Bernie Sanders & Ro Khanna Have Grave Concerns About AI

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

In 2022, Douglas Rushkoff published a book entitled Survival Of The Richest, in which he describes his meetings with many of the wealthiest tech bros in the world. He told The Guardian that those people don’t want others to know what they know — that a catastrophic climate cataclysm is coming just as the technology they created comes to fruition. They have a name for it, Rushkoff says. They call  it “The Event.”

“They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see. They’re afraid that their little AIs are going to come for them. They’re apocalyptic, and so existential, because they have no connection to real life and how things work. They’re afraid the AIs (they created) are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us,” Rushkoff told The Guardian.

He said the tech bros are all in escape mode — planning missions to Mars, creating island bunkers. or moving to higher ground to prepare for “The Event.” They are obsessed with creating a virtual “metaverse,” which will fulfill the prophecy that the tech revolution was always about preparing us for a world in which it was no longer possible to go outside.

For this group, the future of technology is about escaping from the rest of us. Rushkoff calls this “The Mindset” — a form of group-think that is a characteristic of Silicon Valley technocrats. “They have reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding an escape hatch.”

Sanders & Khanna Speak In Palo Alto

Last week, Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna — the Congressman whose district includes much of what is known as Silicon Valley — met with many of those same tech bros. Then they held a town hall meeting at the Jane Stanford Memorial Auditorium at Stanford University to discuss what they learned during those meetings. Their presentation was entitled “Who Controls the Future of AI: The Oligarchs or The People?” and was hosted by Stanford College Democrats and the Stanford Speakers Bureau.

According to Palo Alto Online, workers, students and researchers in Silicon Valley are no strangers to the idea that artificial intelligence may be coming for their jobs. Many are under the impression that it’s not a matter of if, but when. But Sanders told the audience the new technology has ramifications that go well beyond economics.

“If AI is going to replace a lot of the work that human beings do, what becomes of human beings?” he asked. “Are we superfluous in the process? What happens to our ability to relate to each other?” Sanders said he supports a nationwide moratorium on the growth of data centers until political leaders and the public have a better understanding of the long-term impacts of expanding AI. “The Congress and the American people are very unprepared for the tsunami that is coming. We have got to slow this thing down.”

Sanders compared the current state of the technology to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, except he said the changes are coming at an exponentially faster rate. He cautioned that if workers and the general public are caught unawares, then the wealthiest individuals will continue to advance AI for one reason — the pursuit of profit. “We are looking at the most significant investment in human history, which is bringing about the most rapid societal transformation in human history,” Sanders said.

The Divine Right Of Tech Bros

Khanna did not agree completely with Sanders. He told the audience, “Tech billionaires believe they have a modern divine right to lead and rule.” He suggested that rules for data center development put in place by Singapore and Finland, where tech companies are fully responsible financially for the cost of the electrical energy they consume. Ireland has recently adopted new policies that require data centers to secure their own electricity, 80% of which must be sourced from renewables.

“If there are data centers that are putting constraints on (the infrastructure), the tech companies need to pay for that. They can’t put that burden on the local community in Santa Clara or Palo Alto,” Khanna said in an interview after the event.

Trading Food For Data

The Guardian reported this week that tech companies are paying stupid money for farmland all across America, but some land owners are pushing back and saying their land is not for sale at any price. In Kentucky, a group of neighbors have said no to developers offering huge amounts of money for their land. In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected a $15 million offer in January for land he has owned for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80 million the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre — prices unimaginable just a few years ago.

But the allure of all that money is hard to resist. In northern Virginia last November, an investor paid $615 million for less than 100 acres — ten times more than than the seller paid for the property just four years ago. Days later, Amazon spent $700 million on nearby farmland that had sold for a fraction of that price the year before. In Georgia, a local developer flipped land to Amazon for $270 million, which he paid $4 million for 12 months earlier. For the middlemen scouting these deals, potential returns exceed 1,000%, The Guardian reported.

CleanTechnica readers, who are all well above average, may notice that the well funded anti-solar campaigns so common across America are nowhere to be seen when it is data centers rather than solar panels that are the issue. That’s because those campaigns, with all their blather about preserving the rural character of communities, are paid for by fossil fuel companies, although they go to extraordinary lengths to disguise their involvement.

But it’s all different when it comes to data centers. Rural character? Forget about it. There’s big money to be made making electricity for those data centers, and as The Guardian points out, some utilities are using the power of eminent domain to seize land — legally of course — that can’t be obtained any other way.

7.65 GW For Texas Data Center

In Texas, state regulators have just approved a plan to build a 7.65 gigawatt methane-fired thermal generating plant in Pecos county in West Texas. Known as the GW Ranch project, it will be the largest power project in the United States according to the developer, Pacifico Energy.

Oil And Gas Watch points out that 7.65 GW is enough electricity to power more than five million homes — or a large city — but of course those electrons won’t be supplying any homes. The project is dedicated to powering new data centers in the Permian Basin.

It says that as of February 10, 2026, there are 158 proposed projects to build or expand gas power plants in Texas, some of them for data centers. “Based on publicly available permit documents, if constructed these projects could emit over 237 million tons of greenhouse gases every year, as much climate-warming pollution as 50 million gas-powered vehicles driving for a year.”

A recent report from Global Energy Monitor found that more than a third of new gas power demand in the last two years across the country is explicitly linked to data centers. That report says the amount of methane-fired capacity in development in 2025 in the US has tripled and now totals nearly 252 GW, allowing the US to surpass China as the world’s top methane developer.

Changing Priorities

Only a few years ago, many industry experts believed a substantial portion of data center infrastructure would be powered by renewable sources of energy like wind and solar, with battery storage and grid connections helping to compensate for lulls created by intermittent decreases in wind or sunshine.

But the race to achieve results in artificial intelligence has upended that prediction,” Oil And Gas Watch says. “Claiming a need for speed, energy hungry data center developers are rushing forward with their own independent infrastructure and powering it with gas. The Trump Administration has encouraged this shift by prioritizing fossil fuels over renewable energy, and realigned federal policies and incentives to match this preference.”

The dizzying pace of data center and artificial intelligence development makes it difficult for many who are not Big Tech entrepreneurs to understand. Perhaps Bernie Sanders is right. Perhaps it is time to pause, take a step back, and ask what the benefits of this headlong rush to replace human intelligence with an artificial replica might be, exactly.

Where Is This Leading?

Is it appropriate to ask whether this AI mania is just a modern day version of the Great Tulip Bubble that happened in Amsterdam in 1637? Is AI nothing more than the latest new shiny thing and if so, how much are we willing to give up in order to have it? Will it leave us all out in the cold, figuratively speaking, while a few dozen super-wealthy individuals live out their dream existence in underground bunkers in New Zealand?

These are not idle questions. They go to the heart of what constitutes human civilization, and as Forrest Gump so cogently observed, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re not likely to end up there.” If AI is primarily an excuse to extract and burn more fossil fuels, I for one would be quite happy to live without it.