Amid the many political casualties of 2025 — mass federal layoffs, shuttered agencies, and clean energy spending cuts — the passing of one of the last decade’s defining political projects went almost entirely unnoticed. On December 31, 2025, the Green New Deal Network, a coalition of climate, labor, and social justice organizations, officially died.
The coalition wasn’t intended to last forever, but its demise was sped up by the political mood that got President Donald Trump reelected in 2024, when the momentum that the movement had enjoyed under Joe Biden’s administration seemingly evaporated overnight. As Trump launched an all-out assault on environmental regulations and climate policies, the climate movement was left at a loss, unsure how to push for change with the public increasingly focused on other issues, like the cost of living, and a federal government hostile to its cause.
“The conditions under which the Green New Deal Network was founded have fundamentally changed,” the coalition’s site said, explaining its decision to fold. “The mission of climate, jobs, and justice is far from over — but the structure built to win a specific moment is no longer the right vehicle for what comes next.”
Saul Levin, who was the network’s director of campaigns and politics, knew what was next for him personally: fighting AI data centers. The artificial intelligence boom has created a surge in construction of giant facilities that process digital information, and communities across the country are working to stop them from being built, concerned about water usage, soaring energy bills, and Big Tech taking over. Over a year ago, Levin had started a Signal chat to help people opposing data centers get organized. Now his chat has about 350 members across 40 states, and he’s busy with his new podcast, “The Hum,” capturing their stories and highlighting successes.
Many climate activists are following a similar path. Concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, and social justice fit organically into the growing anti-data center movement, which has attracted a much broader, bipartisan coalition than the Green New Deal ever did. “The climate movement is increasingly realizing that this is a fight that’s both an important fight and a strategic fight,” said Evan Sutton, an anti-AI advocate who’s helping connect people who oppose data centers.
Take the Sunrise Movement, whose members stormed Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018 to demand a Green New Deal, catapulting the idea into the national conversation. “We’ve definitely seen a surge of interest in data center fights around the country,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the group’s executive director. Local Sunrise hubs have been mobilizing to stop data centers in Dallas, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Lansing, Michigan, Shiney-Ajay said.
There’s a logical reason for the climate movement to get involved: These hyperscale data centers are poised to cause carbon emissions to spike. A new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers could account for about one-third of the growth in U.S. electricity demand between 2024 and 2030. This thirst for energy is driving the expansion of infrastructure for natural gas, a fossil fuel. A typical AI data center demands as much electricity as 100,000 households, but some of the largest ones being built may use up to 20 times that, according to the International Energy Agency. The rapid expansion of data centers threatens to “undo a huge amount of the progress that we made in terms of moving toward clean energy,” Shiney-Ajay said. “If we don’t really seriously start to pass policy that mitigates that, then they could be a disaster for our climate.”
Some established environmental organizations have gotten on board with suspending hyperscale data center construction. A letter sent to Congress this month calling for a nationwide moratorium was signed by more than 500 groups, most of them related to the environment, climate change, or environmental justice — such as Greenpeace USA, Third Act, GreenLatinos, and Food and Water Watch. But some of the biggest names of the U.S. environmental movement were absent from the list, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Nature Conservancy.
That’s not to say they’re pro-data center, though. “The speculative rush to build data centers is harming ratepayers, our climate, and community health, which is why we urgently need protections from states and the federal government,” Jeremy Fisher, the Sierra Club’s principal advisor, said in an emailed statement. The organization advocates for holding Big Tech to a higher standard in terms of environmental and health impacts and argues that companies should invest in clean energy to run their facilities instead of fossil fuels. “Data centers can and should be powered with renewable energy that does not threaten our environment and our health, our wallets, or our environment,” Fisher said.
Thomas Meyer, the organizing projects director at Food and Water Watch, which led the letter to Congress, said that powering data centers with clean energy doesn’t solve the problem. In Washington state, for instance, Amazon outbid the utility Puget Sound Energy in an auction for an enormous Oregon solar farm, leaving the utility concerned about competition for renewable resources as Amazon races to build energy-hungry data centers. “What about the things that that solar power would have gone to power instead?” Meyer said. “You haven’t grown the pie. You’ve just shifted it from one place to another.”
Big green groups may also be taking cues from Democratic politicians, many of whom, like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, have been friendly to data center development. “The unfortunate reality is that some organizations tend to follow rather than lead, especially when it comes to mainstream positions of Democratic Party leaders or elected officials,” Meyer said.
Meyer witnessed a similar dynamic a decade ago when working as a field organizer on campaigns to ban fracking: a disconnect between grassroots energy and mainstream institutions. Established environmental groups tend to move more slowly than bottom-up movements, said Valerie Costa, co-executive director of the Oil and Gas Action Network, a nonprofit that supports grassroots groups working to move the U.S. beyond fossil fuels. “One of the things that grassroots movements do really well is shifting when there are more immediate threats, and being able to respond quickly,” Costa said.
That was recently in play in Seattle, where the climate activist group 350 Seattle joined the push to pass a moratorium on new large data centers after the news broke this spring that five major facilities could be coming to town. If all the projects were actually built, they would require about one-third the amount of power that Seattle uses on a typical day. The Seattle City Council passed the moratorium unanimously earlier this month, making it the largest city in the U.S. so far to suspend approvals. For local activists working on an issue as amorphous and overwhelming as climate change, it was invigorating to get involved in a mission with a concrete, local outcome.
“For us, it was a very good on-ramp for people who just want to do something and want to turn that powerlessness into something meaningful,” said Nivi Achanta, the founder and CEO of Soapbox Project, a local climate action group that advocated for the moratorium. The group’s Signal chat buzzed as the city council weighed the policy: “People were, like, pulling out drinks and grabbing their popcorn and actually watching these city council politics unfold in a way that’s so much more fun than anything I’ve experienced outside of this, in the general climate movement,” Achanta said.
In Washington state, known for its progressive climate policies, new natural gas infrastructure driven by power-hungry AI data centers threatens to produce an additional 13.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, about 14 percent of the state’s current annual emissions. That could derail its attempt to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, as required by the state’s Climate Commitment Act. Even in a blue state, there’s an understanding that opposition to data centers has to be bipartisan if it’s going to be successful, especially since most data centers are being proposed in rural areas. “We can’t just rely on the West Coast, or on the blue corridor from Bellingham down to Vancouver, Washington, to get something done,” said Lauren Redfield, a voluntary organizer with the Washington AI Resistance.
As climate activists join local fights, they may find themselves teaming up with people they don’t agree with on everything, or on much at all. Data centers are a rare issue that unites Americans across the political spectrum, with 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans opposed to building data centers in their area, according to polling from Gallup. All kinds of people — punk musicians in Utah, farmers in Oregon, beauty salon workers in Maryland — are coming out for all kinds of reasons, according to Levin, the host of “The Hum.” But their differences aren’t stopping them from working together.
“Again and again, we hear from organizers who are like, ‘I don’t care if you’re here for climate change, and I’m here because I think it’s going to be ugly, and that person’s here because they hate AI’ — all of us think this is a bad project,” Levin said.
In the first three months of this year, data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 facilities worth nearly $130 billion. One reason this resistance has been effective is because of its people power — the hundreds of thousands of people who are turning out to town halls, meeting up on porches, and otherwise showing up to fight. In an age of loneliness and political disillusionment, it’s a sign that something is changing.
“I’m really hopeful that this is the thing that gets communities re-engaged in local politics,” Redfield said. “We’ve seen a lot of apathy over the last several years, and I’m really hoping that this civic engagement can help us build that community that can help us stitch our society back together.”
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