President Donald Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, sounded like a full-on supervillain when he essentially vowed on Tuesday to steamroll critics opposed to the construction of new data centers.

Ample evidence has shown there is broad, bipartisan opposition to data centers, which can drive up energy costs and pollute surrounding communities. I recently wrote about one such project that has garnered backlash, a proposed data center on the campus of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Wright, who has absurdly claimed that climate change is actually good, is no stranger to making unpopular and noncredible assertions. And that’s important context for his comments at an Amazon Web Services conference this week.

While discussing alternative energy sources, the former Big Oil executive told the audience that the Trump administration is going to do “intelligent things, Amazon-thinking things and data center-thinking things.” He also made the unsubstantiated claim that data centers help lower energy costs, while portraying the administration and Amazon as partners in a fight against critics.

“‘It’s going to take away your jobs and harm your communities’ — these are the things everyone is saying,” Wright said. “And right now, in the polls, they’re winning. They cannot win — and they will not win.”

The energy secretary added that “we will win this argument, just as we did with fracking,” the controversial technique for oil and gas extraction that has been criticized over its environmental impacts. He went on to encourage audience members to go out into their communities and promote the construction of data centers, telling the attendees that if they share their “pride” in data centers, “we’ll roll over the opposition to data centers faster than we otherwise should.”

Only near the end of Wright’s spiel did he acknowledge the reality of data centers’ corrosive impacts.

“Of course, when you create a powerful new tool, we’re going to do a lot of awesome things with it — it’s going to enable some bad things, too,” he said, adding that a lot of the concerns are real but “just overblown.”

How revelatory. The energy secretary reluctantly addressed data centers’ potential threats to everyday Americans, yet he still feels that opponents of these projects need to be steamrolled. It’s just one of many examples showing how the Trump administration serves corporate interests above all else.

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