OpenAI’s New Energy Chief Is a Trump Administration Natural Gas Evangelist

As artificial intelligence company OpenAI plans its rapid construction of behemoth power-guzzling data centers to fuel the AI boom, it has hired a new energy chief — an official from the first Trump administration who is a dedicated champion of natural gas.
 
John McCarrick, the company’s new head of Global Energy Policy, was a senior energy policy adviser in the first Trump administration’s Bureau of Energy Resources in the State Department under former Secretaries Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo.
 
As deputy assistant secretary for Energy Transformation and the special envoy for International Energy Affairs, McCarrick promoted exports of American liquefied natural gas to Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and advocated for Asian countries to invest in natural gas.

The choice to hire McCarrick matches the intentions of OpenAI’s Trump-dominating CEO Sam Altman, who said in a U.S. Senate hearing in May that “in the short term, I think [the future of powering AI] probably looks like more natural gas.”

It also aligns with the company’s early moves toward powering new data centers, huge warehouses full of linked-up computers that require enormous quantities of water and electricity, to run with gas. OpenAI’s Stargate Project site in Texas, which is slated to become one of the largest data center sites in the world, is already installing off-grid gas turbines to power its operations.

“Big Tech’s collusion with the Trump administration’s fossil fuel agenda for artificial intelligence is evident in their massive investment in methane gas power infrastructure — as well as pro-gas political operatives like McCarrick,” Tyson Slocum, director of the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen’s Energy Program, said.
 
The “solution” of powering AI with gas is part of Trump’s AI energy policy platform. In a July speech to announce a $96 billion AI and energy funding package, Trump lauded fossil fuel and coal-powered data center development while flanked by oil and gas executives.
 
By installing gas turbines to power its data centers, OpenAI has joined a growing cadre of tech giants, including Meta, xAI, and Microsoft, that have begun installing gas-powered generators at their data center sites to meet the surging energy demands of the supercomputer complexes.
 
OpenAI has additionally chosen not to disclose the carbon footprint of ChatGPT-5, its most advanced AI model to date, although researchers told the Guardian that it uses “a significantly larger amount of energy” than responses from GPT-40. The company, which is rapidly expanding internationally, has not formally announced climate or sustainability targets.
 
Altman has also said that he believes artificial intelligence will solve climate change, even though the technology’s voracious, ever-expanding demand for electricity poses a serious threat to net-zero targets worldwide.
 
“I don’t want to say this, because climate change is so serious and so hard of a problem,” Altman said in a 2023 interview. “But I think once we have a really powerful superintelligence, addressing climate change will not be particularly difficult for a system like that.”
 
As Altman’s energy pick, McCarrick has a long history of hawking oil and gas. Previously, McCarrick advised on energy policy for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. At the time, Romney, who did not mention climate change in his energy platform, advocated for the U.S. to ramp up coal and other forms of fossil fuel production.
 
Even earlier, as a senior energy policy adviser for the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008, McCarrick claimed to be the source of its “‘all of the above’ energy strategy” in his LinkedIn profile.

At a campaign rally in 2008, vice presidential candidate and then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin adopted the phrase, announcing: “John [McCain] and I will adopt the all of the above approach,” she said, listing a variety of cleaner energy sources before adding, “we’ll develop clean coal technology, and we’ll drill for the billions of barrels of oil and that we have right now warehoused underground including our resources offshore. We will drill here and drill now — and here’s where you chant. ‘Drill, baby, drill.’”

Hiring a former member of Trump’s team aligns OpenAI even more closely with the current Trump administration.

OpenAI’s CEO Altman already donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration fund. He also accompanied Trump to the U.K. in September for the president’s second state visit where Trump announced the U.S.-U.K. Technology Prosperity Deal.
 
Altman’s history with climate deniers goes back to the roots of his career. His mentor is Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and CEO of data analytics software giant Palantir, who has a history of climate denialist statements. Thiel is also a longtime Trump donor, having given at least $1.75 million to Trump campaigns from 2016 to 2020. 

The Palantir CEO has claimed climate science is “fake science,” has called climate activist Greta Thunberg the “Antichrist” and has funded a science journal that publishes climate denial.

In 2022, Altman also donated over $32,000 to climate denier Michael Shellenberger’s failed campaign for governor of California.

Shellenberger has made extensive claims denying the severity of climate change, including that “humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction,’” that “the Amazon is not ‘the lungs of the world’” and that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse.”

Shellenberger is well known for his advocacy for nuclear energy. When he announced his run for governor on the Joe Rogan podcast, he argued that “nuclear power is the future.”

Shellenberger’s views on nuclear power align with Altman’s own long-held positions on energy. In a 2015 post on Altman’s personal website, he argued, “The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy.”
 
Altman then expressed doubt as to the energy sources of our own era: “I am unsure how the majority of the 21st century will be powered,” he wrote.

If John McCarrick has his way, it appears the answer to Altman’s lack of surety is — gas. McCarrick appears to be a speaker at the North American Gas Forum in Washington, D.C., in December.