AMY GOODMAN: It’s Climate Week here in New York as world leaders arrive in the city for the U.N. General Assembly. This year, Climate Week comes after months of extreme heat in North America and Europe, wildfires in Africa, flash flooding in Asia and a record-breaking El Niño.

Today, community leaders fighting AI data centers are gathering outside Amazon headquarters in Manhattan to protest the links between expanding AI and climate chaos, even as President Trump has called artificial intelligence a hoax. Amazon signed a climate pledge in 2019, promising to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, but it’s now building out a natural gas-burning power plant as part of a huge data center in Texas that could become one of the largest sources of climate pollution in the United States.

We’re going to take on this issue today on the show. We’ll also be speaking with Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, and we’ll talk about a new film on Paulo Freire. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Juan González in Chicago. Hi, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy, and welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on Climate Week here in New York, we’re joined by two guests. Bill McKibben is co-founder of 350.org and founder of Third Act. He writes the Substack The Crucial Years, and his latest book is titled Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. Kavita Sthanumurthy is a former software engineer at Amazon and a member of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

We’re going to talk about this major climate protest in front of Amazon today, but first, Bill McKibben, lay out what this week is all about — climate activists from around the world have come in — and why it’s done in conjunction with the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, with leaders around the world also coming in.

BILL McKIBBEN: This has been many years now that this week in September has been Climate Week in New York. And I think the theory is that perhaps the leaders of the world might like to take action on the single greatest threat that our species has ever faced. That part of the equation hasn’t worked out so well over the years. It’s been a while since the U.N. has really done very much to advance the climate movement. But it’s become the place where people gather to plot strategy for the year ahead. And, of course, this year it really is inflected by this new emerging threat on so many fronts, including the energy and climate one, AI, that Kavita has done so much to dramatize in recent months.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill, I wanted to ask you — the European Union’s climate agency last month said that last month was the planet’s hottest month ever recorded. An estimated 35,000 people died in heat waves in Germany, France and Spain this summer. Can you talk about the significance of this, especially in light of the fact that we still have a president who claims climate change is a hoax?

BILL McKIBBEN: Juan, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The next 14, 18 months are going to be not just the hottest that Europe’s ever seen, but the hottest that our species has ever seen. I was writing yesterday about the latest data from the center of the Pacific, where temperatures are now higher than they were at the absolute peak of the strongest El Niño that we’ve ever measured, and it’s got a couple more months to keep on growing. The effects are going to be chaos in Europe, in — well, in the Himalayas, where we got to watch the appalling pictures of lives swept away as glaciers start collapsing on the world’s third pole, but all over the world.

That this coincides with the reign of a person as idiotically foolish as President Trump is a great sadness and a great catastrophe, mostly because it also coincides with the moment when we could be making extraordinary gains. All of a sudden, we have a tool in this fight: cheap energy from the sun and the wind that’s easily scalable, that helps people at the most basic level everywhere, that offers us a way not to stop global warming — too late for that — but a way to blunt its worst excesses. And the fact that our president is campaigning against the use of clean energy at all times is something that should make — well, I mean, we all have plenty of reason to be embarrassed as Americans at the moment, but this is near the top of the list.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mentioned this, the renewable energy, but the critics are always claiming — they’re putting out misinformation that solar and wind power are intermittent, that they can face disruption. But as we’ve seen, the fossil fuel that powers much of the energy around the world is also subject, especially with these thousands of miles of supply chains, to constant disruptions in that supply chain.

BILL McKIBBEN: Juan, the line I’ve been using the last few months is that sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. This is — should be a breakout moment for these technologies, and around the rest of the world, it is. The key thing that’s happening now, if the last five years were about sun and wind, the next five years are about batteries, above all. And they convert sun and wind into firm baseload power. They’re precisely the kind of thing that places like Texas are developing in huge numbers, which makes it all the more ironic that the tech overlords planning our AI future can’t think of anything more interesting to do than burn a lot of 18th-century gas and oil.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Kavita Sthanumurthy into this conversation, a former software engineer at Amazon, a member of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. You’re here in New York. Both Kavita, you, and Bill McKibben will be speaking, along with others, outside Amazon headquarters in New York today. Why are you — how are you connecting this to Climate Week?

KAVITA STHANUMURTHY: Yeah, thank you for having me here today.

I’m really excited to bring the perspective of workers who are fighting against Amazon’s greenwashing, quite frankly. Amazon is able to make these ridiculous claims that they are 100% renewable, and in the same breath create massive data centers like the one we’re seeing in Pecos, Texas, with 35 gas turbines. And the way that they are doing this is by lobbying groups like the Science Based Targets initiative and lowering standards so that they can buy renewable energy credits and basically pay to offset these massive fossil fuel-based data centers and, you know, have it powered by solar that’s happening maybe in a solar farm in Arizona, but that does not offset the gas that’s being burned in Texas at night. And so, you know, we are really concerned that this company is getting to write the rules, and I think that should frighten us all.

AMY GOODMAN: There was a protest in front of OpenAI yesterday here in New York; tomorrow, Google. Today, you’ll be there at Amazon. And you say, while we hear a lot about OpenAI and Anthropic, Amazon is the heart and the funder of it all. What do you mean?

KAVITA STHANUMURTHY: Exactly. And so, you know, Amazon is at the heart of this AI buildout. They’re pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI and Anthropic. At the same time, they’re spending billions of dollars, primarily in data center infrastructure buildout, for a technology that the American people, quite frankly, are not asking for. And a worker shared with me that Amazon is developing AI in order to do the jobs of roles like executive assistants and technical project managers. So, not only is it, you know, taking us back to the days of fossil fuels and building that out, but it is — you know, it’s not a leap to say that Amazon is looking to replace these jobs, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Kavita, can you talk about the fact that Amazon publicly claims that it’s using 100% renewable energy for its electricity?

KAVITA STHANUMURTHY: Exactly. And so, you know, a few years ago, when Amazon made that claim that they are 100% powered by renewable energy, we laughed, right? Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, we did our own independent research and found that it was closer to 22%. And the way that they were doing that was through those renewable energy credits that I talked about. And so, what you have is Amazon and these Big Tech companies lobbying and basically bullying these standards so that they are able to make these ridiculous claims.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re also deeply concerned about Amazon Web Services, the Department of Homeland Security recently awarding them a $2.6 billion contract to provide cloud services at the agency. Talk about how Amazon fits into the immigrant crackdown in this country.

KAVITA STHANUMURTHY: Yeah, Amazon Web Services proudly displays its partnerships with groups like Palantir, and they have hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts with ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. And we can directly see the way that they are aiding this military surveillance state. In 2021, they signed Project Nimbus, which allows the Israeli government to surveil all aspects of Palestinian life and continue their illegal occupation and genocide.

And workers are really concerned about this. Over 1,200 workers signed on to a letter saying that Amazon needs to stop providing solutions for mass deportation, mass surveillance and war, and that Amazon needs to build data centers with 24/7 energy so that we’re not falling into these traps of building fossil fuel, and, lastly, that we need workers’ voices in the room and communities, because, you know, Amazon and all of these other places like to say they’re democratically building these solutions, but what is democratic when they hide behind a nondisclosure agreement or a shell company? I just don’t see how they’re enacting any of these values.