A few weeks ago, Viktor Orbán reminisced about the election of the current American president before a cheering crowd at a conference in Budapest organized by ultra-conservative American political operatives. “I remember one year ago, we jointly celebrated the victory of President Donald Trump. It was a fabulous success for the patriotic forces of the world,” Hungary’s prime minister, the leader of the right-wing nationalist Fidesz party, told CPAC Hungary, according to an English translation of his remarks.

However, he warned, the global expansion of Trump’s MAGA movement still faces threats, such as his opposition in Hungary’s upcoming parliamentary elections who — despite Orbán’s systematic warping of the electoral system since 2010 to keep himself in power — stand a real chance of ousting Orbán and his Fidesz majority. His loss would be a major MAGA setback, Orbán said, because it would give a resounding victory to the progressive policymakers in Brussels and beyond, along with their so-called “gender propaganda” and “green madness.”

The group behind the Budapest conference, the American Conservative Union, has hosted annual Conservative Political Action Conferences in the U.S. since 1974, and been closely linked to Trump and MAGA since Trump’s first rise to the presidency in 2016. In recent years, under the leadership of current chair Matt Schlapp, the group has been quietly spawning CPAC offshoots across Europe and Latin America with the explicit goal of influencing national elections.

Mapped: The UK Reform-Orbán Network

Ahead of elections in both countries, DeSmog has catalogued the connections between Hungary’s autocratic government and the UK’s right-wing populist Reform party.

International CPAC leaders are now counting on the movement’s assistance to “take out” left-leaning politicians in Colombia and Brazil, while aiding the political campaigns of Europe’s staunchest Trump allies, including Orbán’s re-election efforts in Hungary, according to audio recordings from recent CPAC events obtained by DeSmog.

“Dear Matt,” Orbán said during his speech, addressing Schlapp, who was sitting near the front of the audience, “you mean a lot to us. Not only due to your organizational work. Everyone knows about that and acknowledges and they respect you for it. But here in Hungary, to us, you are more.”

With the support of Schlapp and the other powerful conservatives linked to CPAC, “we shall win these elections,” he said, vowing to “Make Europe Great Again.” 

‘Take Out’ Leaders in Latin America

Trump was powered to a second presidential term in 2024 by vowing to pursue “America First” policies that would supposedly put U.S. citizens first by cutting federal spending, strengthening the country’s economy, and improving its national security. Since taking office at the start of 2025, he and his adherents in government claim they’ve put those ideas into action with moves like setting off global trade chaos with tariffs, and abruptly defunding foreign aid programs that helped feed and provide health care for poor people worldwide. 

These policy moves have been accompanied by an agenda of supporting Trump allies internationally, such as Orbán, that CPAC now refers to as the “Freedom First Movement.” At the latest U.S. CPAC in Dallas, Texas, which took place just two days after CPAC Hungary, leaders from this movement celebrated political victories in other countries that have largely gone unnoticed by most major U.S. and European media.

An “international summit” at the conference featured Mercedes Schlapp, wife of Matt Schlapp and a former director of strategic communications in the first Trump White House, who claimed that CPAC is “making great advances” in Latin America. 

Schlapp celebrated the electoral victories of conservative political leaders including Argentina’s Javier Milei and Chile’s newly elected far-right president José Antonio Kast, whom she called “one of our dear friends.” She praised the Trump administration for “working so hard” to “take out” former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who the U.S. forcibly removed from power during a surprise military raid in January. Maduro and his wife are currently imprisoned in New York City, awaiting trial on federal “narcoconspiracy” charges.

“So we’ve had great success in Latin America,” Schlapp said.

She also outlined upcoming elections where CPAC’s offshoots hope to influence the outcome. That list included Colombia, which is currently led by President Gustavo Pedro, described by TIME as “the former guerrilla turned climate crusader”  who has halted new oil drilling projects and vowed to phase out fossil fuels across the country.

“We’re also looking to have CPAC Colombia to take out President Pedro,” Schlapp said. The goal in the country’s upcoming late May presidential election, Schlapp explained, is to “really have a right wing candidate win there in Colombia.”

Schlapp also referred during her speech to Flávio Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who is in a reportedly tight race for president against the country’s current left-leaning leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. “CPAC will be very involved in helping Flávio down in Brazil,” Schlapp said.

At another panel, Flávio Bolsonaro himself elaborated on the support he hopes to receive from his conservative allies in the U.S. “We don’t want interference in the Brazilian elections,” he said. “I’m going to win because it’s the will of my people.”

“My appeal here, not only to the United States, but to the entire free world is this: Watch Brazil’s elections with enormous attention,” said Bolsonaro. “Learn and understand our process. Monitor our people’s freedom of expression and apply diplomatic pressure so that our institutions function properly.”

The goal is for “free and fair elections based on values of American origin,” he said.

A Far-right Victory in Poland

Similar language appeared on the U.S. State Department website last year to describe American involvement in Hungary’s upcoming election. “We’re watching it very closely. We want to see a free and fair election,” said Samuel Samson, a senior adviser within the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor,during a December online press briefing about meetings with “very key partners of the United States and the administration” in Central Europe, including Hungary.

Samson, who last year called for using U.S. taxpayer money to support French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, said that he was “very pleased” about the positive relationship between Trump and Orbán. “We’re very excited to continue our collaboration as we go into a very important year for the Hungarians.”

Despite being accused of “mass voter intimidation”, Orbán’s party Fidesz is currently trailing in the polls to rival right-wing party Tisza, which has pledged to fight corruption, accusing Orbán and his allies of enriching themselves at the country’s expense.

In advance of a visit by Vice-President JD Vance to Budapest on April 7, during which he heaped praise on Orbán and accused the European Union (which includes Hungary) of “foreign interference” in the election, Tisza leader Peter Magyar posted on X that “Hungarian history is not written in Washington, Moscow, or Brussels — it is written in Hungary’s streets and squares.”

Panelists at CPAC Dallas outlined examples of how MAGA has already influenced European elections. Michał Rachoń, a journalist with TV Republika, which was described at the event as the “Newsmax or Fox News of Poland”, said that last year’s CPAC Poland “significantly helped conservative president Nawrocki win the election.” 

The senior Trump administration officials who attended CPAC Poland in 2025 included now-former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who urged voters to support the far-right candidate Karol Nawrocki. “So this was a very important step towards maintaining the conservative powers,” Rachoń said.     

MAGA Misses in Europe

The “Freedom First Movement” has not been universally successful in its attempts to influence European elections.

The Heritage Foundation – the group that convened Project 2025, the influential right wing policy blueprint for Trump’s second term – failed in its effort to secure a victory for Sali Berisha’s conservative Democratic Party in last year’s Albanian election.

CPAC in Dallas also heard from George Simion, a far-right Romanian politician who received MAGA’s support for his failed 2025 run for president. Simion framed the upcoming Hungarian election as a crucial battleground in the broader Trump-aligned war for conservative political values in Europe. “We are all fighting to keep common sense, to keep the Christian civilization and the roots of our continent,” he said.

“And we will prevail because we here in CPAC are fighters.”

Addressing the crowd gathered in Dallas, he said, “Congratulations for the great work that you are doing.”

The post Revealed: The MAGA Plan to ‘Take Out’ Progressive Leaders Worldwide appeared first on DeSmog.

Elbows up. This defiant sentiment of decoupling Canada from our newly hostile neighbour propelled Prime Minister Mark Carney to his electoral upset last year. So why is Carney’s Minister of Natural Resources Tim Hodgson now signaling that Canada plans to deepen our ties to Donald Trump by providing natural gas to American data centres powering the artificial intelligence arms race?

Hodgson made the remarks in a March interview with Bloomberg, recounting his recent discussions with the Trump Administration. “We talked about how we could help send more gas down to help you export more off the Gulf Coast and to help you with your AI strategy,” Hodgson said. “Obviously, a key component of the AI race is building more data centers. That requires more natural gas. We can provide that gas.”

President Trump owes a large part of his re-election to backing from tech billionaires heavily invested in AI, and obligingly declared the United States will do “whatever it takes” to achieve AI dominance. His administration is already imposing toxic politics onto this disruptive new technology, recently listing tech giant Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the company refused  the government unfettered access to their AI model for potential use in mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Trump recently announced plans to sideline state legislatures from creating their own AI safeguards and even trotted out an AI-generated map showing Canada and Greenland absorbed in the United States. Is this what the Canadian government is supporting?

DeSmog recently documented how the Canada Pension Plan is also investing billions in American fossil fuel extraction and Trump’s AI agenda.

Obviously Canada’s efforts at elbow-elevation need work. Hodgson’s pledge to provide natural gas for massive American data centres further undermines Canada’s already tattered climate goals. Burning fossil fuels to power a dangerous artificial intelligence arms race accomplishes the impressive alchemy of making two of the leading threats to civilization worse at the same time.

The United Nations just documented how fossil fuels are pushing the planet beyond critical tipping points, particularly around ocean temperatures. Data centre energy consumption is exploding, accounting for almost 5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2024 and is projected to reach up to 12 percent by 2028. Over half of this ballooning demand is generated from fossil fuels.

Enormous data centre buildouts are also disrupting local communities in places like rural Pennsylvania, as recently reported by DeSmog. The town of Archbald has only 5,400 residents but may soon need to accommodate five separate data centres totaling 13.4 million square feet of industrial buildings. Routine council meetings have become standing-room only affairs with angry residents overflowing onto the sidewalk outside their town hall.

“Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people showed up on a weeknight in the middle of winter because they’re scared and they’re angry that it seems as if every available acre of land in our community will eventually be turned into a windowless box that hums 24-7 and sends most of its profits someplace else,” warned Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan. A  fierce opponent of the data centre boom impacting Pennsylvania, Gaughan called the issue “one of the biggest environment and social threats of our generation.”

There is sound reason for citizen concern. The gargantuan resource demand of these facilities can inflate electricity rates, overload the grid and delay scheduled closings of coal-fired generating plants. Recent estimates project that data centres could consume a staggering 106 GW of power by 2035, greater than the current installed capacity from either nuclear or hydro in the United States.

Two thirds of recent installations have also been built in already water-stressed areas like Arizona, Texas, and the Colorado River Basin. A large data centre can consume 5 million gallons of water each day, the equivalent of a community of up to 50,000 people. By 2028, this collective demand in America alone could reach 33 billion gallons per year – the equivalent of 360,000 households. While some companies are moving to cooling using air conditioning instead of water, this trade-off only increases already enormous electricity demands.

Canadian regulators are likewise bending over backwards to accommodate Big Tech, regardless of the consequences to local communities or the environment. DeSmog recently revealed how the Carney government caved in on clean energy regulations after being lobbied 37 times by Alberta gas giant Capital Power that is planning to build a large gas-powered AI data centre in the province.

The Saskatchewan government enthusiastically approved a gas-powered server farm south of Regina over the vocal concerns of local residents about noise pollution and other impacts. The Alberta government just exempted a 7.5 GW data centre proposal touted by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary from provincial environmental assessment, even though the gas-fired facility would require seven times the power produced by the Site C dam.

Burning natural gas to power server farms benefits the fossil fuel industry, at the expense of almost every other human endeavour. Putting it another way: higher electricity bills, increased emissions, imperiled water supplies, automation-related job losses, sleep-disruption and a possible AI apocalypse. Data centres – what’s not to like?

The post Carney Government Wants To ‘Provide’ the Fossil Fuels for Trump’s AI Strategy appeared first on DeSmog.

“Viktor Orbán is the strongest leader in Europe and the EU’s biggest nightmare.”

These were the words posted on Twitter by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage about the prime minister of Hungary in April 2018.

Since returning to power in 2010, Orbán has used a network of state-backed think tanks, media outlets, and conferences to promote his brand of “illiberal democracy” across Europe, including in the UK.

Ahead of Hungary’s parliamentary elections on 12 April, and elections in the UK on 7 May, DeSmog has mapped Orbán’s influence network in British politics, which is concentrated around Farage.

It documents how senior Reform figures have held positions at Orbán-funded organisations, appeared on Orbán-backed political and media platforms, and have repeatedly praised the Hungarian leader’s autocratic rule.

The elections come at a crucial time for climate policy, as the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has spiked oil and gas prices, prompting calls from Reform for new North Sea drilling.

Orbán, whose re-election is supported by U.S. President Donald Trump, relies on Russia for oil and gas. A leaked transcript from a call in October shows that Orbán privately told Vladimir Putin: “I am at your service”.

In his 16-year rule, Orbán has used the state to attack press freedom, LGBT and abortion rights, fair elections, and asylum seekers, while opposing EU sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Hungary has been ranked as the most corrupt country in the EU, with high levels of poverty.

Yet Farage and his allies have singled out Orbán’s Hungary for praise, and held it up as a model for the UK and Europe.

In a February 2019 interview with Hungarian outlet Válasz, Farage said: “Do I see Orbán as a little authoritarian monster? No I do not. He represents much more the future of Europe.”

Farage went on: “He [Orbán] actually believes in things. He does not sheepishly, slavishly go along with the European project… he firmly believes in the concept of the nation-state.”

Speaking at a political festival in Hungary in August 2025, Reform’s current head of policy James Orr described Orban’s regime as a “counterexample to the ideology in my own country that rejects national pride and heritage.”  

Meanwhile, Reform politician and GB News presenter Matthew Goodwin has joined Farage and Orr in their praise of the Hungarian autocrat.

In an interview last month with Hungary Today during a visit to the country, Goodwin said: “One of the reasons I have come to Hungary, and why I am a supporter of the country, is that I see a nation-state fully invested in the defense of its national sovereignty, democracy, and people, which in today’s world is a very rare thing.”

However, campaigners have slammed Farage and his troops for supporting a regime renowned for its repressive policies, particularly towards minority groups and democratic institutions.

“It’s deeply shocking that Reform has developed such close ties with Orbán’s regime, an authoritarian government with an appalling record of rolling back democracy and civic rights in Hungary”, said Olivier Hoedeman of the pro-transparency group Corporate Europe Observatory.

“Reform’s deep connections with Orbán’s pro-Kremlin regime reveals the stunning hypocrisy of the party’s claims to defend sovereignty and democracy.”

A Green Party spokesperson told DeSmog: “To know what a Nigel Farage government would be like, look at what his mate Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary.

“Orbán opposed EU sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, has undermined press freedom, fair elections and protections for asylum seekers.”

They added: “Reform is a party working for billionaires and fossil fuel interests, backing authoritarian rulers and intent on undermining the rights and freedoms of ordinary people.”

Reform was approached for comment.

MCC

Reform’s ties to Orbán go beyond warm words.

Orbán’s government has funded a network of think tanks and foundations to promote its interests abroad. At the centre of this network is Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a think tank and private education institution chaired by Orbán’s political director, Balasz Orbán (no relation).

Balasz has said: “It is our goal for Hungary to become an intellectual powerhouse, in which MCC plays a key role.” 

The group has vast resources. In 2020, MCC was gifted more than $1.3 billion in Hungarian state funding, including a 10 percent stake in the country’s national oil company, MOL, which derives much of its income from selling Russian fossil fuels.

Using this wealth, MCC convenes regular conferences and events featuring high-profile politicians from across Europe and America – including figures associated with Reform.

Goodwin, who unsuccessfully stood for Parliament in February, has spoken at the last two summer festivals organised by MCC.

At the 2025 event – which also featured Orr, techno-authoritarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel, and former Conservative advisor Dominic Cummings – Goodwin praised the Hungarian government as a “counterexample” to what he called the ideology of “national self-loathing” in Britain.

Goodwin even formerly served as an MCC visiting fellow, teaching at “classes across Hungary” and giving “public lectures and educational events” – a role that reportedly pays between €5,000 and €10,000 a month (although Reform denies that Goodwin was paid this much).

Goodwin has also appeared at other Orbán-backed events, including the Roger Scruton Symposium at the Hungarian Embassy in London last October, and a Budapest Global Dialogue event in June featuring Viktor Orbán and Balázs Orbán, co-hosted by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, a government-funded group.

The Reform-Orbán Alliance

MCC is a leading sponsor of the pro-Orbán network across Europe, but it’s not alone.

In April 2024, Farage spoke in Brussels at the National Conservatism conference, a gathering of right-wing politicians and public figures headlined by Viktor Orbán.

The event was sponsored and coordinated by MCC’s Brussels arm and run by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a Washington DC-based think tank that employs Reform’s James Orr as its UK chairman.

Orr spoke at the event, as did Suella Braverman, the former Conservative minister who has since defected to Farage’s party.

The Edmund Burke Foundation received $200,000 in 2024 from the Heritage Foundation, the group that drafted the authoritarian Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term. U.S. Vice President JD Vance has today (7 April) visited Hungary to lend his support to Orbán.

The Heritage Foundation also has an official “cooperation agreement” with the Danube Institute, another think tank funded via the Hungarian government.

As DeSmog has reported, Orr spoke last month at CPAC Hungary, a Trump-inspired event in Budapest.

The conference featured speeches by Viktor Orbán, Argentinian president Javier Milei, Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, and video messages from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump. The event attempted to corral international support for Orbán. According to the latest polls, his party Fidesz is trailing its rival Tisza ahead of parliamentary elections this weekend.

Orr spoke at the event alongside a far-right Estonian politician and claimed a Reform government in the UK would seek to “reverse” immigration.

MCC also funds the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF), a charity named after the late British conservative philosopher. RSLF has received more than £500,000 from MCC since 2023, over 90 percent of its funding, according to the Good Law Project. The foundation’s board of directors includes Reform’s James Orr and Spectator editor (and former Tory minister) Michael Gove.

MCC Brussels, lobbies aggressively against EU climate policies, is led by Frank Furedi, a Hungarian-born sociologist and former professor at the University of Kent. Furedi is part of a group of Marxists who converted to libertarianism and founded the UK website Spiked, an anti-climate publication.

Another member of this group is Mick Hume, the editor-in-chief of the European Conservative, a pro-Orbán magazine which is reportedly funded by Batthyány Lajos Foundation (BLF), a group which receives its money from the government.

Hume was employed by Reform as a communications consultant during the 2024 UK general election campaign.

The Reform-Orbán alliance appears to be based on a mixture of common interests and ideologies. This includes hostility to liberal politics, immigration, climate action, and unenthusiastic support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

In an infamous 2022 speech, Orbán warned of “race-mixing” in Europe, while Farage – who used fear of immigration to campaign for Brexit – is calling for mass deportations of up to 600,000 people if elected.

Orbán has been an aggressive opponent of EU sanctions on Russia, and has portrayed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a villain in this year’s election propaganda.

Although Reform doesn’t have the same allegiance with Putin’s Russia, its senior figures have frequently echoed talking points that are helpful to his regime.

In August 2025, James Orr called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “regional Slavic conflict” that he doesn’t “care very much about”.

Meanwhile, Farage has long repeated Putin’s line on the war – claiming that the EU and NATO provoked Russia’s invasion – and in 2014 said that Putin was the world leader he most admired.

In their own words: Reform UK’s praise for Viktor Orbán

“Viktor Orbán is the strongest leader in Europe and the EU’s biggest nightmare.” — Nigel Farage, April 2018, X.com

“Do I see Orbán as a little authoritarian monster? No I do not. He represents much more the future of Europe. […]

“He actually believes in things. He does not sheepishly, slavishly go along with the European project as he firmly believes in the concept of the nation-state. He clearly is a strong defender of, as he sees, the Hungarian culture and he is not afraid to say and do these things despite huge criticism from the European Union. 

“[…] With the [George] Soros thing I agree with completely of course. His influence is all across the Western democracies.” — Nigel Farage, February 2019, Válasz Online 

Orban’s Hungary is a “counterexample to the ideology in my own country that rejects national pride and heritage.” — James Orr, August 2025, MCC Festival

“One of the reasons I have come to Hungary, and why I am a supporter of the country, is that I see a nation-state fully invested in the defense of its national sovereignty, democracy, and people, which in today’s world is a very rare thing. […]

“I also believe there are a lot of things that Britain can learn from countries like Hungary: how to preserve national borders, oppose mass immigration, invest in pro-family policies, and stand up to distant supranational institutions — like the European Union.” — Matthew Goodwin, March 2026, Hungary Today.

“The British elite often portrays Hungary as a country in violation of EU laws, regulations and standards. But I think their country is just resisting the pressure to impose a liberal agenda represented by a narrow minority of Western countries.” — Matthew Goodwin, August 2024, Mandiner

“I just spent 4 days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the West. I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No mass immigration. No broken borders. No self-loathing. No chaos. And now I’ve just landed back in the UK.” — Matthew Goodwin, August 2024, X.com

The post Mapped: The Reform-Orbán Network appeared first on DeSmog.

Jacqueline Lassetter wanted to see America’s biggest data center. So one day in July last year, at the age of 78, she jumped into a car with her daughter, Daphne, and headed west across the muddy Chattahoochee River, leaving their wooded Georgia home for the Nevada desert. A week later, she was standing in front of the Citadel Campus, owned by data center company Switch, which lies along a stretch of highway outside of Reno, Nevada more than 2,000 miles from her home.

Lassetter was finally able to imagine what might soon be coming to her doorstep in Coweta County, Georgia: a gigantic, windowless computing complex emitting a strange hum.

The mother-daughter duo had made the trip after learning about plans to build an enormous data center complex called Project Sail on roughly 830 acres of land outside of the town of Newnan, about 35 miles southwest of Atlanta. That’s the equivalent of about 600 football fields of industrial development in a landscape of rolling back roads lined with houses and farms. San Francisco-based Prologis, one of the world’s biggest real estate companies, is the main backer of the development. But Prologis kept its role in the project hidden for months while Atlas Development, LLC  — a company based in nearby Carrollton, Georgia, with no known record of building data centers, and only a handful of employees — served as the project’s public face.

On Tuesday, Coweta County’s five commissioners voted 3-2 to grant Atlas Development’s application to rezone the Project Sail tract from “rural conservation” to “industrial,” an essential step to allowing the development to go ahead. Many local residents fear that if built, the project will erase the rural character of their area by ushering in 10 years of construction traffic, air, light, and noise pollution, along with the clear-cutting of woodlands along the Wahoo Creek that are home to deer, muskrats, and eagles.

“I won’t live to see it done probably at my age,” says Lassetter of Project Sail, “but this does not need to be [built] in a rural area.” Since learning about the data center mega-project, she’s barely missed a Coweta County Commission meeting, which are held every two weeks, to speak her mind. And every month Lassetter writes to the county commissioners expressing her opposition. “Mama sends them something in the middle of the night. At two o’clock in the morning, she will send them a message, if she’s up,” says Daphne, her daughter, who attends the meetings on the rare occasions when her mother can’t make it. 

The partnership between Atlas Development and Prologis is emblematic of a pattern, playing out across the United States, of little-known advisory firms doing the legwork of filing zoning applications for highly contested data center projects, while partnering with large tech and real estate companies and investment funds ready to invest billions of dollars once key local approvals are secured. While major real estate developments typically operate under a certain degree of confidentiality — particularly when land is being bought — the opacity surrounding data center projects provides cover for companies to lobby local officials for changes to zoning regulations, negotiate tax incentives, and drum up support to approve the projects before residents have time to organize in response.  

In Coweta County, Atlas Development and various individuals affiliated with Project Sail worked to influence local officials as they wrote new data center regulations and considered the project’s rezoning application, DeSmog can report. Among those involved in seeking to shape the regulations in favor of the projects: Arthur “Skin” Edge IV, one of Georgia’s most influential lobbyists; Leigh Ann Green, a local real estate agent; and Mike Lash, a vice president of Dallas-based CBRE, one of the world’s largest real estate services companies. 

“Our conversations with Coweta County followed standard, transparent processes that are open to all stakeholders,” a Prologis spokesperson said in a statement to DeSmog in December. “Prologis’s involvement was consistent with customary public engagement in land-use and policy discussions.” Prologis said that it did not hire any lobbyists in Coweta County.

“There was a never a meeting with developers to talk about the ordinance,” said Coweta County administrator Michael Fouts, who coordinated the county’s data center regulation drafting process last year, “If there was a meeting, it may have been with staff to talk about their proposed project, but they didn’t have access to just carte blanche, ‘write the ordinance.’”  

On a cold Monday night, Jan. 6, 2025, a week after Coweta County published Atlas Development’s Project Sail rezoning application online, local residents packed into Sargent Baptist Church, which is located next to the proposed site about six miles northwest of Newnan, to share what they’d managed to find out about the impacts of large-scale data centers on nearby communities. Shortly after, a group of local opponents formed the Citizens for Rural Coweta community group, which gradually swelled into hundreds of local residents challenging the plans, and thousands of members on a Facebook page aimed at stopping Project Sail.

The Sargent area, near the proposed Project Sail site, Coweta County, GA, December 19, 2025. (Credit: Edward Donnelly/DeSmog)

donnelly-Apr7-PHOTO_2A

donnelly-Apr7-PHOTO_2B

donnelly-Apr7-PHOTO_2C

“They [Prologis] haven’t been transparent from the get-go,” says Connie Lytten, one of the leaders of Citizens for Rural Coweta and the principal of a local school for children with learning disabilities. Lytten, who has shown up to Coweta County Commission meetings twice a month for more than a year to speak against the industrial plans, says that the fight against the data center has been “emotionally draining” — compounded by the difficulties in establishing exactly who is doing what to secure permission for the project to go ahead.

Project Timeline

Atlas Development is situated in a two-story building on the side of the Bankhead Highway in Carrollton, Georgia, about 15 miles northwest from the proposed Project Sail site. Its website advertises the company’s “unique relationships with various utility providers and local municipalities” and ability to secure “zoning approvals in difficult municipal and social environments.”

Atlas Development lists seven employees on LinkedIn, the professional networking site. They include company president Jonathon Ward, a former employee of Atlanta area construction contractor United Grading.

Despite its modest headquarters and spartan staffing, Atlas Development says on its website that it is managing more than $40 billion of construction investments and has access to over 7.5 gigawatts of electrical power — a significant portion of the world’s demand for power capacity in 2025 of about 100 gigawatts.

Leading data center industry databases Baxtel and Data Center Map— which include details such as the location, power usage, and ownership of the computing facilities — contain no reference to Atlas Development completing or building a data center, according to a DeSmog review. However, the company has acquired land to build several large-scale data centers in Georgia since 2024, including in Bartow, Floyd, and Carroll counties, which are near Coweta County.

Despite the lack of a known portfolio of completed projects, Atlas Development has a highly prized resource in the race to build out data centers to feed the AI boom: local connections.

The company hired Leigh Ann Green, a prominent Coweta County real estate agent, as a consultant to coordinate the Project Sail rezoning application. Project Sail could also count on the support of Arthur “Skin” Edge IV, a Coweta County resident and Georgia’s “top lobbyist” in 2024, according to Atlanta’s James Magazine, who Atlas Development hired as an attorney to assist with its Project Sail application.

“It will bring in over a hundred million dollars a year in tax revenues to Coweta County,” Green told DeSmog in August. She said that the Project Sail site bordered industrial land and added that the county’s data center ordinance — then in the process of being written — was the most stringent that Atlas Development had seen.

“It’s a lot better than what we can do with the property today,” added Ward, Atlas’ president, who said that Project Sail would be less invasive to neighboring properties than building hundreds of homes on the site. “We moved several things to try to accommodate anyone’s concerns around there.”

Some local residents aren’t convinced by the developer’s promises. “Atlas Development has never built a doghouse,” said Coweta County county resident Steve Swope, one of the most vocal opponents of Project Sail, who has criticized the location of the project near surrounding homes.

Prologis became involved in Project Sail in September 2024, a company spokesperson told DeSmog. The following month — in October 2024 — Green met with the Coweta County Development Authority, which has a mandate to attract economic development to the county, to discuss the planned project, according to emails obtained via public records requests. Representatives from Georgia Power, the main electricity provider in the state, also attended. The Georgia Power employees were part of the utility’s Economic Development team, tasked with finding commercial partnerships and suitable sites for development. Local real estate agent Craig Jackson was also present.

In mid-November 2024, Green again met with Coweta County staff, Jackson, and Georgia Power representatives, according to the records. In early December, Green and county staff reconvened to discuss the planned rezoning of the Project Sail site from conservation-zoned land to “light industrial.” 

Atlas Development subsequently submitted the rezoning application. Although Prologis had not yet announced its involvement in Project Sail, the application contained a clue: a Prologis logo visible on an illustration of the planned project. Nevertheless, as Citizens for Rural Coweta started to organize against the plan, Prologis’ role remained hidden. Grassroots opponents of Project Sail did not know who they were fighting.

Unbeknownst to locals, Prologis representatives had met with Coweta County staff on February 11, 2025, alongside Green and Mike Lash, a vice president of CBRE, according to emails received in response to public records requests. Prologis told DeSmog that Atlas Development had hired CBRE as a broker. 

That month, Green also met with Coweta County Commissioner Jeff Fisher (R) at a local sports bar to discuss Project Sail, although the records contain no details of what was discussed. Green also emailed Coweta County staff asking them to expedite the rezoning process because “we are being asked by Georgia Power and Prologist [sic],” the records show. 

Growing Backlash

As backers of Project Sail worked to push the approval process forward, a decision to green-light a similar project in Coweta County galvanized opponents of Project Sail. In mid-April 2025, the Coweta County commissioners voted 3-2 to approve a rezoning application for Project Peach, a large-scale data center being developed by Dallas-based CyrusOne in the town of Palmetto, about 15 miles northeast of the Project Sail site.

Although Microsoft was already building a data center on a part of Palmetto that lies in Fulton County, Palmetto Mayor Teresa Thomas-Smith opposed Project Peach, saying the town was looking for other ways to develop its economy.

“This is a whole community that will be impacted,” Thomas-Smith told DeSmog. “Who’s going to cover my city’s hundred-year-old infrastructure when [the construction traffic] starts cracking pipes and tearing up streets?”

Alarmed at the apparent ease with which Project Peach had won its rezoning request in Palmetto, hundreds of people living near the planned Project Sail site began writing to Coweta County commissioners to demand they adopt stricter limits.

The growing backlash prompted the commissioners to impose a six-month moratorium on new data center decisions in early May 2025. The plan was to use this period to work on new zoning laws to govern data center developments, including Project Sail.

Prologis broke cover about two weeks later — in mid-May 2025 —  after months of remaining outside the public eye. Kent Mason, a Prologis vice president, wrote an opinion piece in the Newnan Times-Herald arguing in favor of Project Sail, saying that it would have a low impact on the environment and generate $1.3 billion dollars of tax revenue over 21 years.

Sarah Jacobs, president of the Coweta County Development Authority, emailed Mason to thank him for the article, and mentioned Project Sail’s “significance” for the local community, according to correspondence obtained with the public records request. Mason responded that it was “a great project that is next to the generating station, so not a pristine wilderness area” — a reference to Georgia Power’s Plant Yates, which has occupied a spot near the proposed Project Sail site since the 1950s. Jacobs did not respond to a request for comment.

In June, Atlas Development organized a data center tour for county officials. Prologis representatives also took part in a barbecue at the home of a local resident. In an email later that summer to county commissioner John Reidelbach (R), Prologis vice president JC Witt wrote that the company was incorporating feedback from three families in the area near the Project Sail site into its site plan.  

On July 7, Edge, the lobbyist, wrote detailed recommendations for Coweta County’s draft data center regulations “on behalf of the Project Sail team,” according to the records, as DeSmog first reported in August. Edge’s submissions included a suggestion to delay an environmental report on the project until after the rezoning stage, contrary to calls from residents for such a study to be completed prior.

Fouts, the county administrator, said that staff worked to be as transparent as possible while processing a huge amount of feedback from residents as well as developers. “Just because they sent emails in, doesn’t mean they’re the ones writing the ordinance.”

With the Coweta County Commission’s proposed data center regulations up for a vote in mid-August, Fisher, the Coweta County Commissioner, met individually with Atlas Development and Prologis representatives on July 29 at the offices of a local real estate attorney, according to an email in the records. Fisher and Coweta County did not respond to questions about the subject of the meeting. Prologis said that its meetings with local officials were part of its standard engagement for real estate developments.

Some Project Sail opponents contend that one of the county commissioners worked to suppress criticism against the project. In mid-August, the Newnan Times-Herald reported that County Commissioner Reidelbach had written to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to request it “reprimand” an agency employee due to his public stance opposing Project Sail and for writing his own independent environmental impact assessment. Reidelbach did not respond to a request for comment.

After months of deliberating over the new data center rules, it was time to put the measures to a vote. Coweta County Commissioners convened a meeting in the Commission Chambers in Newnan on August 19, the first day the data center ordinance was eligible for a vote. But given the strength of local opposition, commission president Bill McKenzie (R) proposed a motion to delay the decision on the new regulations to allow more time for deliberations.

“Given the overwhelming feedback regarding the draft data center ordinance, I’d like to make a motion that the Board continue the public hearing,” McKenzie told the meeting. His motion passed, and Coweta County scheduled a special meeting to receive public feedback about the data center ordinance, to be held at the County Fairgrounds on September 11.

Prologis, meanwhile, sought to rally support for Project Sail in Coweta County. Witt appeared on a local radio station in late August, and the company set up a website extolling the promised benefits of the development, such as skilled jobs and tax revenue to finance roads, schools, and emergency services.  

After a well-attended September 11 meeting at the County Fairgrounds, county commissioners and staff continued to revise the new data center regulations throughout the fall. Jackson, the real estate agent, and Lash of CBRE sought the addition of further provisions to favor the projects at a commission meeting in mid-November. Both Jackson and Lash are affiliated with Project Sail in public records, but did not identify their involvement during the meeting. 

At least some of Lash’s requests were incorporated into the final draft of the ordinance, including his request for allowable data center building heights, including rooftop equipment, to be raised from 60 feet to 70 feet, and his recommendation to allow data centers to face smaller roads than allowed in previous versions. Lash and Jackson did not respond to requests for comment.

After months of delays, requests for amendments by data center developers, and growing public outcry, the Coweta County Commission could defer a decision no longer: The new measures governing data centers would be put to a vote on December 16.

Why Coweta?

Last September, Prologis’ then-CEO Hamid Moghadam took the stage in Los Angeles at the company’s yearly Groundbreakers summit. The real estate giant billed the event as a spotlight on “a global supply chain revolution driven by relentless demand and accelerated breakthroughs in AI, infrastructure, and energy transformation.” Headlining the event and joining Moghadam by video call was U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum.

Moghadam said that Burgum and a fellow Trump administration cabinet member, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, were very open to working with the company to develop public-private partnerships, and had a met with him personally. “But, unfortunately they [federal agencies] don’t control all of the conditions,” Moghadam added. “State and local entities have a lot of power in this country. And when it comes to land use and all these matters we’ve been talking about, you could have the fastest federal policy but it can run into a brick wall with the state issues.”

In common with any number of similar gatherings in the past year, the message from the podium was clear: The federal government was backing an ever-closer alliance between tech giants, real estate companies, and the energy industry to secure the land needed to satisfy the booming demand for data centers, and generate the colossal amounts of electricity needed to power them.

This confluence of forces is bearing down on Coweta County in large measure because Plant Yates — the more-than-half-century-old power plant — is adjacent to the site for Project Sail, and has become central to plans to source the more than 900 megawatts needed to run it. That’s enough generating capacity to power about 700,000 Georgia homes.

In December 2025 — a little more than a year after Prologis began pushing Project Sail — Georgia Power announced a $16 billion expansion plan to add 10 gigawatts of generating capacity by 2030, equivalent to about two-thirds of its entire current fleet. Some 80 percent of this new capacity will be used to power data centers, a company spokesperson said.

The federal government lent its weight to the plan in February by extending a $26 billion loan to Southern Company, Georgia Power’s parent company and the nation’s second-largest utility.

While part of the plan hinges on extending the life of coal-fired power plants that had been due to retire, Georgia Power is also rolling out new high-voltage transmission lines, battery storage, and extending gas-fired power generation — including at Plant Yates, which switched from coal to gas in 2017 and is key to the company’s expansion plans.

With data centers on track to potentially consume more than a tenth of the nation’s electricity demand by 2028, according to a U.S. Department of Energy report — more than double the 4 percent registered in 2022 — the carbon emissions associated with the projects pose a threat to the climate. In Georgia and other states, however, people are often more focused on news reports showing how the costs of power utility upgrades for data centers are driving up the cost of electricity. These costs have become a matter of increased debate heading into the 2026 midterm elections. 

For many local opponents of Project Sail, their most deeply felt fears relate not to their monthly bills, but to the threats the projects pose to the land they love.

Fears for Fate of Community

Jacqueline Lassetter grew up next to the then-newly-built Plant Yates in the 1950s, riding her horse in her family’s farmland along the Chattahoochee River. Coweta County only had about 30,000 residents then — about a fifth of today’s population of more than 160,000.

Lassetter’s father worked in a lumber mill, and she would clean off after a muddy horseback ride in piles of sawdust. Down the road, neighbors worked in the textile mills of Arnco and Sargent villages.

In 1971, Georgia Power told Lassetter, then a young woman, that she would need to move, because Plant Yates was expanding. The Lassetters were forced to sell the family land to make way for the power plant.

“I cry when I go by it now,” says Lassetter.

The Lassetters took their wooden house off its foundation and rebuilt it two miles down the road. Today, Lassetter, who still lives in the relocated family home, sees Project Sail as an even more threatening incursion into her corner of Coweta County, one that she fears could permanently ruin the rural landscape where she grew up.

“It breaks my heart,” says Lassetter. “I have a lot of family members over there [directly bordering the Project Sail]…and friends…Their homes are going to be ruined because the noise, the property values are going to drop because no one’s going to want to live next to one this size.” 

Down the road from Lassetter, local resident Laura Beth says she was among the community members who learned about the Project Sail plans on December 31, 2024, when Atlas Development LLC’s rezoning application appeared publicly online. Surveyors soon came unannounced to the edge of their 10-acre property, her husband Phil says, planting stakes in the woods where their children play by a stream and go mountain biking. 

“They’re going to watch this community disintegrate,” says Beth, adding that the specter of a large industrial site next door is scaring away new homeowners. She and Phil are wary of investing more into their property — plans to change the old blue carpet in the living room and build a cabin in their woods are now on hold. Shortly after the announcement, Beth co-founded the Citizens for Rural Coweta Community group.

Beth, who moved with her family to Coweta County for its nature and quiet, points out that the county’s current 2021-2041 Comprehensive Plan, a document used to guide land development in parallel with zoning regulations, designates the proposed Project Sail site for rural uses, on top of its current “rural conservation” zoning. Although Project Sail developers have cited its proximity to Plant Yates as a core component of their argument for rezoning the site for industrial use, less than 1 percent of the project’s perimeter borders the power plant.

Ron Bockrath, an octogenarian and retired industrial chemist, lives with his wife on 50 acres bordered by a horse farm and the wooded tract slated for Project Sail. “What good is it going to do to kill ourselves?” says Bockrath, who has fears about the climate-heating impacts of the site, the potential destruction of nearby wildlife habitats, and the drain on local water resources to keep the data center cool.

Many of the local opponents to Project Sail acknowledge the role of data centers in supporting modern life, saying their campaign is primarily about the project’s location. But they want the facilities built in existing industrial areas, not on rural land, and fear the promised tax revenues may never fully materialize.

Prologis estimates that Project Sail could generate up to $100 million in yearly tax revenue at full build-out, according to figures in an economic impact analysis the company commissioned from a Georgia economic consultancy. The estimate is based on a total projected investment of $112 billion in buildings and computing infrastructure over the next 21 years. That would greatly surpass the state’s $35 billion Plant Vogtle in Burke County, the biggest nuclear power plant in the U.S., as the most expensive infrastructure project in Georgia. In the zoning application it filed to Coweta County in December 2024, Atlas Development had put the cost of building Project Sail at $17 billion.

DeSmog could not establish the reason for the discrepancy between the various projections of the project’s cost. Prologis did not respond to a request for comment on how it intends to secure the funds to build Project Sail.

Prologis’ largest data center project under construction, a halfway-completed 600-megawatt facility in Hutto, Texas, is about two-thirds the size of Project Sail, and yielded about $2.4 million in local tax revenues last year, according to property tax records. Prologis did not answer a question about its current and future projected tax revenues for data center projects.

Rob Cole, a salesman at a Newnan roofing company and a vocal opponent of Project Sail, is skeptical of Prologis’ projected nine-figure tax estimate. Cole previously worked in the luxury pen industry, and once saw a pen formerly owned by American writer Mark Twain sell for $1.9 million. But in all his years in business, he has never observed anything quite like the astronomical promises of the data center industry, which he likens to “riverboat gamblers” who roll the dice but lose their bet “nine times out of ten.”

“Data centers are here to stay whether we like it or not. But the size, the scope, the location, and the protections to be put in place for the environment and for the people are the most important thing,” Cole says. “They’re looking at us like the knuckle-dragging rednecks that they assume that we are.”

“Here 4 Deer, Not 4 Data!”

At about 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 17, Jacqueline Lassetter joined a crowd of residents gathering outside the Coweta County chambers in Newnan to attend the council vote on the new zoning rules for data centers. 

Some toted hand-made signs that said, “Here 4 Deer, Not 4 Data!”, “Keep Coweta Rural!”, “Vote No or Out You Go.” Many wore red, the chosen color of Project Sail opponents. To the right of the front door, Atlas Development’s Jonathon Ward stood in line with a smaller group of blue-shirted Project Sail supporters. Local residents speculated that many of the supporters were not Coweta County residents, but had connections to the data center developers through the construction industry.

PHOTO_13A

Coweta County resident Dave Wiliams and other local residents before a Coweta County Commission meeting in Newnan, GA, on December 16, 2025. Credit: Edward Donnelly

PHOTO_13B

Jacqueline Lassetter (left) and other local residents before a Coweta County Commission meeting in Newnan, GA, on December 16, 2025. Credit: Edward Donnelly

By 6 p.m., a crowd of more than 150 residents packed the county chambers, with some standing or spilling out into the vestibule. One of those standing was Maura Keller (D), a U.S. Congressional candidate, who carried a pink binder labeled “data centers.” Ahead of the mid-term elections, Keller was traveling to public meetings across Georgia’s 3rd Congressional District, which she is hoping to win, where a growing number of citizens from Fayetteville to Newnan are organizing across party lines to oppose the computing mega-projects. Seated toward the front was Tim Ryan (R), a candidate for Coweta County commissioner and a vocal critic of Project Sail, who would call that night for county officials to enact stricter regulations on data centers.

In the crowd, Lassetter sat — wearing a red shirt —  among dozens of other Project Sail opponents, including Ron Bockrath, Laura Beth, Rob Cole and Connie Lytten. Toward the front sat Arthur “Skin” Edge IV, the prominent Georgia lobbyist and attorney for Atlas Development.

Commissioner Al Smith (D) led a prayer after the Pledge of Allegiance. “We pray tonight that You will allow us to disagree amicably,” Smith invoked, head bowed.

To start the meeting, the Coweta County administration presented the proposed data center ordinance, which included a detailed timeline of the steps taken to draft it.

Then the floor opened for public comments. Many residents spoke in opposition to the ordinance and data centers at large.

“It’s almost like in some of the changes [to the ordinance], you’re making them for Project Sail,” said Tim Ryan, speaking at the podium in front of the commissioners. “Fellas, please take a bit more time. This is a generational decision.”

“Data centers create very few permanent jobs compared to other developments, and the profits flow to corporations,” said county resident Misty Caballero. “It’s the same pattern which we could call ‘digital colonization’ where local communities pay the price for the global tech ambitions.”

“Over the past months I’ve watched my neighbors mount an extraordinary effort to stop this data center nonsense,” said county resident Spencer Lewis. “This isn’t a handful of loud voices. This is a broad, united, and unmistakable will of the people.” 

donnelly-Apr7-PHOTO_14A

Coweta County commissioners take their seats before a Commission meeting on December 16, 2025. From left to right: Jeff Fisher, Bill McKenzie, and Al Smith. Credit: Edward Donnelly

donnelly-Apr7-PHOTO_14B

Misty Cabellero speaks at a Coweta County Commission meeting on December 16, 2025. Credit: Edward Donnelly

donnelly-Apr7-PHOTO_14C

Ron Bockrath speaks at a Coweta County Commission meeting on December 16, 2025. Credit: Edward Donnelly

In a 4-1 vote, county commissioners approved the new ordinance. McKenzie, the only one who voted against, banged his gavel to confirm the new law. “I think it’s a very good ordinance,” Edge, the lobbyist working for Atlas Development, told DeSmog after the meeting. “It took a lot of time and it received a lot of input from the citizens and everybody else. I think the final product is good and will help regulate these data centers.”

But many in the crowd filing out of the meeting room were angry and upset. Coweta County had instated its first-ever ordinance for data center development, and the moratorium on new data centers was lifted. Project Sail could now move forward to the rezoning hearing scheduled for April 7 — the last major hurdle for the project to go ahead.

Decision Time

Despite the progress it’s made in Coweta County, Prologis’ pitches to build large-scale data centers in rural areas haven’t always worked. Last April, JC Witt, the company vice president, stood in a courthouse in Warsaw, Indiana, before a crowd of worried Kosciusko County residents opposed to the company’s plans to build a data center complex on more than 500 acres of farmland. Kosciusko County commissioners voted down the plans 3-0.

Witt returned to Indiana in January this year, this time to the town of Shelbyville, where Prologis hopes to build Project Hackman, another planned data center complex. Joining him on the trip was the company’s recently appointed director for data center policy, Trae Westmoreland, who previously worked as president of the Coweta County Development Authority.

At a Jan. 5 public town meeting, Witt cited the potential millions in yearly tax revenues Project Hackman could earn, which he said would have minimal impacts on the town and surrounding farmland. He pointed to Prologis’ three decades of investing in Indiana real estate projects and the community charities the company supported. Westmoreland then presented a PowerPoint showing illustrations of other Prologis developments across the U.S., explaining that the data center buildings would have a visually pleasing exterior and would not use more water than an average office building. 

“There’s a lot of land in the United States that’s got the electrical and the water,” Westmoreland told the crowd about the conditions needed to build data centers, “But we’re in Shelbyville because of you. The proven leadership and the pro-business attitude that ya’ll have is the reason why we are here and want to build in your community. We want to build in your community.”

After Westmoreland finished his presentation, the meeting opened for public comments, many Shelbyville residents were not convinced. “These developers and their minions, they’re ruthless and they’re soulless, and it’s your duty to protect the citizens of this community,” local resident Bill Collins, who lives near the proposed Project Hackman site, told the town council from the podium.

Two days later, on Jan. 7, hundreds of residents packed a local planning commission meeting at Shelbyville High School to oppose the project, according to local news reports, citing environmental impacts and asking for more details about the Prologis project. Following public comments, the town’s planning commission recommended rejecting Project Hackman in a 11-0 vote. But on April 6, Shelbyville’s council — which has the final say on zoning requests — voted 4-2 to approve rezoning for the data center project.

Prologis also enjoyed recent rezoning success in neighboring Illinois. There, council members in the town of Yorkville voted 7-1 to approve its Project Steel data center project on March 24. A group of residents voiced opposition to the plans, but did little to sway local council members. Contingent upon the approval, Prologis agreed to write a $40 million check up front to the local school system according to reporting by the Shaw Local News Network. In Coweta County, Michael Fouts, the county administrator, said that staff only discuss economic agreements with developers after a rezoning process is complete.

On Jan. 28, at Newnan High School, Prologis and Atlas Development held a legally mandated information session to inform residents about Project Sail ahead of the rezoning vote due on April 7. 

“The conversation was honest and straightforward. Residents asked thoughtful questions, and we worked to answer them openly and respectfully,” JC Witt, the Prologis vice president, wrote in an email to Fouts, the Coweta County administrator, the following week, according to public records. “To be sure,” Witt added, “there were some in attendance who simply were not open to our information and there was some confusion about what details are available at this early stage.”

Jacqueline Lassetter has heard and seen enough to make up her mind on Project Sail. “I’ve been getting out and getting petitions,” she said.

Knocking door to door, Lassetter had collected 240 signatures asking Coweta County commissioners to reject the project as of April 4, part of a larger group effort, before illness forced her to take a break.

By April 7, the evening of the Project Sail rezoning vote, Lassetter and her neighbors had collected a combined 7,820 signatures from Coweta County residents asking commissioners to deny the Project Sail rezoning application, which resident Melanie Tomlinson presented during the public comment period of the 6 p.m. commission meeting. Eight residents presented arguments against Project Sail during the time allotted, including its proximity to homes, churches, and an elementary school.

“The Project Sail rezoning request is not a minor adjustment. It is one of the most significant land use changes possible from rural to heavy industrial,” said Lassetter from the podium.

“What sits before you is not just a zoning decision. It is in many ways a defining moment,” said Rob Cole.

“Because for many in this room, and for many not in this room, it feels like a last-minute appeal, sort of a state of execution. Not of a project, but of something more difficult to restore, once it’s gone, and that’s the spirit of Coweta County.”

JC Witt, who had presented the project on behalf of Atlas Development earlier in the meeting, was given time for a rebuttal. He showed a diagram indicating that less than 20 percent of the Project Sail would be built, and that the remaining roughly 80 percent would be preserved for green space. “The Commission here today and the county staff has done a very intricate and detailed job of putting together an ordinance that restricts all these concerns [of residents],” Witt said.

After Commissioner Al Smith asked follow-up questions about the project plan from Witt and county staff, Commission Chair Bill McKenzie made a motion to reject the rezoning application based on his opinion that it did fit the Coweta County’s Comprehensive Plan or meet other conditions for approval.

“After a long 15 months, or possibly even longer, of study, my own personal visits to data centers, to hundreds, possibly thousands, of emails, text messages, phone calls, personal conversations about this rezoning, many times being described as ‘the data center’… I have spent hours during the day, evening, and even during the night… I prayed over this,” McKenzie said, of his decision.

Bob Blackburn (R) voted to second the motion. But that was all the support McKenzie received. In a 3-2 vote, Coweta County voted to approve the Project Sail rezoning application, with yes votes from commissioners Fisher, Reidelbach, and Smith.

For residents opposed to the plan, the next step could be a legal appeal.

This story was updated on on April 10, 2026 at 2100 BST.

The reporting for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post How Data Center Developers Staked Their Claim in Rural Georgia appeared first on DeSmog.

James Orr, until recently a relatively obscure academic theologian, now ranks among Reform UK’s most influential politicians, having been appointed as the party’s head of policy in February, following a four-month stint as a senior advisor to leader Nigel Farage.
 
Orr’s friendship with U.S. Vice President JD Vance is widely known. However, there are many details about Orr’s views and political affiliations that haven’t received much scrutiny.

He shared a stage with a white nationalist

As revealed by DeSmog and The Mirror, Orr spoke in March 2026 at CPAC Hungary, a political conference closely associated with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and co-organised by groups funded by Viktor Orbán’s autocratic Hungarian government.

Orr shared a stage with Martin Helme, leader of the far-right Estonian Conservative People’s Party, who has expressed white nationalist views about immigration.

In 2013, Helme said that his immigration policy was: “If you’re black, go back,” adding, “I want Estonia to be a white country”.

Asked by DW in 2019 if he had changed his views, Helme said: “No, no,” adding that he made those comments as a “talking head [on] a commentator show… You’re expected to say things in a more upfront way.”

Helme also made a “white power” gesture at his swearing-in ceremony as Estonia’s finance minister in 2019, a role he held until 2021.

At CPAC Hungary, Orr stated that Reform’s immigration policy is: “Not only do we have to stop mass migration, we have to start thinking about how we reverse it.”

Reform has pledged to deport all “illegal” migrants, and to restrict the rights of those who have legally settled in the UK by preventing them from remaining in the country indefinitely.

Read DeSmog’s profile of James Orr.

He loves Orbán’s Hungary

Orr has claimed that Orbán’s autocratic government serves as a “counterexample to the ideology in my own country that rejects national pride and heritage.”

He made this remark at the 2025 summer festival hosted by Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a think tank bankrolled by and closely associated with Orbán’s government.

Orr’s appearance was not his first encounter with MCC. Since 2021, he has been a director at the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF), a UK right-wing think tank that has received more than £500,000 – over 90 percent of its funding – from MCC over the past decade.

Orbán’s government funded MCC via endowment worth over €1 billion in 2020, including a 10 percent stake in the Hungarian national oil company MOL, which has made a significant share of its revenues in recent years from trading Russian fossil fuels.

He’s mates with Peter Thiel

Tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel – an influential figure in radical right-wing political networks – was among the other speakers at MCC’s 2025 summer festival, interviewed on stage by Orr.

The pair appear to be close. Early in 2026, Orr hosted Thiel for a series of Cambridge talks entitled “The Antichrist Lectures”.

Posting about the lectures on Elon Musk’s social media platform X, Orr said: “What a privilege to host Peter Thiel in Cambridge this week for a stunningly original and erudite series of lectures.

“Thiel is a walking antidote to the modern multiversity.

“The highlight of our academic year.”

Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity, to which Orr belongs, attracted criticism in 2021 for organising talks from radical right-wing figures including Thiel – some of which were organised by Orr.

He wants a UK ICE

Speaking at Reform’s annual conference in September 2025, Orr advised the party to form a UK equivalent of the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

Since Trump returned to the White House in 2025, ICE has engaged in the harassment, kidnapping and killing of U.S. residents and citizens in the name of deporting “illegal” immigrants.

During his speech, Orr also called for the UK equivalent to Project 2025, the 900-page authoritarian policy blueprint for Trump’s second term, written by the Heritage Foundation.

He’s anti-climate

Orr has frequently attacked climate policies and the UK’s goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

Speaking to the European Conservative in August 2025, he attacked European governments over their commitment to net zero, labelling it “fiscal suicide” and an example of “crazy energy policies.” He also suggested that if Reform UK were to win a general election, it “would end the economic catastrophe of net zero” which would “alone will give the country an enormous kick in terms of productivity.” 

In reality, the New Economics Foundation has estimated that Reform’s climate policies would wipe £92 billion off the economy and cost 60,000 jobs.

He headed a pro-Reform think tank modelled on the Heritage Foundation

In September 2025, Orr helped to formally launch the Centre for a Better Britain, a UK think tank designed to “support Reform with policy development, briefing and rebuttal”.

Leaked documents indicate the group seeks to raise £25 million by 2029 from UK and U.S. sources, including tech investors and pro-Trump donors.

The Centre for a Better Britain was co-founded by business interests in the energy and metals industries who reportedly worked with Nigel Farage in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Speaking to the BBC about the Centre for a Better Britain in July 2025, Orr heaped praise on the Heritage Foundation, claiming that British think tanks “struggle to keep the lights on”, whereas Heritage boss “Kevin Roberts has built up the … Heritage Foundation to the point where I think it’s getting about $100 million a year in income”.
 
 He went on to praise the group for formulating “an enormous policy shop window”, and helping to staff Trump’s “entire administration with hundreds and hundreds of bright young things”.

He called Russia’s war on Ukraine a “regional Slavic conflict”

In his European Conservative interview in August 2025, Orr minimised the importance of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – labelling it a “regional Slavic conflict” and adding that “it is a conflict happening in the world that I don’t care very much about.” 

Orr took a different line during his appearance at CPAC Hungary in March 2026, calling Putin’s invasion “scandalous” and saying that “in Britain we’re very proud that we welcomed 200,000 Ukrainian refugees.”

He’s anti-abortion

Orr holds extreme, anti-abortion views.

A profile of him published by The Times in August 2025 said that “he does not think abortion should be allowed, at any stage of foetal development, even in pregnancies resulting from rape.”

The post Eight Things You Should Know About Reform’s Policy Chief James Orr appeared first on DeSmog.

“Do governments have to do more? Absolutely,…without question. There is a gap between ambition and policies that’s large. It needs to close.” – Mark Carney, United Nations Climate Action & Financial Special Envoy. 

Now-Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke those words in 2021, commenting on news that the six largest Canadian banks had joined the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) – an effort Carney spearheaded to steer capital away from fossil fuel development.

What a difference five years makes. All those financial institutions have since fled the now-defunct NZBA, which collapsed in 2025. Carney just pledged to pay $1 billion in required fees to the United Nations for the massive Bay du Nord offshore oil development in Newfoundland on behalf of oil giant Equinor, a move that might be described as a haiku of hypocrisy.

The Bay du Nord proposal would involve deep water drilling 500 km offshore of St. John’s, potentially extracting almost one billion barrels of oil with emissions per barrel just six percent lower than diluted bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands.

When Newfoundland and Equinor signed a tentative agreement on royalties in early May, the federal government proudly proclaimed in a statement, “The Government of Canada is committed to helping de-risk this project to enable this important investment in Canada’s energy future to move forward.”

Strange. Canada pledged in 2009 to phase out fossil fuel subsidies along with our G20 partners. As part of the legally-binding 2015 Paris Agreement, Canada also committed to “making finance flows consistent with a pathway toward low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development”. Yet Ottawa still shovels billions in public funds at a highly profitable and polluting sector, totalling almost $30 billion in 2024. 

“There is no good reason why the federal government should be using taxpayer dollars to give a giant subsidy to a foreign-owned oil company,” Julia Levin, Associate Director, National Climate at the non-profit Environmental Defence, told  Desmog.

Environmental Defence previously conducted opinion polling which showed that two-thirds of the public oppose fossil fuel subsides. “That’s not how Canadians want their money used,” said Levin. “It violates the government’s own commitments that they have now had for decades about ending fossil fuel subsidies.”

Besides being unpopular and terrible for the climate, this latest gift from Carney to Norwegian-based Equinor also sets a troubling precedent. The Bay du Nord deposit lies in international waters, and would be the first project required to pay production fees under Article 82 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The Carney government caving on paying this revenue rather than Equinor means that nations elsewhere in the world may be on the hook for private sector resource extraction beyond their territorial waters. 

“This is just the latest example of how Prime Minister Carney is giving big oil everything on their wish list,” said Levin. Carney recently asserted that Bay du Nord is “one of the lowest-carbon new oil fields, depending on how you develop it.” Yet according to Levin, “Bay du Nord would be a carbon bomb. Its emissions would equal those of 100 coal fired power plants. It’s also a really risky project. It’s a real threat to Labrador’s fisheries and biodiversity.”

Another red flag is the shaky business case. Drilling for oil 500 km offshore at ocean depths exceeding one kilometre is challenging and expensive, requiring an estimated $14 billion in capital investment. Equinor has been kicking the tires of the Bay du Nord project for years and has delayed a final investment decision until 2027.

Nichole Dusyk, a senior policy advisor and lead at the International Institute for Sustainable Development is concerned that taxpayers will again be forking over public money for another risky fossil fuel project. “If projects like Bay du Nord are not receiving final investment decision, why is that,” Dusyk asked when contacted by Desmog.  

She feels that Ottawa offering to cover the UNCLOS royalties is “very clearly a subsidy, and a very generous subsidy.” Dusyk sees this outlay of public money as a sign that Bay du Nord is not nearly as viable as the company and the government are telling the public. “Why would a mature industry need government de-risking?”

Formerly named Statoil, Equinor is a 54-year-old company with a market value of $100 billion. Does a state-controlled oil company from Norway, a country with a $2.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund, really need handouts from the Canadian taxpayer? 

The Carney government has so far announced fast tracking for eleven major projects totalling $116 billion, including two LNG developments worth over half that amount. The only renewable energy project prioritized so far by Carney is a hydro development in Nunavut valued at $500 million – less than 0.5 percent of the major projects total.

Carney may want to notice news from another United Nations body, the World Meteorological Organization, that just released an alarming report that the planet is being “pushed beyond its limits” due to dangerous heating of the oceans driving more extreme weather.

The authors found that 2015-2025 were the hottest 11-years on record and that “the Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history, as greenhouse gas concentrations drive continued warming of the atmosphere and ocean”.

If only Canada had courageous climate leadership to help meet this challenge. What happened to the allegedly principled person who was the UN special envoy on climate action and finance? 

The post Mark Carney Pledges $1B in Taxpayer Money for a ‘Carbon Bomb’ Project appeared first on DeSmog.

His name is ‘Fossi’. He’s depicted as a swirl of grey smoke. And he’s liable to lose his temper whenever his classmates blame him for the climate crisis.

Fossi is the protagonist of Our Hidden Powers: The Big Switch, a children’s book launched last week by Swedish clean energy operator Baseload Capital. The company invests in and manages geothermal projects in the United States, Taiwan, Japan, and Iceland that use the Earth’s heat to generate electricity.

Tentatively stepping into a classroom as a new pupil, Fossi is rejected by his peers, who each represent a different form of clean energy. No one wants to sit next to the smelly, smokey fuel that has caused the planet to heat up and “become sick”.

“You wanted to travel, build, light up the world,” cries Fossi in frustration. “And I helped you! We fossil fuels gave you heat, cars, lights, and factories. And now you say it’s all my fault?”

Fossi gradually wins the admiration of his classmates, however, when he offers to use his “wealth of experience” to help them plan a shift to cleaner energy sources and solve climate change.

“In a way, I’m a hero too,” Fossi thinks to himself at the end of the story.

To the book’s author, Baseload Capital’s chief marketing officer Kristina Hagström Ilievska, her sympathetic depiction of Fossi is an attempt to explain the energy transition in a way her son could grasp. “Modern society has been built on fossil energy. That is simply the starting point. From there, the story is about change and the need to move forward, not about defending the status quo,” Ilievska told DeSmog.

But some readers question why the final scene shows Fossi joining hands and becoming friends with characters representing solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and bio energy — a helpful image for oil and gas companies that need younger generations on their side if they are to remain a socially accepted part of the economy.

In reality, critics say, the fossil fuel industry has never been a true friend to clean energy or the planet, actively lobbying against policies designed to support renewables or regulate oil, gas and coal production for decades.

“This book gets a lot right. But the idea that fossil fuels are the ‘new’ kid deserving of sympathy is almost laughable,” said Lindsey Gulden, a former climate and data scientist at U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil who was fired in 2020 after internally reporting an allegedly fraudulent overvaluation of the company’s assets in Texas and New Mexico. “Fossil fuel companies are working hard to keep their seat at the table and delay a robust energy transition.”

Entrenched power relations dominated by “vested interests” that “control and benefit from existing technologies” are a key barrier to the energy transition, concluded the U.N. climate body Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2023.

Neither the book nor the press release mentions that Baseload Capital is part-owned by oil and gas producer Chevron and fossil fuel services provider Baker Hughes. These partnerships are listed on Baseload Capital’s website.

Chevron and Baker Hughes have promoted their investments in Baseload Capital as examples of their commitment to clean energy and reducing their climate impact, despite the vast majority of their businesses still being based on fossil fuels.

Chevron plans to increase oil and gas production up to three percent each year until 2030, the company announced on its investor day in November.

Ilievska said the book was “an educational story, not a corporate product,” and there was no involvement from Chevron, Baker Hughes, or any other investors. “We share the same end goal as many [climate campaigners], a fast transition away from fossil fuels, and we see better understanding as part of how we get there,” said Ilievska.

But campaigners and industry experts warned that the story of ‘Fossi’ appears to closely mirror fossil fuel industry narratives by playing down the industry’s role in blocking climate action, portraying it as an enthusiastic player in the energy transition, and tackling its image as “the bad guys” — in the words of a leaked advertising briefing from British oil giant BP, unearthed by Drilled.

“I want to be part of the solution and make a difference,” says Fossi at one stage.

“If this book was a truer metaphor, it would have been a school where the majority of the kids were called ‘Fossi’, and they had already been there for a very long time, maybe had become the teachers already, were sitting on the board … because it’s fossil fuels that are maintaining the status quo,” said Gustav Martner, creative director at Greenpeace Nordics, who previously worked in corporate advertising and marketing for 17 years.

“There is definitely a need to produce books for children about climate change, but it is troubling when you can so clearly read between the lines that the solution being offered is to stop blaming the fossil fuel industry,” Martner added.

“It doesn’t help anyone to point fingers,” Ilievska said. “We know they did wrong, and they have their perspective of what we have done wrong, but we need to find that common ground to move on.”

Baseload Capital CEO Alexander Helling said in the book’s press release that its message — including “showing how geothermal energy can use knowledge, technology, and experience from the fossil fuel sector” — is targeted at investors and policymakers as well as children.

Ilievska said the company believed that by partnering with oil and gas companies, Baseload Capital could “bring [the fossil fuel industry] with us” and help speed up the growth of geothermal energy, thanks to their drilling expertise and financial muscle.

Our Hidden Powers: The Big Switch is the second book Baseload Capital has released with publishing house Mondial, which also sells titles by well-known cultural figures and journalists in Sweden.

The first, in 2023, taught children about the potential of geothermal energy as a clean and renewable fuel. The book did not include the character ‘Fossi’.

Chevron and Baker Hughes did not respond to a DeSmog request for comment.

‘Non-traditional Allies’

The fossil fuel industry has a long history of targeting children and young people with its messaging.

The American Petroleum Institute, America’s largest oil and gas lobby group, sponsored STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workshops with girl scouts in 2017, which it viewed as “nontraditional local allies”, according to internal documents made public by a U.S. congressional investigation in 2024 and analysed by DeSmog. BP invested millions in STEM programmes throughout the 2010s to “protect BP’s reputation”, the same batch of documents shows — programmes that still continue today.

As awareness of the climate crisis has grown, the fossil industry has increasingly seen these audiences as crucial to its survival, internal marketing documents obtained by DeSmog suggest.

In 2017, Norwegian state-owned oil company Equinor —  then known as Statoil — and its advertising agency TRY noted that “an increasing number of people question Statoil’s corporate social responsibility, sustainability, innovation and attractiveness as an employer” and that “this is especially true amongst the younger generation.”

“Younger voices are taking more prominent space in the energy and climate debate, and people who we consider young today will be the decision-makers, thought-leaders and opinion formers of tomorrow,” the document says. “Hence, the need to be more relevant to the next generation was evident — simply because Statoil’s future will depend on The Young.”

In April 2025, DeSmog revealed that Equinor had sponsored pop-up science classrooms on a group of Scottish islands at the same time as it sought approval to develop a nearby oilfield called Rosebank.

Equinor also created a video game called “Energy Town” targeted at UK school children. “Energy Town” aimed to “help build future talent pipelines and secure permission to operate at a time of sensitivity around fossil fuels, particularly in light of … the Rosebank development,” according to a web page made by the game’s designers, first reported on by Norwegian outlet E24.

Shell’s gas and coal subsidiary in Australia paid US$7 million to fund children’s educational programs at the Queensland Museum that fail to clearly identify fossil fuels as the primary cause of climate change, a DeSmog investigation published in December found.

The industry has also turned to social media influencers to connect with younger generations.

Influencers posted hundreds of times for oil and gas companies around the world between 2017 and 2023, DeSmog found. One influencer partnership with oil giant Shell made people in their 20s “31 percent more likely to believe” that the oil company is “committed to cleaner fuels”, according to a case study written by its PR agency Edelman.

Brazil’s state-controlled oil company Petrobras hired “a squad of influencers whose language is aimed at Generation Z,” it said in a press release announcing its “Just Energy Transition” campaign in June 2025. The squad included nature content creator Mylly Biologando, who made videos about visits to a Petrobras algae-fuel lab for her 500,000 followers.

‘Fossi’ may have been the brainchild of a clean energy company that wants to see the back of him one day. But as scientists sound the climate crisis alarm more loudly than ever, the wider fossil fuel industry is still aiming its favoured narratives at the generations that it needs on its side for its survival. They are also the generations that will feel the consequences of climate change the most.

The post Meet the Combustible Cartoon Character Who Wants to Make Kids Feel Sorry for Fossil Fuels appeared first on DeSmog.

In the wake of the fossil fuel crisis created by Donald Trump’s war in Iran, a host of influential figures and groups in the UK have been calling not for the rapid rollout of renewable energy, but a growing reliance on oil and gas.

They have been calling for ramped up exploration of the UK’s declining North Sea basin – and, as Carbon Brief has shown, their core arguments are based on falsehoods.

And, as it turns out, a large number of those lobbying for the UK government’s fossil fuel expansion either have close ties to the oil and gas industry, or to groups that deny basic climate science.

The Conservative Party

Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party has been leading the campaign for the UK to award new North Sea oil and gas licences – launching a “Fuel Britannia” campaign this week that proposes more drilling and less support for renewable energy.

Badenoch has been hostile to clean energy throughout her time as Conservative leader. As DeSmog has shown, her party has frequently pilfered policies from Nigel Farage’s hardline, anti-climate party Reform UK, and has notably dropped its commitment to the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions goal.

However, the Conservative Party – including under Badenoch – has a long history of accepting donations from fossil fuel interests and climate science deniers.

DeSmog revealed that Badenoch and her family spent a week at the home of Neil Record in February – a longstanding Conservative donor who has given more than £550,000 to the party. Record is a close ally of the current Tory leader, having donated to Badenoch’s 2024 leadership campaign and even gifted her the use of his London home as a campaign HQ.

Record, who’s a Telegraph columnist and holds senior positions at several right-wing think tanks, is a vocal opponent of clean energy development. He’s also the chair of Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the climate denial Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which has claimed that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised”.

In recent years, a host of Record’s fellow climate science deniers have pumped money into the Conservatives. DeSmog research found that, in the two decades to 2024, the party accepted more than £7 million from those who refute evidence of man-made global warming and its solutions.

The party has also accepted donations from fossil fuel interests. Badenoch even launched her “Fuel Britannia” campaign at an oil rig owned by a Conservative donor, and she accepted money for her Conservative leadership campaign from a director of Chevron – one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies.

“‘Fool Britannia’ would be a better strapline for Badenoch’s plan since it won’t help bill payers but will make oil giants richer,” said Paul Morozzo, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK. “It’s the fossil fuel industry’s wish list – ignore the environmental consequences and let them drill wherever they like, despite this doing nothing to reduce energy bills at home.”

Reform UK

Nigel Farage’s party has been a leading advocate of pro-oil politics for years, which has been turbocharged during the Iran crisis.

Reform has falsely claimed that more drilling would make “Britain energy independent once again” and “bring down bills”.

The party has been making these assertions while being funded by individuals with a vested interest in undermining the clean energy transition.

As revealed by DeSmog, the party received 92 percent of its funding between the 2019 and 2024 general elections from fossil fuel investors, major polluters, and climate science deniers. The party’s treasurer Nick Candy has claimed that the party is actively attempting to raise funds from oil executives, while several senior Reform figures have financial and non-financial ties to Gulf petrostates.

Farage himself is also a climate science denier. Speaking at the 2025 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, he claimed he’s “not a scientist” but that it’s “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant. 

In reality, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, has said “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.”

The IPCC has also stated that carbon dioxide pollution “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought” – all of which “put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”

Think Tanks and the Media

A network of right-wing think tanks and media outlets has also been pushing for more North Sea oil production.

A number of these organisations share donors and key personnel, while echoing the same pro-oil narratives.

For example, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) – which has been lobbying for more North Sea exploration – has been heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch, whose media outlets have been repeating the same anti-climate lines.

As revealed by DeSmog, the IEA has received significant funding in the past from fossil fuel majors including BP and Shell. The IEA is part of the Tufton Street network of anti-tax, anti-regulation groups that have also been bankrolled by Conservative, climate denial donors.

In December 2025, DeSmog and Democracy for Sale revealed that Tory donors had pumped £7 million into Tufton Street groups since 2019.

These groups have adopted a new favourite energy specialist in recent months – Kathryn Porter, who has written reports for the IEA, and the GWPF.

Porter is a consultant for the fossil fuel industry. She claims to work for “businesses with projects across the electricity, gas and oil industries”, including “clients with conventional energy assets including gas-fired power stations, gas storage, upstream oil and gas production and [Liquefied Natural Gas]”.

Porter is also featured regularly on GB News, the anti-climate broadcaster. GB News is co-owned by the Legatum Group, an investment firm based in the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate, and Paul Marshall, whose hedge fund Marshall Wace had billions invested in fossil fuel companies as of June 2023.

The post The Vested Interests Lobbying for North Sea Oil and Gas Expansion appeared first on DeSmog.

Council members in Archbald, Pennsylvania, have voted down Texas-based Provident Realty Advisors’ application to build a giant data center after months of growing public outcry against plans to build several of the computing facilities in the borough of about 7,500 people. 

About 200 local residents showed up for the March 27 special meeting held at 1 p.m., many wearing yellow shirts, to register their opposition to the projects, according to local news reports. The crowd erupted in applause after Tamara Misewicz-Healey, a leader of the local movement calling for stricter data center zoning limits, listed a series of arguments for the council to deny Provident Realty Advisors permission to build the proposed computing cluster of 18 buildings, known as Archbald 1 LLC. 

“I’ve never heard roars like this except for a basketball game,” said newly appointed Archbald Borough Council President Louis Rapoch (R), seated with other council members in an old gymnasium on the third floor of Archbald Borough Building.

Archbald Borough Council had hastily convened the March 27 vote, after it was legally required to cancel a March 23 public hearing on the project after the local newspaper made an error in printing a notice of it.

Since Provident Realty Advisors did not agree to reschedule the March 23 hearing, Archbald needed to vote on the project by the close of business on March 27, or the data center zoning application would have been automatically approved, in line with provisions under Pennsylvania state law.

At the March 27 special meeting, residents questioned the Texas-based developer’s decision not to reschedule the hearing, where it had planned to present further information about the project, and locals were due to speak about their concerns over its potential impacts.

“This doesn’t quite fit the ‘good neighbor’ rhetoric we continue to be fed,” said Archbald resident Janessa Bednash during the public comments section of the meeting.

Residents also voiced concerns over noise, air, and light pollution, potential falls in property values, destruction of wildlife habitat, and the project’s demands for water and power.

“Is this development or is this exploitation?” Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan (D), who has called for a three-year statewide moratorium on new data center approvals, asked at the meeting.

Archbald resident Larry West cited a March 11 DeSmog investigation that revealed how borough officials had worked with developers, including Provident Realty Advisors, to draft new zoning regulations to pave the way for data centers. The rules were passed on November 24 last year by Archbald Borough Council in a 5-2 vote.

The findings in the DeSmog investigation, which followed months of local outcry against data centers, prompted Archbald residents to launch a petition demanding local officials resign. Archbald Borough previously defended the process used to rewrite zoning rules for data centers, saying that they had not ceded to blanket provisions sought by developers, and that a new provision allowed the borough council to have final say in voting on proposed data centers. 

Amid increasing public pressure over its stance on data centers, Archbald Borough Council voted to change its leadership at a March 18 council meeting, with Rapoch — who was one of three new members to join the council earlier this year — taking over Dave Moran’s role as council president. 

Moran was absent from the March 27 data center vote, as was Richard Guman (D), who voted for the highly contested November 24 zoning amendment.

Provident Realty Advisors did not immediately respond to questions about whether it would appeal Archbald Borough’s decision, or attempt to pursue its project under a previous October 2025 zoning application, which did not require a special vote for approval. The developers’ initial application included 22 buildings across two sites, but was restricted by height and sound parameters in line with the borough’s zoning rules at that time.

Archbald is expected to vote on two more data center projects in the coming weeks and months — among five announced in the borough in 2025 across six sites — making it one of the most hotly contested municipalities for data centers in the country.

The post Pennsylvania Town Votes Buzzer-Beater ‘No’ on Data Center Mega-Project appeared first on DeSmog.

The BBC has been accused of creating “propaganda films” for Saudi Arabia, the state behind the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, DeSmog and The Guardian can reveal.

The broadcaster has accepted money to produce a series of “glossy” films on behalf of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is controlled by Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

The content was made by BBC StoryWorks, a studio that produces videos, podcasts, and articles paid for by commercial clients, which it publishes on BBC channels outside the UK. 

BBC StoryWorks boasts on its website that it leverages the reputation of the BBC – “our century-long pedigree as the world’s most trusted storytellers” – to create content for corporations.

However, critics have slammed the broadcaster for “bolstering the reputation” of a regime that is a “proven killer of journalists”.

A version of this article has been published by The Guardian.

“The BBC’s existence depends on its reputation as an unbiased and reliable news outlet that is beholden to no one, and pursues the truth without fear or favour,” said Patrick Howse, the BBC’s former Baghdad bureau chief. “The airing of glossy propaganda films at major junctions seriously undermines that.”

The BBC-produced content sells Saudi Arabia as “a country redefining itself in a bold new era” through PIF’s “truly inspiring” investments, including in clean energy and environmental protection.

In October 2018, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of Saudi Arabia’s government, was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A report by United Nations special rapporteur Agnes Callamard in June 2019 concluded that the Saudi Arabian state was responsible, while U.S. intelligence agencies stated that Mohammed bin Salman had personally ordered the killing – a claim the Saudi ruler has denied.

According to Human Rights Watch, a PIF-controlled airline owned the two planes used by Saudi agents to travel to Istanbul before they murdered Khashoggi.

“There can be no moral justification for any part of the BBC to create promotional content for the Saudi regime,” said Mic Wright, author of Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t and Why it Matters. “It is a country that has shown itself to be opposed – fatally so – to the principles of free and honest journalism. It is absolutely disgusting to see the corporation’s commercial arm taking money from a regime that is a proven killer of journalists.”

PIF – a trillion-dollar investment vehicle – has also been accused of committing “serious human rights violations”, including forcibly evicting residents and razing neighbourhoods to pave the way for PIF projects, mistreating migrant workers, and silencing dissent.

This includes allegations that Saudi Arabia permitted the use of lethal force to clear land for PIF’s “Neom” project – as revealed by the BBC.

However, BBC StoryWorks has failed to acknowledge these facts when producing content for PIF – stating that Neom could “propel the Kingdom ahead in the future” and that it is “reshaping and catalysing numerous industries.”

The BBC films also promote the green credentials of Saudi Arabia, a petrostate reliant on fossil fuels for roughly 40 percent of its economic output. They feature PIF project employees boasting of hiring “people who are passionate and knowledgeable about the environment”.

The content also accurately states that “The world is facing the challenge of a fast transition from fossil fuels to reliable, affordable and clean energy alternatives,” yet neglects to mention that Saudi’s state oil company Aramco plans to increase its gas output by 80 percent by 2030 and is estimated to be responsible for more than 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1965.

“PIF investments are an important tool of Saudi soft power and influence, and are used to whitewash Saudi government abuses,” said Joey Shea of Human Rights Watch.

“Through its investments, the PIF seeks to garner uncritical foreign support for MBS’s agenda, spread disinformation about the country’s rights record, neutralise scrutiny, silence critics, and undermine institutions seeking transparency and accountability.

“Businesses should refrain from activities that would bolster the reputation of government entities or officials recently and credibly accused of serious abuses.”

A BBC Studios spokesperson said: “BBC News maintains clear separation between its commercial and editorial departments and our journalists continue to report rigorously, impartially and without fear or favour on all issues, with no consideration of wider commercial relationships.”

PIF was approached for comment.

Petrostates and Polluters

BBC StoryWorks content appears outside the UK on the BBC website – the most viewed news platform in the world – and on its non-UK broadcast channels, with a disclaimer that it has been paid for by an external organisation.

BBC Commercial – which includes StoryWorks – generated £2.2 billion for the broadcaster in 2024/25, a 20 percent increase on the previous year. The BBC has been looking for new sources of funding as the number of people paying the licence fee dwindles.

Over recent years, BBC StoryWorks has regularly produced content for major polluters and some of the world’s leading fossil fuel states, many of which have a poor record on human rights and press freedom. 

This has included the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – a petrostate that, like Saudi Arabia, continues to arrest and imprison those who speak out against its monarchic rulers. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have long been known for their oppression of women. Although some restrictions – such as on the right of women to drive – have been lifted in Saudi Arabia, the male guardianship system is still in place and has faced serious criticism from human rights groups.

“Saudi Arabia is pouring billions into cultural and entertainment projects to polish its global image, but its human rights record remains deeply alarming. These glossy ventures risk distracting from ongoing abuses inside the Kingdom,” said Felix Jakens, Amnesty International UK’s head of campaigns.

“Reports that PIF may help finance the BBC raise serious concerns about the risk of soft-power influence and perceived conflicts of interest. Even the appearance of financial ties to governments with troubling human rights records risks undermining its credibility and opening the door to reputational pressure.

“The BBC’s credibility depends on reporting without fear or favour. That trust cannot be for sale, and it must not be compromised by any investment that risks rewriting a human rights record.”

BBC StoryWorks has also worked for other repressive regimes, including China. Deadline reported in December 2022 that BBC StoryWorks had partnered with at least nine Chinese state-affiliated bodies, including a media outlet banned from broadcasting in the UK. 

Critics say that BBC StoryWorks is using the broadcaster’s reputation to make money from commercial content that often flouts its editorial values.

“The BBC is an extremely well-recognised and trusted brand, but close association with repressive regimes endangers that,” Howse said. “The BBC is a huge asset to the UK, and it needs to be properly funded, so that it is not reliant on advertising money from countries that have no regard for democratic values or for the protection of the environment.”

An investigation by DeSmog and Drilled previously revealed that many of the world’s most trusted English-language news outlets regularly promote the fossil fuel industry’s narratives on climate-related topics. Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and the Washington Post all have internal commercial studios that have created advertising content for fossil fuel firms.

The post BBC Under Fire for Producing Paid ‘Propaganda’ for Saudi Arabia appeared first on DeSmog.