The data doesn't lie. We just gave up on the climate, didn’t we?

NewsAerial photo of coal ash pond at Alabama Power's Miller Steam Plant in Jefferson County, Ala. (Photo by Nelson Brooke, Black Warrior Riverkeeper; Flight by SouthWings)Nelson Brooke, Black Warrior RiverkeeperBy Kyle Whitmire | kwhitmire@al.comThis is an opinion column. We’ve given up on climate change, haven’t we?Alabama’s No. 2 — or at least, it will be soon — and not for football.Generally speaking, when Alabama leads the nation in something, and that thing doesn’t involve college sports or American Idol, it’s a fair bet that thing will be bad.For instance, pollution.For nine years running, Alabama Power’s James H. Miller Jr. Electric Generating Plant northwest of Birmingham has led the nation in greenhouse gas emissions, belching more than 16 million tons of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the air in its most recent EPA numbers.If you feel the urge to laugh, it’s probably the nitrous, which is fine at the dentist, but otherwise bad for the planet.However, news came this week that the Miller Plant might not carry the distinction of the nation’s biggest climate-killing fart machine much longer, but not because of any substantive improvements at the plant. Rather, because a new, even bigger fart machine could soon take the champion title.According to The New York Times, Amazon plans to build a data center to best all data centers in Pecos County, Texas. In good news for the folks nearby, the plant will not strain their electric grids (which really is good news, as Texas’ grid is historically terrible) as the company plans to generate all its power needs onsite with “35 natural-gas turbines to generate up to 7.65 gigawatts of power.”That’s enough juice to power more than 5 million homes.Or one really big data center.The power plant is permitted to dump up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year — about double what the Miller Plant in Alabama put out in its latest annual total, the Times reported.It looks like The Weather Channel — yes, The Weather Channel, which first called out the Miller plant back in 2017 — will have somebody else to pick on.But here’s the thing — Amazon had previously promised not to gunk up the atmosphere. Not just no more than it had to, but not at all.In 2019, the company entered into a voluntary pledge to bring its emissions to net zero by 2040.Maybe the company makes some big swings in the next 14 years, but not nearly as big a shift as it’s making with its Texas development — one that takes it farther in the wrong direction than America’s reigning champion greenhouse gas polluter ever went. Unless someone invents cheap, accessible cold fusion between now and then, Amazon is showing us that its 2019 pledge was never more than a wish, and it was never going to deliver on that promise any sooner than it would broker world peace.File this one next to DEI programs and so many Black Lives Matter messages on company social media accounts. Corporations do not have values, only interests, and the only pledges we should assume they intend to follow through on have names — contracts, civil settlements and consent decrees.Unless it comes at the barrel of government regulation, we should never consider any corporate promise to be anything more than a feeling that will pass as soon as it’s in the company’s best interests to zig where they said they would zag.And yeah, the government isn’t coming to the rescue, either.So maybe it’s time we all made our peace. We’d all better hope the scientists were Chicken Littles, but because whatever the worst-case scenarios are, we’re heading right for them. We were never going to fix this thing. Not with worthless pledges and empty promises. Not with paper straws (that always seem to come with plastic cups). Not with the recycling bins we dutifully rolled to the curb while the Miller plant coughed out more greenhouse gas in an afternoon than our aluminum cans would offset in a lifetime.We are going to muck up this world. We are going to relieve ourselves where we eat, where we drink, where we breathe and where we live.We’re going to put more slop in the air so we can put more slop on the internet.For years Alabama held the title, and now the rest of the country has looked at us and decided we weren’t thinking big enough.Everything is bigger in Texas. Or it will be soon. The water will rise, the storms will grow, and The Weather Channel will never run out of material.Amazon will deliver, all right. Just not the thing it promised.Kyle Whitmire is a columnist for AL.com where he skewers corruption, cruelty, incompetence and hypocrisy while also searching for those righteous folks who stubbornly adhere to their principles and make their...