Drilling Deep: Karen Hao on How Big AI Is Gambling with the Planet’s Chips

Drilling Deep: Karen Hao on How Big AI Is Gambling with the Planet’s Chips

Author: Pushkin Industries March 17, 2026 Duration: 52:31

What is “artificial intelligence”? Is it a fancy technology? A management consulting buzzword? A PR effort to inflate corporate share prices? A political project designed to shape the world more to the liking of the billionaire class? A way to replace needy human workers with machines?

Perhaps it’s all of that—and more. In her groundbreaking book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, award-winning journalist Karen Hao argues that AI—and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it—is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues in Silicon Valley are pursuing, Hao says, is not just corporate power but imperial power. They are building empires. And as history shows, empires are built on resource extraction, particularly the old-fashioned kind: of labor, energy, minerals, land, water.

Seemingly overnight, tech elites’ feel-good climate promises have evaporated, having been seamlessly swapped for slippery promises that so-called “artificial general intelligence” will save the planet for us. Never mind that AGI is a fantastical concept that has no agreed-upon definition, or that, more fundamentally, it appears nowhere close to existing. In Big Tech’s frenzied pursuit of the “hyperscale” AI dominance that evangelists claim will unlock AGI, as well as its expanding alliances with fossil fuel-backed petrostates and authoritarian political movements, the industry has become an increasingly central contributor to the climate crisis.

In an October conversation with Drilled, Hao discussed how Silicon Valley giants appear to be following the oil and gas industry’s playbook of disinformation and deceit; how Altman and OpenAI’s secrecy and disingenuous rhetoric transformed the field of AI research into corporate PR; and why the destructive trajectory of AI scale and commercialization is not inevitable—no matter what its power-hungry proponents would have you believe.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.


There’s a story behind the stalled progress on climate change that goes beyond melting ice and rising seas-it’s a story of deliberate deception. Drilled, from Pushkin Industries, approaches the climate crisis through the lens of investigative true crime. Led by veteran reporter Amy Westervelt and a team of award-winning climate journalists, this podcast meticulously traces how networks of corporate interests and political operatives constructed a decades-long campaign of denial and delay. Each season is a deep forensic examination, pulling on threads of new evidence to unravel systems of disinformation and hidden power. What you’ll hear isn’t just a recap of scientific reports, but a gripping narrative that follows the paper trail, the leaked memos, and the orchestrated efforts that have held meaningful action just out of reach. The result is a compelling and often unsettling listen that reframes our understanding of the past half-century. By treating climate inaction as a crime story, this podcast reveals the human architects and the calculated strategies that brought us here, making complex collusion startlingly clear. Tune in for a masterclass in accountability journalism.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Drilled
Podcast Episodes
Carbon Credit Markets Have a Human Rights Problem [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:43
Drilled global climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani interviews Elisa Morgera, the UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change about Morgera’s latest report on the fundamental shortcomings of credit markets. Posed as a solut…
The Invitation from OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:36
Today we're sharing an episode of OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising. The story of Occupy Wall Street — how it exploded, how it collapsed, and why its lessons may matter more now than ever before — from the voices of activi…
The Climate Movement Fights Back [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:53
In this week's episode Alleen Brown speaks with Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of The Sunrise Movement about being infiltrated by the feds, why fighting authoritarianism is a climate fight, and more. See omnystudio.…
Welcome to "The Spill," Our New Weekly Newscast [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:18
Amy Westervelt, Nina Lakhani and Alleen Brown on the world on fire, how the media is covering the climate crisis, what's happening with the industry as a whole, and how it all relates to rising authoritarianism. The Spil…
Episode 3: The Story of a Decade-Long Investigation [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:30
Alleen could only put together a story like this because she's stayed on the beat for a decade, building relationships and hunting for documents. At the 10-year anniversary of the Standing Rock movement, she gives us a l…
Episode 2: The Real Outside Agitators of Iowa [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:41
The pipeline has been built, the protest camps disbanded, but the fight isn't over. As pipeline opponents set up a new camp in Iowa, the Tiger Swan propagandists follow them, this time with the help of an undercover infi…
Episode 1: North Dakota’s Facebook Mercenaries [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 37:50
As protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline began to grow in North Dakota, a new seemingly grassroots Facebook page emerged. In this episode we meet the hired gun behind it, Robert Rice, who was working for the pipeli…
Welcome to The Propagandist [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 2:18
10 years ago, rural North Dakota became the hub of one of the largest Indigenous-led protests in decades, and one of the largest climate protests ever in U.S. history: Standing Rock. What started as a protest against a p…
Should we mess with nature? | Introducing How We Survive [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 23:48
The climate crisis is escalating. We have to decarbonize our economy, but we’re moving too slowly. So, what’s the backup plan? This season of “How We Survive” is about engineering nature: large-scale interventions that c…