On Sept. 21, President Donald Trump responded to growing public concern about artificial intelligence with a Truth Social post that dragged climate denial into the debate. He published it on the first day of Climate Week NYC.

Trump wrote: “The same people that said, ‘We’ll all be dead in twelve years because of Global Warming,’ a name since ‘reborn’ to Climate Change, because the Planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead, are the people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us, that robots are going to attack us, and everything is a DISASTER.”

The timing was especially revealing. Trump reframed concerns about AI as another supposed false alarm while dismissing climate science along the way.

At Climate Week, meanwhile, corporations promoted AI as a potential climate solution. Chip maker Nvidia highlighted uses of its products involving operational improvements at a nuclear power plant and energy storage projects using old batteries.

Josh Parker, Nvidia’s head of sustainability, expanded on that argument Wednesday during an interview with The New York Times. He said AI could deliver emissions reductions in transportation, manufacturing and buildings that would outweigh its climate footprint.

Taken together, those messages reveal an evolving discourse that combines climate denial with technological optimism. Neither approach provides an honest accounting of what AI is doing now.

Trump was dismissing fears that superintelligent computers could eventually kill people. Yet the more immediate concerns involve AI’s enormous demands for water, electricity and investor dollars.

A paper published in a Nature journal in August offered a sobering assessment. It found that increased carbon emissions from powering AI data centers and using AI to optimize fossil fuel production far exceeded savings from AI applications involving clean energy.

The paper’s coauthors include Will Alpine and Holly Alpine, a couple who previously worked on AI at Microsoft. They later founded the nonprofit Enabled Emissions Campaign, which pushes technology companies to acknowledge how AI can increase fossil fuel use.

Their findings align with statements from the International Energy Agency. The organization has said AI’s potential climate benefits remain on the horizon, while consequences such as increased electricity demand from data centers will arrive sooner.

Holly Alpine described the corporate messaging bluntly: “What we’re seeing at Climate Week is a familiar pattern: companies spotlighting a handful of clean energy pilot projects while the overwhelming majority of AI’s actual applications are aimed at increasing fossil fuel extraction and production,” she said in an email. “Nvidia’s post is a good example—highlighting a renewable energy partnership is easy and photogenic, while conveniently omitting how much AI is being deployed to find, extract, and produce more oil and gas.”

The standard should not be complicated. If AI were mostly powered by clean sources and its beneficial climate applications outweighed its harmful ones, companies would not need to present such a selective picture.

Independent researcher Jonathan Koomey, who has studied data centers for decades, is similarly wary of companies advertising AI’s climate benefits without acknowledging the risks. He recently discussed the difficulty of forecasting the data center boom during a speech in Columbus, Ohio.

“Projecting short-term trends for even 10 or 12 years is a recipe for disaster, in my experience,” Koomey said.

Koomey emphasized that the scale of the boom remains uncertain. One especially damaging scenario would see utilities build new power plants for anticipated data centers that never materialize, leaving households and businesses to absorb the costs through utility bills.

He said regulators and lawmakers should protect consumers. For now, the rush to build data centers has pushed developers toward some of the least efficient and most expensive power technologies, including natural gas combustion turbines.

“It’s madness,” Koomey said, noting that many of the turbines are essentially jet engines intended for short term use. “No sane [utility] would buy electricity from combustion turbines running 24-7. It just wouldn’t happen.”

Eventually, Koomey said, economic gravity will take over. Data centers must recover their development costs and determine how much customers are actually prepared to pay.

That reality bears little resemblance to Trump’s all caps defense of AI or corporate promises that the technology will rescue the climate. It also suggests an industry downturn may be approaching.

Trump’s reference to everyone being dead within 12 years likely concerns coverage of a 2018 report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report said the world had 12 years to reduce emissions enough to avoid a temperature threshold associated with severe heat and drought.

No credible climate scientist said everyone would be dead by 2030 because of climate change. Trump’s version is not a correction of a climate hoax, but another distortion used to wave away legitimate concerns about both climate change and AI.