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Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo

A data center owned by Amazon Web Services, front right, under construction next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Berwick, Pennsylvania, January 14, 2024

In his address to the joint session of Congress last Tuesday night, President Trump stressed his opposition to action on climate change, touting his withdrawal from the “unfair” Paris climate accord and pledging to “drill, baby, drill” for the “liquid gold under our feet.” This followed his freezing of federal funding for assorted climate programs and his efforts to impede wind energy development.

Regardless of whether Trump and his officials are successful, the public should expect few, if any, affirmative steps on climate from the federal government. In this environment, it may be tempting to treat Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft as indispensable climate actors. They want to power their data centers using clean electricity. Given the major contractual commitments these companies have made to purchasing clean energy, their promises are more than just public relations.

Counting on Big Tech to be climate saviors would be a mistake, however. The power consumption of data centers more than doubled between 2018 and 2023, and in Virginia, these facilities in 2023 accounted for 26% of the state’s total electricity use. Tech giants will consume more renewable and fossil fuel–generated energy and are much more likely to be climate villains than heroes. Further, we do not need to put our faith in the social responsibility of dominant corporations. A better alternative—publicly owned power—is solidly established in the United States. State and local agencies like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power can build clean power systems that work for all.

More from Sandeep Vaheesan

More than one-quarter of the electricity customers in the United States receive their power from community-owned utilities. The cities of Austin and Omaha, both in red states, have municipal utilities, which have pledged substantial reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions. Complementing the approximately 2,000 publicly owned power companies are nearly 900 consumer-owned rural electric cooperatives, covering much of the Midwest and South and providing power to millions.

Many of these institutions were created during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. At a campaign stop in Portland, Oregon, in September 1932, candidate FDR proposed to create and support a critical mass of public power projects to serve as a “yardstick” to evaluate the performance of their private counterparts and to pressure them to do better through publicity and competition. He did not seek full nationalization of the industry, but rather vigorous public-private competition to serve the people.

Applying this yardstick principle, Congress and the Roosevelt administration built hydroelectric dams through agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority and aided the formation of municipal utilities. As late as 1935, only about 1 in 10 American farmers had electricity. Then, the federal government, through financial, legal, and technical support for electric cooperatives, helped bring light and power to the countryside.

Today, a private-led effort to clean up the supply of electricity risks sacrificing one or more of the goals of reliable, affordable, and zero-carbon power. Even if all the needs of tech are supplied by green energy, however unlikely that may be, their demands represent an additional burden on the grid. The existing requirements of homes, businesses, and industry still need to be met. Rapid growth in power consumption, driven by artificial-intelligence projects, means that old fossil fuel plants must be kept in service to ensure the lights stay on for everyone. Using more electricity for new public transit has clear social value; generating AI slop is harder to justify.

The pursuit of more clean energy should not blind us to the fundamental goal—reduced, and eventually net-zero, greenhouse gas emissions. That will require both supply and demand measures such as conservation and efficiency.

Publicly regulated private utilities such as Duke Energy and Georgia Power might seem a more promising choice than relying on Big Tech. Getting them to decarbonize, though, might come at a significant cost: They may demand significantly higher rates to invest in clean energy. At a time when millions struggle to pay power bills and hear calls from the president to ignore global warming entirely, pitting climate goals against affordable electricity is bad policy and bad politics.

Instead of picking between Big Tech and private utilities to lead, we should put public power at the forefront of a national decarbonization program. Through these institutions, ordinary Americans and our elected officials can control the climate transition and ensure it is both rapid and just. Without shareholders to answer to, publicly owned utilities do not face constant demands from financial interests for larger dividends and stock buybacks. They can also often borrow money at lower rates than their private counterparts. And as FDR articulated in 1932, public power can function as a yardstick and competitively pressure private utilities to do better on rates, reliability, and decarbonization, especially if more states and cities start to view public control as a superior alternative to investor ownership.

For proof of concept, Washington state has a mostly carbon-free grid thanks to public investment. The Grand Coulee and other publicly owned dams on the Columbia River, built in the mid-20th century, supply zero-carbon hydropower to municipal utilities like Seattle City Light, which resell it to households and businesses at some of the lowest rates in the country.

In 2023, the New York legislature empowered the publicly owned New York Power Authority to construct large-scale renewable projects. Now, NYPA should go big in its wind, solar, geothermal, and energy storage build-out. It should take the lead in helping the Empire State meet its climate goals and show the entire nation how to do public decarbonization.