More Climate Leadership From Amazon! A Koch-Sponsored AI & Energy Conference Chock-Full Of Paid Climate Liars
Tech giant Amazon, which has for years portrayed itself as a global corporate climate leader, sponsored an AI energy summit featuring prominent climate deniers, DeSmog can reveal. The C3 Energy Summit on “American Leadership in Energy Innovation,” which took place in Washington, D.C., this week, featured sponsors and speakers from across the world of oil and gas, including a keynote from Chris Wright, President Trump’s energy secretary and vice-chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, who has previously stated that “There is no climate crisis.”
The summit featured Jarrod Agen, executive director of Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, who in 2010 stated, “Science is best left to the experts, and currently there is lively debate on the impact of humanity’s impact on global warming and climate change.” He more recently stated that renewables “haven’t proven that they can get off the ground,” when in fact they are the fastest-growing energy source worldwide. At the event, Agen said that the Trump administration wants to “optimize” and “grow” the coal sector, according to audio obtained by DeSmog. The Amazon sponsorship comes despite the fact that the company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, pledged $10 billion to fight climate change in 2020 – setting up the Bezos Earth Fund, one of the largest philanthropic commitments to address climate change to date. Bezos even renamed a sports stadium in Washington state the Climate Pledge Arena at the time.
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A coterie of organizations linked to climate deniers joined Amazon in its event sponsorship. Co-sponsors included Stand Together, a political organization and charitable group founded by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch, who for decades has helped fund and promote efforts to question the science of climate change. Another sponsor was the Hamm Energy Institute, which was created by oil billionaire Harold Hamm, a close Trump ally who’s previously stated that “Climate change isn’t our biggest problem.” The institute put out a recent paper saying, “natural gas has emerged as the most reliable baseload” to provide energy to power AI, despite industry data showing that renewables are the quickest and most economic electricity source to install.
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Five years ago, when announcing the Bezos Earth Fund, the Amazon CEO stated that “Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.” Earlier this year the fund halted funding to the Science Based Targets Initiative, a key global climate certification organization for companies. Amazon insists it’s still committed to fighting climate change. It announced in August that it reached a goal of powering its global operations with 100 percent renewable energy seven years ahead of schedule. Yet, the company does not appear to have ruled out relying on powering AI with gas in the future. At an energy summit this April, Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers, told a room of oil and gas and tech executives that “to have the energy we need for the grid [to power data centers], it’s going to take an ‘all of the above’ approach for a period of time.”
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https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/18/amazon-sponsors-ai-energy-summit-featuring-climate-deniers/