What the report is
On April 28, 2026, Kairos Fellowship -- a tech-justice campaign organization, not the nuclear startup of the same name -- released a primer titled "Big Tech's False Solutions to the Climate Crisis." The document was written for climate campaigners and tech-justice organizers, in partnership with Stand.earth and Honor the Earth, and is hosted on the campaign site noclimateresultsfound.com.
The core argument is short and direct. Big Tech companies are accelerating the climate crisis through the energy demand of generative AI and the data centers that train and run it. Instead of slowing that buildout, the industry is selling three "solutions" that allow it to keep growing while claiming environmental progress. All three, the report argues, are scams.
The three false solutions: nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and AI itself.
False solution #1: Nuclear power
Big Tech has spent the last 18 months propping up nuclear as a "carbon-free" power source for AI. Microsoft signed a deal to reopen Three Mile Island, the site of a 1979 partial meltdown. Amazon committed more than 500 million dollars to small modular reactors. Google has agreements with three U.S. nuclear sites and signed a purchasing agreement with NextEra to reboot a shuttered Iowa plant.
The report's case against nuclear is built on receipts, not just policy preference. The most recent reactor to come online in the U.S. -- Plant Vogtle in Georgia, completed in 2024 -- took 15 years to build and cost 35 billion dollars, both roughly double what was originally projected. The original contractor declared bankruptcy mid-construction. To pay for it, every Georgia Power customer is now seeing their bill increase by 23.7 percent. The cost of new energy projects to serve Big Tech, the report notes, is almost never paid by the tech companies driving the demand.
The small modular reactor pitch -- the "safer, faster" pivot Big Tech now leans on -- is, per the report, speculative: SMRs have never been successfully produced at commercial scale.
False solution #2: Carbon capture and storage
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the industry's other escape hatch: the promise that emissions can be sucked back out of the air, or pumped into the ground, instead of avoided. The report's framing of the problem is sharp. Carbon pumped underground is, in practice, often used to extract more oil -- a process called enhanced oil recovery -- which ends up emitting more carbon than it stores. Even projects that don't end up serving fossil-fuel extraction have failed repeatedly and consumed billions of taxpayer dollars without delivering verifiable emissions reductions.
In the data-center context, CCS is increasingly being attached to natural-gas power plants built specifically to serve hyperscale campuses. The report argues this pairing is a way to keep building gas plants -- and to keep claiming climate credit -- without actually reducing emissions.
False solution #3: AI itself
The third false solution is the loudest one: the claim, repeated by Sam Altman and others, that AI will eventually solve the climate crisis. The report quotes Altman directly on the "astounding triumphs" he believes are coming. It then quotes Google's own 2024 environmental report: "As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment."
That is Google saying the same thing the critics are: AI's energy footprint is growing faster than the industry can decarbonize. Climate-harming applications of AI -- including its use by oil and gas companies to optimize fossil-fuel extraction -- are happening now and verifiable. The climate-saving applications, by contrast, are still hypothetical.
The report's framing: "Its 'help' is hypothetical, but its harms to our planet, our health, and our communities are very real."
What Kairos says actually works
The closing section is what makes the report useful as an organizing document, not just a critique. It calls for a just transition off fossil fuels via two specific moves: sharply cutting industrial energy use, and equitably deploying wind and solar to meet what remains.
Its four explicit policy demands map cleanly onto fights communities are already running:
1. Mandate AI and data-collection opt-outs for consumers. 2. Mandate transparency in algorithmic decision-making, AI training, and tech-infrastructure deals with localities. 3. End state and municipal subsidies (the report calls them "handouts") for data centers. 4. Require tech companies to meet renewable-energy, water-use, and community-benefit requirements for their infrastructure.
The third demand is the one most directly connected to the projects we track. Every property tax abatement, every sales tax exemption on construction materials, every electric franchise fee carve-out, every Industrial Revenue Bond ceiling -- those are the specific "handouts" Kairos is asking organizers to end.
If you're already fighting a project in your community, the report is short, footnoted, and free. The PDF is linked in the sources below.
One thing the report itself doesn't lead with, but the campaign that hosts it does: this is a Google petition. "No Climate Results Found" -- the campaign site distributing the report -- frames the entire push around a single demand that Google take meaningful climate action and stop using nuclear, carbon capture, and AI hype as cover for its rising emissions. The petition lives at noclimateresultsfound.com. If you read the PDF and find it persuasive, signing the petition is the action the campaign asks for.