The Heartland Institute Has A Bold New Plan - Win The AI Race (TM) By Powering It With Coal. Lots And Lots Of Coal!

“I want to give you just a few points to keep in mind when this topic comes up so you understand,” Heartland Institute President James Taylor told state lawmakers and others who had gathered in Indianapolis for the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) 52nd annual meeting last summer, “the climate crisis simply does not exist.” Attacking the conclusions of climate science is hardly new for the Heartland Institute, which in 2012 ran a brief but notorious billboard campaign that depicted Unabomber Ted Kaczynski with the caption “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”

But Taylor’s speech at an ALEC side event came with a new AI-era twist on an old message: Bring back coal. After several years of attacking big tech over the industry’s perceived politics, Heartland is now urging those same companies to burn coal and other fossil fuels to power the enormous data centers used to train and run so-called “artificial intelligence” systems and for cryptocurrency mining. During its July 2025 presentation, Heartland sought to convince listeners that coal can — and should — make a major comeback, documents reviewed by DeSmog show.

To a significant degree, big tech companies have so far kept the notoriously-polluting fossil fuel at arm’s length as they’ve moved to build new power plants to generate electricity for data centers. Nonetheless, the datacenter–linked surge in power demand and whipsawing government policies are spurring a minor comeback for coal — including a proposed 1.25 gigawatt energy center in Alaska that, if built, would be the first new coal plant opened in the U.S. since 2013.

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On July 16, as Heartland took the podium, the impacts of a warming climate were on display: Texas was reeling from catastrophic flooding that killed 27 young campers and counselors along with dozens of others, wildfires had already burned over a million acres across 12 states that year, and the eastern half of the U.S. roasted under a massive heatwave. Heartland kicked its presentation off with familiar climate denial talking points. It started with the false claim that “temperatures are unusually cool, not hot,” which it illustrated with figures from a 1998 study. A slide headlined “global warming is saving lives,” follows, then a prediction that “CO2 can cause no further warming” (sourced to “testimony in U.S. Congress” by two long-retired academics with histories of taking funding from coal companies).

EDIT

https://www.desmog.com/2026/05/20/heartland-institute-climate-denier-group-pushes-states-to-embrace-coal-power-for-data-centers/