This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Liam Fitzpatrick’s was packed on a Tuesday in November, and all eyes in the suburban Orlando, Florida, pub were glued to the TVs behind the bar. Fitzpatrick’s usually had sports on, but this was Election Eve 2020, and Republican state Senate candidate Jason Brodeur watched nervously as the results trickled in. This was his election party. Brodeur’s campaign had spent millions of dollars running him for an open seat against the Democratic nominee, a labor attorney, and the race was neck and neck.

But his backers had a secret weapon. Just before the filing deadline, a substitute teacher named Jestine Iannotti had joined the race as an unaffiliated third-party candidate. A political unknown, she didn’t even campaign. The central Florida district was then carpeted with misleading mailers that appealed to liberal values and voters’ distaste for partisan politics—one included a stock photo that seemed to imply that Iannotti, who is white, is a Black woman. If she siphoned off votes from his Democratic rival, Brodeur stood a better chance.

Iannotti was a “ghost candidate,” one with no hope of winning who runs—or is run—specifically as a spoiler. Ghost candidates are legal in Florida—sort of. Any eligible person can run for public office, but the covert financing of ghost campaigns sometimes runs afoul of even that state’s famously lax election laws. State prosecutors would eventually conclude that Iannotti and another ghost candidate who ran in 2020—along with their political consultants—had broken quite a few. (Brodeur claimed ignorance of the scheme, and has faced no legal action as a result, though a local tax collector on trial for unrelated charges would later testify that Brodeur was well aware of it.)

Also at Fitzpatrick’s that night was then-47-year-old Frank Artiles, a burly, foul-mouthed ex-Marine and former Republican state senator. Artiles, who is Cuban American, had resigned his Senate post in disgrace in 2017 after using racial slurs in front of two Black colleagues during a drunken rant. He, too, was fixated on Brodeur’s returns, as well as the results of an even tighter state Senate race in south Miami-Dade.

The latter contest was a slugfest between one of Florida’s highest-profile Democratic lawmakers, José Javier Rodriguez, and Republican Ileana García, founder of Latinas for Trump. It, too, hinged on a ghost candidate: Alex Rodriguez, a down-on-his-luck salesman of used heavy equipment, whose shared surname with the incumbent was no coincidence. Like Iannotti, Rodriguez hadn’t campaigned. He, too, was boosted by a flood of misleading mailers. 

As the final tallies came in, the mood at Fitzpatrick’s turned electric. Brodeur ended up winning his seat by about 7,600 votes. (Iannotti drew nearly 6,000.) In south Miami-Dade, Garcia, the Republican, edged out incumbent José Rodriguez by fewer than 40 votes. Artiles was jubilant. “That was me!” a partygoer recalls him yelling. “That’s all me!”

At a criminal trial this week in Miami, the prosecution may ask the jury to interpret Artiles’ outburst as an admission of guilt. Four months after the election party, the Miami-Dade state attorney charged him and ghost candidate Rodriquez with multiple campaign finance–related felonies. Among other charges, Artiles stands accused of conspiracy, making excessive campaign contributions, and “false swearing” in connection with voting or elections. If found guilty on all counts, he faces up to five years in prison.

In Central Florida, prosecutors issued a multi-count indictment against Iannotti and the two operatives (Eric Foglesong and Ben Paris, chair of the Seminole County Republican Party) who’d arranged for her to run. (A ghost candidate Artiles had recruited for a third state Senate race—a spa owner whose wife regularly waxed Artiles’ back—was not charged.) In 2022, a jury found Paris guilty of interfering in an election by means of an illegal campaign donation—the state recommended 60 days in jail; the judge gave him a year of probation, community service, and a fine. Foglesong, charged with felony and misdemeanor election crimes, avoided possible jail time by pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges, and Iannotti pleaded no contest last month to a pair of first-degree misdemeanors. Artiles maintains his innocence.

And all of the above might have been just another colorful tale of shady politics in the Sunshine State were it not for a spat between political consultants.

Indeed, after the leaders of Matrix LLC, a high-powered political consulting firm whose CEO helped finance the ghost campaigns, started feuding, the story took on a new life, offering something rarer and more consequential: a glimpse, oddly enough, into the political meddling of one of America’s largest power companies.

The source of the leak was never clear, but as the consultants squabbled, thousands of pages of Matrix’s internal documents made it into the hands of Florida news outlets. The revelations therein, and reporting on discovery materials generated by the various prosecutions, would culminate in the abrupt January 2023 retirement of Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, triggering a single-day, $14 billion drop in the company’s market value.

FPL is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the nation’s largest utility conglomerates in terms of homes and businesses served. And although its parent is a major producer of renewable energy, FPL is among Florida’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters. The leaked documents, in any case, showed that FPL was enmeshed in a covert campaign of media manipulation, surveillance, and what one federal securities lawsuit calls electoral “dirty tricks,” all in the name of maximizing profits.

Investigations by Floodlight and other Florida news outlets would reveal that the ghost candidates were bankrolled with some $730,000 in dark money, $100,000 of which was channeled through a prominent Republican operative into a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that Artiles controlled. (Artiles’ attorney, Frank Quintero, disputes that any of that money ever made it to ghost candidate Rodriguez: “The prosecutor can say whatever the fuck he wants, but the reality is different than what he wants it to be.”) The remaining $630,000 made its way through a daisy chain of opaque nonprofits partially overseen by the CEO of Matrix, which was then working for FPL.

From the utility’s perspective, expanding the state Senate’s Republican majority—by whatever means—would help fulfill its legislative priorities. Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

FPL, which declined to comment for this article, prevailed on all counts.

The company has steadfastly denied wrongdoing, although it does not dispute hiring Matrix. “They did good work,” then-CEO Silagy told me in June 2022. During the same interview, he admitted to authoring a January 2019 email about Sen. Rodríguez, wherein Silagy ordered his minions “to make his life a living hell”—a directive that was immediately relayed to Matrix.

The utility claims that two outside law firms, whose investigations FPL commissioned but has never made public, have cleared it of election-related liability or wrongdoing, despite reporting that suggests otherwise. The Orlando Sentinel, for example, reported that Silagy sometimes used an email pseudonym (Theodore Hayes) when communicating with Jeff Pitts, then CEO of Matrix. And a 2022 Federal Election Commission complaint accused five nonprofits linked to Pitts of “direct and serious violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

The complaint, dismissed earlier this year after the partisan six-member commission deadlocked on a party-line vote, cites a memo Pitts sent to Silagy laying out how FPL could channel money covertly through a series of nonprofits and, ultimately, a super-PAC, to fund “‘political activities’ on both the state and federal level.” The complaint alleges that “the effect of this scheme would be to illegally hide the identities of the true source or sources of contributions.”  

“Unfortunately, partisan gridlock and dysfunction has become routine at the FEC, which has only opened four investigations this year,” says Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that filed the complaint. “That means many complaints, even those for which the FEC’s nonpartisan expert staff recommends an investigation, end in partisan gridlock. That’s exactly what happened with our complaint.”

The scenes to follow are based on thousands of pages of documents and more than 50 interviews with various players. In addition to setting the stage for Artiles’ long-delayed trial, they offer a window into how some utility monopolies have chosen to flex their political power, pushing legal boundaries for financial gain, and sometimes thwarting America’s transition to clean energy in the process.

On a Friday evening in late February 2017, 32 NASCAR race-truck drivers squinted under the Daytona International Speedway’s 2,000-watt lights. Their eyes were fixed on state Sen. Frank Artiles, who sported a suede jacket emblazoned with the NextEra logo. He waved a green flag to kick off the 250-mile race, sponsored by NextEra Energy Resources, another NextEra subsidiary, but just two laps in things went awry—a 17-vehicle pile-up that resulted in one of the trucks getting completely totaled.

Your high school English teacher would call this foreshadowing.

Artiles was then serving his first term in the Florida Senate and chairing its energy committee. That is to say, the elected official who controlled the fate of state bills related to energy and the environment was accepting the red-carpet treatment from a utility holding company that routinely had business before his committee.

Such potential conflicts of interest are not unusual in the utility realm. Investor-owned power companies specialize in charming and lobbying legislators and regulators. A captured regulator might approve a higher profit margin for a power company than an adversarial one would. A friendly legislator is more likely to pass favorable laws. Across the nation, utilities are the most active lobbyists on state environmental bills.

Our system “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines.”

What makes the situation especially irksome is that utilities are not normal companies. The firms that provide gas and electricity and send monthly bills to homeowners and businesses are state-sanctioned monopolies. They don’t make money from selling power per se. Rather, like a waiter with guaranteed tips, their profit margins are pre-determined by regulators based on how much they invest in their infrastructure. The more plants and poles and substations a utility builds, the bigger its guaranteed return, which averages about 10 percent nationwide. (FPL’s have run as high as 11.8 percent.) Politicians and regulators, at least in theory, are supposed to act on behalf of consumers and prevent utilities from running up the tab.

The way the system is set up “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog. “No matter how you slice it,” he adds, “they are among the biggest spenders on political influence generally.”

The numbers are staggering. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an energy think tank, investor-owned utilities have given more than $130 million to federal candidates over the past decade and have spent more than $294 million on state political races between 2014 and 2023.

FPL alone donated at least $42 million to Florida lawmakers between June 2013 and June 2023, according to a Floodlight analysis. And that’s just reported donations. Across the nation, from 2014 to 2020, power companies pumped at least $215 million more into politics via 501(c)(4) nonprofits that don’t have to reveal their donors—which is why these funds are referred to as “dark money.”

Utility influence operations have led to a generational resurgence of fraud and corruption in the sector. A recent Floodlight analysis of three decades of corporate prosecutions and federal lawsuits describes malfeasance that has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion over the past 10 years. The costs to the environment and the energy transition are also steep. Utilities in Ohio struck a corrupt bargain with prominent state lawmakers—some of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison—to prop up failing coal and nuclear plants. Utilities in Arizona were investigated by the FBI for using dark money to elect energy regulators who slashed rooftop solar incentives, though no charges have been filed.

Artiles’ Daytona junket didn’t break any laws, but the optics weren’t great. He’d flown in on a private plane that belonged to his campaign treasurer—an FPL lobbyist. The night of the NASCAR race, he took in $10,000 in contributions at a fundraiser in his honor, where he rubbed shoulders with Keanu Reeves. The next day, he visited Disney’s Epcot Center as the guest of John Holley, FPL’s top in-house lobbyist. “It was an honor to be there,” Artiles told the Miami Herald after the news got out. “I’m not going to lie to you. It was cool.”

After returning to Tallahassee, Artiles fast-tracked two bills coveted by FPL.

But like the truck totaled during that second lap at Daytona, the freshman senator’s tenure would be short-lived. About a month after the FPL junket, Artiles got into an argument with two Black fellow senators at a private club near the state Capitol, berating them and using the n-word. The Senate president made Artiles stand and apologize to his colleagues, after which Artiles walked straight out of the chamber and into a gaggle of reporters, shedding his conciliatory tone like a football player doffing sweaty pads. This prompted the legislative Black caucus to demand his expulsion. Artiles resigned two days later.

He was out of the Senate, but not the game. In October 2017, Artiles was invited to a lunch meeting with Ryan Tyson, then a leading Republican operative for Associated Industries of Florida, a powerful trade group to which FPL had donated millions. Tyson, a pollster, had done work on issues critical to FPL, and was executive director of Let’s Preserve the American Dream—a nonprofit that would play a key role in the ghost candidate scandal. Alex Alvarado, Tyson’s protégé, set up the lunch, which Tyson says he does not recall attending. Starting that same month, and continuing into 2021, Artiles would receive $5,000 monthly payments from Tyson for “research services” related to Hispanic voters.

After the 2020 election, Tyson and his group came under the scrutiny of the prosecutors. “We waived all privileges and co-operated with the government in its investigation,” he told me recently. “They couldn’t explain to us what they were looking for, but we were nonetheless cooperative.” (Tyson was never charged with wrongdoing.) “This is crazy that this is how law-abiding tax paying cooperative citizens are treated,” he said.

Chuck’s, a fish house in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was bustling on the evening of October 26, 2021, when a former Pat Buchanan staffer named K.B. Forbes arrived for what he thought was dinner with Jeff Pitts, who until recently had been CEO of Matrix.

A few months earlier, Joe Perkins, Matrix’s founder, had sued Pitts, his longtime employee and erstwhile protégé. The suit, which had FPL and two of its executives as “fictitious” (unnamed) co-defendants, basically accused Pitts of running his own firm within the firm, stealing Matrix’s clients and cash, operating a clandestine network of dark money groups, and working for FPL without Perkins’s knowledge. (Pitts, in legal filings, denied all of these claims.)

At first, their split had seemed like an amicable, if unexpected, business divorce. “Joe Perkins flew Jeff Pitts down on his plane to meet with me personally to let me know that they had come to an agreement that they were going to part ways, and it was okay,” Silagy said during our 2022 interview. “And then apparently, somewhere along the way, Jeff and Joe got sideways.”

This much was clear: For a decade, Matrix had been the servant of two masters, working both for Southern Co., the nation’s second-largest utility holding company, and NextEra Energy. But as the partners’ acrimony grew, so did the friction between the energy giants. Forbes, who publishes a blog critical of Alabama Power, a Southern Co. subsidiary, told me he had gone to Chuck’s in the hope of obtaining damaging information about Alabama Power’s CEO, Mark Crosswhite. But the vibe was off, and the conversation awkward.

Pitts “was a nervous wreck,” Forbes recalled. “That’s why, on my blog, I call him Jittery Jeff.”

The lawsuit came at a difficult time for Pitts. His new firm, Canopy Partners, less than a year old, was already drawing law enforcement interest. The Miami-Dade Public Corruption Task Force had obtained sworn testimony from Abigail MacIver, one of Pitts’ co-founders, in exchange for limited immunity from prosecution in the ghost candidate scandal. MacIver laid out how she, Pitts, and a contractor had channeled money from a nonprofit operated by Tyson into political committees controlled by Alvarado, Tyson’s associate, by way of a tax-exempt group Pitts controlled. Those committees paid for the ghost candidate mailers.

Reporting from the Sentinel also tied Pitts’ dark-money network to an FPL-funded campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would have introduced competition into state energy markets and broken FPL’s monopoly. Tyson worked as a pollster on the campaign to counter the initiative. (Neither Pitts nor any Canopy Partners associates have been charged with crimes.)

Pitts is a dapper guy in his early 50s who brings to mind Fred Astaire. He was one of the first employees at Matrix in 1995 and became the director of its Birmingham office in 2009. He enjoys the good life, according to former associates: steak dinners, private flights, expensive wine. But by the time he met with Forbes, his life had grown complicated. “He could not look me in the eye,” Forbes told me, and Pitts wouldn’t stop rubbing the back of his head with his left hand during their dinner: “He was twirling his hair in circles.”

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment.”

Matrix began consulting for NextEra, FPL’s parent, in the early 2010s. Pitts took extraordinary care to conceal his—and FPL’s—involvement in Florida elections. He obscured the money trail by creating multiple layers of subcontractors, shell companies, and 501(c)(4) nonprofits. In one case, he listed the brother of a Matrix subcontractor as the head of several nonprofits in his network, which he registered in faraway states. He preferred in-person conversations to texts or phone calls and hired expensive tax attorneys to advise him on his moves.

FPL was kept apprised of the work. Flight records show that the Matrix company jet made frequent visits to Palm Beach, where the utility is headquartered, and the leaked documents contain lively text and email correspondences between Pitts and its executives. FPL’s public affairs VPs were forwarded drafts of political ads slated to run against candidates they hoped to defeat. The Matrix document trove also included emails between Pitts and Silagy wherein Pitts lists names of dark money nonprofits and political committees to which Silagy could donate. There was also a Matrix invoice seeking reimbursement for incorporating a nonprofit that helped fund the ghost candidate campaigns.

A generation ago, power companies were forced to disclose the names of their consultants and attorneys, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the industry, did away with the rule in 2002. Jon Wellinghoff, FERC’s chairman from 2009 to 2013, told me he regrets not reinstating it. “We didn’t reverse that when I was chairman,” he said, “And we should have. All that should be disclosed. All that should be open to the public and available—information right down to the $100 contribution.”

Pitts didn’t end up staying for dinner at Chuck’s. He got takeout instead, Forbes says, and never forked over the dirt on Alabama Power’s CEO. Neither did Pitts’ attorney, with whom Forbes kept corresponding until he grew too frustrated: “I was livid. I was like, ‘This is a waste of my time.’”

It was opening day of the 2023 session of the Florida Legislature, and the capitol was abuzz. House Speaker Paul Renner presided over his chamber’s opening ceremonies, introducing a dozen former members in attendance. Among them was Frank Artiles, who, despite his legal troubles, had maintained close ties with some of Florida’s Republican power brokers. He would register as a lobbyist that session—for a construction company that paints traffic lanes.

Twenty-nine months had passed since the Fitzpatrick’s election party, and two years since Artiles’ arrest and indictment. Pitts and Perkins had by this time settled their lawsuit, and Silagy had recently taken his leave from FPL.

The utility’s veil of secrecy had been pierced—at least temporarily. Weeks after the meeting between Pitts and Forbes, the first batch of Matrix records arrived at the offices of the Sentinel in an envelope with no return address. The intel consisted of a heavily redacted copy of a nearly 200-page report Perkins had sent to NextEra’s board of directors in November 2021. It detailed Pitts’ allegedly secret work for FPL, efforts ranging from municipal to congressional campaigns, funded by millions in utility cash.

In 2018 alone, the report revealed, Pitts had participated in campaigns against a South Miami mayor who supported rooftop solar, ran ghost candidates against both a Miami-Dade commissioner critical of an FPL nuclear plant and a progressive state Senate candidate in Gainesville, and moved millions of dollars to help defeat Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum, who lost to Ron DeSantis that year by a razor-thin 0.4 percent margin.

Pitts’ work, the report showed, went beyond elections and into acquisitions. In 2019, Pitts had aided in FPL’s failed attempt to acquire the Jacksonville Electric Authority, a city-owned utility whose territory it coveted. His contributions included hiring a private detective to follow a reporter who’d written critically of the proposed sale, running a front group that championed the sale, and enlisting a contractor to offer Garrett Dennis—a Jacksonville councilman seen as unlikely to support the sale—a $250,000-a-year job with the same dark money group, Grow United, that distributed the ghost candidate funds to the other nonprofits. Accepting the position would mean giving up his council seat. (Dennis didn’t bite.)

The leaked records also detailed how Matrix and Pitts had paid at least $900,000 to six pay-to-play news outlets in Florida and Alabama between 2013 and 2020. The outlets, with more than 1.3 million combined monthly viewers, attacked critics and enemies of Southern Co., FPL, and other Matrix clients, though all of them deny that the payments influenced their coverage.

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment,” the attorneys in a federal securities suit filed against NextEra in December 2023 wrote of the revelations. It was one of at least two class-action suits filed against the company since Silagy’s resignation alleging political impropriety.

The proceedings in the shareholder suit have been telling, though perhaps not in the way the plaintiffs would prefer. At a hearing this past May, federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon asked their attorneys to clarify the case against NextEra. “Just so I understand,” she said, “has there been any finding of liability…We talk about, sort of, allegations of wrongdoing and criminality. Can you just pinpoint exactly what would be the crime and has there been any finding of such a crime?”

“Artiles is the victim in this case!” his lawyer told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist.”

Plaintiffs attorney Jeffrey Block responded in the negative.      

“So, I guess, what exactly is wrong that was allegedly done?” Cannon said.      

Her question, albeit unwittingly, broaches a bigger issue, with ramifications far beyond Florida. The IRS and the FEC have generally failed to enforce nonprofit and election laws effectively. At the state level, regulatory boards are easily influenced—and their penalties for breaking the rules, to the extent they are imposed, are often too small to discourage bad behavior.

It is a system that practically invites monopoly power companies and their consultants to exploit every loophole to maximize political leverage and profit—and even, in some cases, to spend money collected from power consumers to lobby for actions that run counter to those ratepayer’s interests. “It’s ludicrous on its face that state-granted monopolies that provide an essential service are allowed to lobby at all. It ought to be unthinkable,” energy expert David Roberts noted during a 2023 discussion of utility corruption on his podcast, Volts.

The notion of a monopoly utility launching a secret effort to field bogus candidates and trick voters would seem all the more unthinkable, and the fact that a federal judge feels compelled to ask what the company is actually alleged to have done wrong is telling.

Back in January, public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen told Cannon he intended to follow the money, although it’s not clear how far up the chain he intends to go. “It’s the money, the payment, that makes this illegal, judge,” he asserted then. The state’s position is, look at all the trouble that they were going through to run…ghost candidates.”

As for Artiles’ alleged ghost candidate activities, “It’s my opinion that this case is politically motivated,” defense attorney Quintero told a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge during a hearing earlier this year. “It’s not just one party that does it. It’s both parties and it’s perfectly legal. Period. End of story.”

The state’s star witness this week is none other than ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who agreed to plead guilty to some charges and testify against Artiles to avoid a possible prison sentence. The defendant’s legal team is attempting to impugn Rodriguez’s character and portray the money that changed hands between the two men as a con. “Artiles is the victim in this case!” Quintero told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist, on loans, on a car Rodriguez sold to him that didn’t exist.”

The jury is expected to decide on the guilt or innocence of Frank Artiles by the end of September. Yet after all the courtroom dramas, feuding consultants, and exposés about the financial subterfuge that enabled the ghost candidates, it remains unclear when, and whether, and to what extent, anyone will ever hold NextEra accountable.

“The system is on trial, because the system enables this kind of conduct,” Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney, told me of Artiles’ trial. “In a fully functioning democracy, this kind of scandal would result in real changes to campaign finance laws. But Florida doesn’t have a fully functioning democracy.”

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Liam Fitzpatrick’s was packed on a Tuesday in November, and all eyes in the suburban Orlando, Florida, pub were glued to the TVs behind the bar. Fitzpatrick’s usually had sports on, but this was Election Eve 2020, and Republican state Senate candidate Jason Brodeur watched nervously as the results trickled in. This was his election party. Brodeur’s campaign had spent millions of dollars running him for an open seat against the Democratic nominee, a labor attorney, and the race was neck and neck.

But his backers had a secret weapon. Just before the filing deadline, a substitute teacher named Jestine Iannotti had joined the race as an unaffiliated third-party candidate. A political unknown, she didn’t even campaign. The central Florida district was then carpeted with misleading mailers that appealed to liberal values and voters’ distaste for partisan politics—one included a stock photo that seemed to imply that Iannotti, who is white, is a Black woman. If she siphoned off votes from his Democratic rival, Brodeur stood a better chance.

Iannotti was a “ghost candidate,” one with no hope of winning who runs—or is run—specifically as a spoiler. Ghost candidates are legal in Florida—sort of. Any eligible person can run for public office, but the covert financing of ghost campaigns sometimes runs afoul of even that state’s famously lax election laws. State prosecutors would eventually conclude that Iannotti and another ghost candidate who ran in 2020—along with their political consultants—had broken quite a few. (Brodeur claimed ignorance of the scheme, and has faced no legal action as a result, though a local tax collector on trial for unrelated charges would later testify that Brodeur was well aware of it.)

Also at Fitzpatrick’s that night was then-47-year-old Frank Artiles, a burly, foul-mouthed ex-Marine and former Republican state senator. Artiles, who is Cuban American, had resigned his Senate post in disgrace in 2017 after using racial slurs in front of two Black colleagues during a drunken rant. He, too, was fixated on Brodeur’s returns, as well as the results of an even tighter state Senate race in south Miami-Dade.

The latter contest was a slugfest between one of Florida’s highest-profile Democratic lawmakers, José Javier Rodriguez, and Republican Ileana García, founder of Latinas for Trump. It, too, hinged on a ghost candidate: Alex Rodriguez, a down-on-his-luck salesman of used heavy equipment, whose shared surname with the incumbent was no coincidence. Like Iannotti, Rodriguez hadn’t campaigned. He, too, was boosted by a flood of misleading mailers. 

As the final tallies came in, the mood at Fitzpatrick’s turned electric. Brodeur ended up winning his seat by about 7,600 votes. (Iannotti drew nearly 6,000.) In south Miami-Dade, Garcia, the Republican, edged out incumbent José Rodriguez by fewer than 40 votes. Artiles was jubilant. “That was me!” a partygoer recalls him yelling. “That’s all me!”

At a criminal trial this week in Miami, the prosecution may ask the jury to interpret Artiles’ outburst as an admission of guilt. Four months after the election party, the Miami-Dade state attorney charged him and ghost candidate Rodriquez with multiple campaign finance–related felonies. Among other charges, Artiles stands accused of conspiracy, making excessive campaign contributions, and “false swearing” in connection with voting or elections. If found guilty on all counts, he faces up to five years in prison.

In Central Florida, prosecutors issued a multi-count indictment against Iannotti and the two operatives (Eric Foglesong and Ben Paris, chair of the Seminole County Republican Party) who’d arranged for her to run. (A ghost candidate Artiles had recruited for a third state Senate race—a spa owner whose wife regularly waxed Artiles’ back—was not charged.) In 2022, a jury found Paris guilty of interfering in an election by means of an illegal campaign donation—the state recommended 60 days in jail; the judge gave him a year of probation, community service, and a fine. Foglesong, charged with felony and misdemeanor election crimes, avoided possible jail time by pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges, and Iannotti pleaded no contest last month to a pair of first-degree misdemeanors. Artiles maintains his innocence.

And all of the above might have been just another colorful tale of shady politics in the Sunshine State were it not for a spat between political consultants.

Indeed, after the leaders of Matrix LLC, a high-powered political consulting firm whose CEO helped finance the ghost campaigns, started feuding, the story took on a new life, offering something rarer and more consequential: a glimpse, oddly enough, into the political meddling of one of America’s largest power companies.

The source of the leak was never clear, but as the consultants squabbled, thousands of pages of Matrix’s internal documents made it into the hands of Florida news outlets. The revelations therein, and reporting on discovery materials generated by the various prosecutions, would culminate in the abrupt January 2023 retirement of Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, triggering a single-day, $14 billion drop in the company’s market value.

FPL is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the nation’s largest utility conglomerates in terms of homes and businesses served. And although its parent is a major producer of renewable energy, FPL is among Florida’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters. The leaked documents, in any case, showed that FPL was enmeshed in a covert campaign of media manipulation, surveillance, and what one federal securities lawsuit calls electoral “dirty tricks,” all in the name of maximizing profits.

Investigations by Floodlight and other Florida news outlets would reveal that the ghost candidates were bankrolled with some $730,000 in dark money, $100,000 of which was channeled through a prominent Republican operative into a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that Artiles controlled. (Artiles’ attorney, Frank Quintero, disputes that any of that money ever made it to ghost candidate Rodriguez: “The prosecutor can say whatever the fuck he wants, but the reality is different than what he wants it to be.”) The remaining $630,000 made its way through a daisy chain of opaque nonprofits partially overseen by the CEO of Matrix, which was then working for FPL.

From the utility’s perspective, expanding the state Senate’s Republican majority—by whatever means—would help fulfill its legislative priorities. Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

FPL, which declined to comment for this article, prevailed on all counts.

The company has steadfastly denied wrongdoing, although it does not dispute hiring Matrix. “They did good work,” then-CEO Silagy told me in June 2022. During the same interview, he admitted to authoring a January 2019 email about Sen. Rodríguez, wherein Silagy ordered his minions “to make his life a living hell”—a directive that was immediately relayed to Matrix.

The utility claims that two outside law firms, whose investigations FPL commissioned but has never made public, have cleared it of election-related liability or wrongdoing, despite reporting that suggests otherwise. The Orlando Sentinel, for example, reported that Silagy sometimes used an email pseudonym (Theodore Hayes) when communicating with Jeff Pitts, then CEO of Matrix. And a 2022 Federal Election Commission complaint accused five nonprofits linked to Pitts of “direct and serious violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

The complaint, dismissed earlier this year after the partisan six-member commission deadlocked on a party-line vote, cites a memo Pitts sent to Silagy laying out how FPL could channel money covertly through a series of nonprofits and, ultimately, a super-PAC, to fund “‘political activities’ on both the state and federal level.” The complaint alleges that “the effect of this scheme would be to illegally hide the identities of the true source or sources of contributions.”  

“Unfortunately, partisan gridlock and dysfunction has become routine at the FEC, which has only opened four investigations this year,” says Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that filed the complaint. “That means many complaints, even those for which the FEC’s nonpartisan expert staff recommends an investigation, end in partisan gridlock. That’s exactly what happened with our complaint.”

The scenes to follow are based on thousands of pages of documents and more than 50 interviews with various players. In addition to setting the stage for Artiles’ long-delayed trial, they offer a window into how some utility monopolies have chosen to flex their political power, pushing legal boundaries for financial gain, and sometimes thwarting America’s transition to clean energy in the process.

On a Friday evening in late February 2017, 32 NASCAR race-truck drivers squinted under the Daytona International Speedway’s 2,000-watt lights. Their eyes were fixed on state Sen. Frank Artiles, who sported a suede jacket emblazoned with the NextEra logo. He waved a green flag to kick off the 250-mile race, sponsored by NextEra Energy Resources, another NextEra subsidiary, but just two laps in things went awry—a 17-vehicle pile-up that resulted in one of the trucks getting completely totaled.

Your high school English teacher would call this foreshadowing.

Artiles was then serving his first term in the Florida Senate and chairing its energy committee. That is to say, the elected official who controlled the fate of state bills related to energy and the environment was accepting the red-carpet treatment from a utility holding company that routinely had business before his committee.

Such potential conflicts of interest are not unusual in the utility realm. Investor-owned power companies specialize in charming and lobbying legislators and regulators. A captured regulator might approve a higher profit margin for a power company than an adversarial one would. A friendly legislator is more likely to pass favorable laws. Across the nation, utilities are the most active lobbyists on state environmental bills.

Our system “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines.”

What makes the situation especially irksome is that utilities are not normal companies. The firms that provide gas and electricity and send monthly bills to homeowners and businesses are state-sanctioned monopolies. They don’t make money from selling power per se. Rather, like a waiter with guaranteed tips, their profit margins are pre-determined by regulators based on how much they invest in their infrastructure. The more plants and poles and substations a utility builds, the bigger its guaranteed return, which averages about 10 percent nationwide. (FPL’s have run as high as 11.8 percent.) Politicians and regulators, at least in theory, are supposed to act on behalf of consumers and prevent utilities from running up the tab.

The way the system is set up “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog. “No matter how you slice it,” he adds, “they are among the biggest spenders on political influence generally.”

The numbers are staggering. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an energy think tank, investor-owned utilities have given more than $130 million to federal candidates over the past decade and have spent more than $294 million on state political races between 2014 and 2023.

FPL alone donated at least $42 million to Florida lawmakers between June 2013 and June 2023, according to a Floodlight analysis. And that’s just reported donations. Across the nation, from 2014 to 2020, power companies pumped at least $215 million more into politics via 501(c)(4) nonprofits that don’t have to reveal their donors—which is why these funds are referred to as “dark money.”

Utility influence operations have led to a generational resurgence of fraud and corruption in the sector. A recent Floodlight analysis of three decades of corporate prosecutions and federal lawsuits describes malfeasance that has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion over the past 10 years. The costs to the environment and the energy transition are also steep. Utilities in Ohio struck a corrupt bargain with prominent state lawmakers—some of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison—to prop up failing coal and nuclear plants. Utilities in Arizona were investigated by the FBI for using dark money to elect energy regulators who slashed rooftop solar incentives, though no charges have been filed.

Artiles’ Daytona junket didn’t break any laws, but the optics weren’t great. He’d flown in on a private plane that belonged to his campaign treasurer—an FPL lobbyist. The night of the NASCAR race, he took in $10,000 in contributions at a fundraiser in his honor, where he rubbed shoulders with Keanu Reeves. The next day, he visited Disney’s Epcot Center as the guest of John Holley, FPL’s top in-house lobbyist. “It was an honor to be there,” Artiles told the Miami Herald after the news got out. “I’m not going to lie to you. It was cool.”

After returning to Tallahassee, Artiles fast-tracked two bills coveted by FPL.

But like the truck totaled during that second lap at Daytona, the freshman senator’s tenure would be short-lived. About a month after the FPL junket, Artiles got into an argument with two Black fellow senators at a private club near the state Capitol, berating them and using the n-word. The Senate president made Artiles stand and apologize to his colleagues, after which Artiles walked straight out of the chamber and into a gaggle of reporters, shedding his conciliatory tone like a football player doffing sweaty pads. This prompted the legislative Black caucus to demand his expulsion. Artiles resigned two days later.

He was out of the Senate, but not the game. In October 2017, Artiles was invited to a lunch meeting with Ryan Tyson, then a leading Republican operative for Associated Industries of Florida, a powerful trade group to which FPL had donated millions. Tyson, a pollster, had done work on issues critical to FPL, and was executive director of Let’s Preserve the American Dream—a nonprofit that would play a key role in the ghost candidate scandal. Alex Alvarado, Tyson’s protégé, set up the lunch, which Tyson says he does not recall attending. Starting that same month, and continuing into 2021, Artiles would receive $5,000 monthly payments from Tyson for “research services” related to Hispanic voters.

After the 2020 election, Tyson and his group came under the scrutiny of the prosecutors. “We waived all privileges and co-operated with the government in its investigation,” he told me recently. “They couldn’t explain to us what they were looking for, but we were nonetheless cooperative.” (Tyson was never charged with wrongdoing.) “This is crazy that this is how law-abiding tax paying cooperative citizens are treated,” he said.

Chuck’s, a fish house in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was bustling on the evening of October 26, 2021, when a former Pat Buchanan staffer named K.B. Forbes arrived for what he thought was dinner with Jeff Pitts, who until recently had been CEO of Matrix.

A few months earlier, Joe Perkins, Matrix’s founder, had sued Pitts, his longtime employee and erstwhile protégé. The suit, which had FPL and two of its executives as “fictitious” (unnamed) co-defendants, basically accused Pitts of running his own firm within the firm, stealing Matrix’s clients and cash, operating a clandestine network of dark money groups, and working for FPL without Perkins’s knowledge. (Pitts, in legal filings, denied all of these claims.)

At first, their split had seemed like an amicable, if unexpected, business divorce. “Joe Perkins flew Jeff Pitts down on his plane to meet with me personally to let me know that they had come to an agreement that they were going to part ways, and it was okay,” Silagy said during our 2022 interview. “And then apparently, somewhere along the way, Jeff and Joe got sideways.”

This much was clear: For a decade, Matrix had been the servant of two masters, working both for Southern Co., the nation’s second-largest utility holding company, and NextEra Energy. But as the partners’ acrimony grew, so did the friction between the energy giants. Forbes, who publishes a blog critical of Alabama Power, a Southern Co. subsidiary, told me he had gone to Chuck’s in the hope of obtaining damaging information about Alabama Power’s CEO, Mark Crosswhite. But the vibe was off, and the conversation awkward.

Pitts “was a nervous wreck,” Forbes recalled. “That’s why, on my blog, I call him Jittery Jeff.”

The lawsuit came at a difficult time for Pitts. His new firm, Canopy Partners, less than a year old, was already drawing law enforcement interest. The Miami-Dade Public Corruption Task Force had obtained sworn testimony from Abigail MacIver, one of Pitts’ co-founders, in exchange for limited immunity from prosecution in the ghost candidate scandal. MacIver laid out how she, Pitts, and a contractor had channeled money from a nonprofit operated by Tyson into political committees controlled by Alvarado, Tyson’s associate, by way of a tax-exempt group Pitts controlled. Those committees paid for the ghost candidate mailers.

Reporting from the Sentinel also tied Pitts’ dark-money network to an FPL-funded campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would have introduced competition into state energy markets and broken FPL’s monopoly. Tyson worked as a pollster on the campaign to counter the initiative. (Neither Pitts nor any Canopy Partners associates have been charged with crimes.)

Pitts is a dapper guy in his early 50s who brings to mind Fred Astaire. He was one of the first employees at Matrix in 1995 and became the director of its Birmingham office in 2009. He enjoys the good life, according to former associates: steak dinners, private flights, expensive wine. But by the time he met with Forbes, his life had grown complicated. “He could not look me in the eye,” Forbes told me, and Pitts wouldn’t stop rubbing the back of his head with his left hand during their dinner: “He was twirling his hair in circles.”

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment.”

Matrix began consulting for NextEra, FPL’s parent, in the early 2010s. Pitts took extraordinary care to conceal his—and FPL’s—involvement in Florida elections. He obscured the money trail by creating multiple layers of subcontractors, shell companies, and 501(c)(4) nonprofits. In one case, he listed the brother of a Matrix subcontractor as the head of several nonprofits in his network, which he registered in faraway states. He preferred in-person conversations to texts or phone calls and hired expensive tax attorneys to advise him on his moves.

FPL was kept apprised of the work. Flight records show that the Matrix company jet made frequent visits to Palm Beach, where the utility is headquartered, and the leaked documents contain lively text and email correspondences between Pitts and its executives. FPL’s public affairs VPs were forwarded drafts of political ads slated to run against candidates they hoped to defeat. The Matrix document trove also included emails between Pitts and Silagy wherein Pitts lists names of dark money nonprofits and political committees to which Silagy could donate. There was also a Matrix invoice seeking reimbursement for incorporating a nonprofit that helped fund the ghost candidate campaigns.

A generation ago, power companies were forced to disclose the names of their consultants and attorneys, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the industry, did away with the rule in 2002. Jon Wellinghoff, FERC’s chairman from 2009 to 2013, told me he regrets not reinstating it. “We didn’t reverse that when I was chairman,” he said, “And we should have. All that should be disclosed. All that should be open to the public and available—information right down to the $100 contribution.”

Pitts didn’t end up staying for dinner at Chuck’s. He got takeout instead, Forbes says, and never forked over the dirt on Alabama Power’s CEO. Neither did Pitts’ attorney, with whom Forbes kept corresponding until he grew too frustrated: “I was livid. I was like, ‘This is a waste of my time.’”

It was opening day of the 2023 session of the Florida Legislature, and the capitol was abuzz. House Speaker Paul Renner presided over his chamber’s opening ceremonies, introducing a dozen former members in attendance. Among them was Frank Artiles, who, despite his legal troubles, had maintained close ties with some of Florida’s Republican power brokers. He would register as a lobbyist that session—for a construction company that paints traffic lanes.

Twenty-nine months had passed since the Fitzpatrick’s election party, and two years since Artiles’ arrest and indictment. Pitts and Perkins had by this time settled their lawsuit, and Silagy had recently taken his leave from FPL.

The utility’s veil of secrecy had been pierced—at least temporarily. Weeks after the meeting between Pitts and Forbes, the first batch of Matrix records arrived at the offices of the Sentinel in an envelope with no return address. The intel consisted of a heavily redacted copy of a nearly 200-page report Perkins had sent to NextEra’s board of directors in November 2021. It detailed Pitts’ allegedly secret work for FPL, efforts ranging from municipal to congressional campaigns, funded by millions in utility cash.

In 2018 alone, the report revealed, Pitts had participated in campaigns against a South Miami mayor who supported rooftop solar, ran ghost candidates against both a Miami-Dade commissioner critical of an FPL nuclear plant and a progressive state Senate candidate in Gainesville, and moved millions of dollars to help defeat Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum, who lost to Ron DeSantis that year by a razor-thin 0.4 percent margin.

Pitts’ work, the report showed, went beyond elections and into acquisitions. In 2019, Pitts had aided in FPL’s failed attempt to acquire the Jacksonville Electric Authority, a city-owned utility whose territory it coveted. His contributions included hiring a private detective to follow a reporter who’d written critically of the proposed sale, running a front group that championed the sale, and enlisting a contractor to offer Garrett Dennis—a Jacksonville councilman seen as unlikely to support the sale—a $250,000-a-year job with the same dark money group, Grow United, that distributed the ghost candidate funds to the other nonprofits. Accepting the position would mean giving up his council seat. (Dennis didn’t bite.)

The leaked records also detailed how Matrix and Pitts had paid at least $900,000 to six pay-to-play news outlets in Florida and Alabama between 2013 and 2020. The outlets, with more than 1.3 million combined monthly viewers, attacked critics and enemies of Southern Co., FPL, and other Matrix clients, though all of them deny that the payments influenced their coverage.

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment,” the attorneys in a federal securities suit filed against NextEra in December 2023 wrote of the revelations. It was one of at least two class-action suits filed against the company since Silagy’s resignation alleging political impropriety.

The proceedings in the shareholder suit have been telling, though perhaps not in the way the plaintiffs would prefer. At a hearing this past May, federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon asked their attorneys to clarify the case against NextEra. “Just so I understand,” she said, “has there been any finding of liability…We talk about, sort of, allegations of wrongdoing and criminality. Can you just pinpoint exactly what would be the crime and has there been any finding of such a crime?”

“Artiles is the victim in this case!” his lawyer told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist.”

Plaintiffs attorney Jeffrey Block responded in the negative.      

“So, I guess, what exactly is wrong that was allegedly done?” Cannon said.      

Her question, albeit unwittingly, broaches a bigger issue, with ramifications far beyond Florida. The IRS and the FEC have generally failed to enforce nonprofit and election laws effectively. At the state level, regulatory boards are easily influenced—and their penalties for breaking the rules, to the extent they are imposed, are often too small to discourage bad behavior.

It is a system that practically invites monopoly power companies and their consultants to exploit every loophole to maximize political leverage and profit—and even, in some cases, to spend money collected from power consumers to lobby for actions that run counter to those ratepayer’s interests. “It’s ludicrous on its face that state-granted monopolies that provide an essential service are allowed to lobby at all. It ought to be unthinkable,” energy expert David Roberts noted during a 2023 discussion of utility corruption on his podcast, Volts.

The notion of a monopoly utility launching a secret effort to field bogus candidates and trick voters would seem all the more unthinkable, and the fact that a federal judge feels compelled to ask what the company is actually alleged to have done wrong is telling.

Back in January, public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen told Cannon he intended to follow the money, although it’s not clear how far up the chain he intends to go. “It’s the money, the payment, that makes this illegal, judge,” he asserted then. The state’s position is, look at all the trouble that they were going through to run…ghost candidates.”

As for Artiles’ alleged ghost candidate activities, “It’s my opinion that this case is politically motivated,” defense attorney Quintero told a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge during a hearing earlier this year. “It’s not just one party that does it. It’s both parties and it’s perfectly legal. Period. End of story.”

The state’s star witness this week is none other than ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who agreed to plead guilty to some charges and testify against Artiles to avoid a possible prison sentence. The defendant’s legal team is attempting to impugn Rodriguez’s character and portray the money that changed hands between the two men as a con. “Artiles is the victim in this case!” Quintero told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist, on loans, on a car Rodriguez sold to him that didn’t exist.”

The jury is expected to decide on the guilt or innocence of Frank Artiles by the end of September. Yet after all the courtroom dramas, feuding consultants, and exposés about the financial subterfuge that enabled the ghost candidates, it remains unclear when, and whether, and to what extent, anyone will ever hold NextEra accountable.

“The system is on trial, because the system enables this kind of conduct,” Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney, told me of Artiles’ trial. “In a fully functioning democracy, this kind of scandal would result in real changes to campaign finance laws. But Florida doesn’t have a fully functioning democracy.”

Native Hawaiians have always understood the value of water. In the Hawaiian language, the word for fresh water is “wai”—and the word for wealth is “waiwai.” An essential asset, water was a resource Hawaiians shared, and they made sure to return what they didn’t use back to the stream.

But the 19th-century sugar barons who diverted water to irrigate their plantations did not share those traditions. On Maui, the most important was Alexander & Baldwin, founded in 1870 by the sons of missionaries, which wielded great political and economic power for more than a century. At its height, it sustained its operations by draining plentiful streams of 165 million gallons a day to irrigate its plantation in Maui’s central plain, moving it through 70 miles of tunnels, ditches, flumes, and reservoirs. As stream levels dropped and taro patches dried up, Native Hawaiians, unable to grow their own food, were forced to move.

The network became a subsidiary company—East Maui Irrigation—which still controls this water diversion system. Today, EMI is jointly owned by Alexander & Baldwin and agribusiness company Mahi Pono.

EMI has been the source of long-running legal battles on Maui, as farmers and environmental groups seek to stop it from sucking up fresh water from the island’s streams. “For more than two decades, Native Hawaiians and the environmental community have been using legal avenues to try to restore at least some flow to these streams,” says Sierra Club attorney David Frankel. “At every turn, A&B and [the Board of Land and Natural Resources] have worked hand-in-hand to thwart those efforts.”  

An A&B spokesperson disputes this. “There are laws and statutes in Hawaii that govern the flow of water in streams and these legal processes were followed by the BLNR, A&B, and the Native Hawaiian and environmental communities,” the spokesperson says. “Significant amounts of water have been restored to East Maui streams. A number of priority streams…have been permanently and fully restored and will not be diverted in the future.”

The battle over Maui’s water supply intensified last August, when wildfires tore through the island and devastated the community of Lahaina. Earlier that summer, EMI’s legal opponents had scored a victory when a state court reduced the amount it could suck up from Maui’s streams by a quarter. But a day after the historic town was all but wiped out, the state of Hawaii petitioned its Supreme Court to stop the court order and increase the amount of water diverted, ostensibly for the purpose of fighting fires in Upcountry Maui.

The state’s petition seemed like a backdoor way to reverse the earlier ruling against EMI, especially when it soon became clear there was more than enough water available to fight the Upcountry fires. And it raised local suspicions that the state was doing the bidding of corporations.

Frankel called the effort a “brazen attempt to capitalize on tragedy to subvert the judicial process.” The state Supreme Court ultimately denied the petition. But a year after the Maui fires, the fight at the heart of that case—over who controls the island’s water supply, public or private interests—remains as fierce as ever.

Hawaii’s sugar plantations started closing one by one in the 1950s, as production moved to countries where costs were lower. The last of them, A&B’s Central Maui sugar operation, shut down in 2016. The company is now in the commercial real estate and development business, with a portfolio spanning 39 properties and 3,500 acres across Hawaii.

On Maui, A&B’s legacy remains complicated. For some it is an extractive force that has denied Native farmers their cultural lifestyle. For others, it is a benevolent presence that provided jobs, medical care, housing, and scholarships for students. “A&B was a major employer on Maui for over a century,” says Lucienne de Naie, the chairperson of Sierra Club Maui Group. “There were people who were very grateful to A&B. They gave immigrants a chance to work in the fields.” But cross the company, de Naie says, and “you were blackballed. It was hard to get any kind of job on Maui.”

Because of its history on the island, any issue having to do with A&B, including water, has deeply divided the island community. “While we can’t speak for our predecessors, we are encouraged by the re-emergence of taro cultivation as a cultural practice and important food source in East Maui,” says an A&B spokesperson.

De Naie lives in Huelo, a small town in northeastern Maui, where there is no public water supply. Residents retrieve water from streams or through water catchment. If those sources are dry, they have to purchase water. “We live in an area where our water is taken for other people to use, but we have to buy water from people that come in trucks and deliver it,” de Naie says.

Hawaii’s constitution declares that water is a public trust for the benefit of all citizens, and the state government is the only entity that can administer this resource. But there’s a loophole: Businesses, such as A&B, can control and sell the use of their water diversion systems.

“The operators of the diversion system end up having a significant amount of leverage over who gets how much water,” says Jonathan Scheuer, co-author of the book Water and Power in West Maui. “This is partly because of the amount of information they have available on how the system operates. Other players have to trust them often when they say this is how much water is available.”

The state leases water rights to EMI and other companies. For decades, EMI has received one-year revocable permits from BLNR to divert water from Maui’s streams. In exchange for the use of water for its own purposes, EMI must deliver water to rural residents in Upcountry Maui, for which it is paid 6 cents per thousand gallons by the Maui Department of Water Supply.

In 2018, the newly incorporated company Mahi Pono bought 41,000 acres of former plantation lands from A&B for $262 million, making it Maui’s largest landowner. The deal also included a 50 percent interest in EMI for $2.7 million.

The company currently employs 350 Maui residents. By the end of 2024, it projects it will complete planting 14,830 acres with a variety of crops, including citrus, coffee, macadamia nut, watermelon, and onions.

Though Mahi Pono’s name is Hawaiian—it means “to grow responsibly”—the company is not. It is majority owned by Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP), which manages approximately $200 billion in assets and has been buying up water rights worldwide as long-term investments.

“It makes perfect sense for them to invest in water,” says Shay Chan Hodges. She served as vice chair of the Maui County Board of Water Supply from 2018 to 2019, and chair from 2019 to 2021. “Obviously there’s value to 40,000 acres of land, but the real value is the water attached to that land.”

That’s something A&B and Mahi Pono evidently agree on, too. Per their sales contract, if A&B is unable to secure water leases with the state of at least 30 million gallons per day or if it’s unable to secure a long-term water lease of 30 years, it must pay Mahi Pono rebates of up to $62 million. Indeed, Mahi Pono’s allocation had been cut below that contractual threshold shortly before the state and A&B petitioned to increase the water usage of the East Maui Irrigation System last August in the wake of the Lahaina blaze.

“If Mahi Pono can obtain a 30-year lease from the state allowing for tens of millions of gallons a day (upwards of 90 mgd), the lease itself is an asset that can be monetized and potentially transferred or sold. This adds significant value to Mahi Pono’s holdings,” says Hodges.

After the Mahi Pono deal, A&B moved quickly to pursue a 30-year lease to divert up to 92 million gallons per day from Maui’s streams, with 85 mgd earmarked for Mahi Pono’s agricultural holdings. As part of its lease application, EMI filed an environmental impact statement that made plain the Faustian bargain at the heart of Maui’s water system. If it was not granted water rights, its water deliveries “would terminate,” a prospect that would leave tens of thousands of Maui residents without access to fresh water.

This language predictably caused local alarm, and the Maui County Board Department of Water Supply created a Temporary Investigative Group in 2019 to research the feasibility of purchasing and maintaining the EMI system.

“The Temporary Investigative Group believed that public ownership of the system was necessary for protecting the public health,” says Hodges, who was part of the group. “Because why are we being held hostage? The basic message was, ‘if you don’t do what we say, you won’t get any water.’”

Hodges and her colleagues recommended either purchasing or condemning the EMI system, or for the mayor to step in to acquire the long-term leases and give control back to the government, but nothing came of it.

For years, A&B and Mahi Pono have sought to influence local politics. “These corporations’ executives have held a number of influential positions in both the state and county governments,” says Keani Rawlins-Fernandez, a member of the Maui County Council. “A&B and Mahi Pono have long donated tremendous amounts to elected officials’ campaigns.”

Hannibal Tavares, one of Maui’s former mayors, was a veteran of the sugar industry and an employee of A&B prior to winning office in 1979. The current vice president of A&B also served on the state’s Commission on Water Resource Management (the arm that decides how much water companies can divert) from 2002 to 2005 while working for A&B. Another sugar industry leader twice served on the commission.

Since 2006, A&B and its top executives have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to state and county politicians. They’ve donated more than $10,000 to Gov. Josh Green in the past two years. Mahi Pono’s executives began donating to political campaigns in 2020. Thousands of those contributions flowed to Green, too.

“This is a case of our elected leaders choosing to be beholden to a private entity,” Hodges says.

Even before last year’s wildfires reinvigorated the fight over Maui’s water supply, activists had begun to gain some ground in their effort to wrest control from A&B and Mahi Pono.

Since the former and present mayor didn’t step in, in 2022, voters approved the creation of the East Maui Community Board water authority, which gives the people the power to negotiate water leases with the state. Hodges says she was surprised there was no pushback from corporations when it was put on the ballot, but there was some controversy with the appointment of its 11-member board. After the deadline to apply had closed, the county council received requests to open the process up again.

When the county did so, new applicants included a former Mahi Pono executive and former Mayor Alan Arakawa, who had opposed the water authority and said it would “kill Mahi Pono.” (When the 11-member board was eventually approved, it included Arakawa, taro farmers and several water resource experts, including Scheuer, who became the chair.)

Delayed by the fire, the water board began holding bimonthly meetings in February, and the director seat will soon be filled. But whether the community water authority and board successfully take East Maui water leases out of the hands of A&B and Mahi Pono, or if more challenges emerge, remains to be seen. If successful, it would be the first time in more than 100 years that the people of East Maui, and not a private corporation, will determine how its water is divided and shared. It could prove to be a model for the rest of the island, where other corporations hold its own separate systems.

Currently, EMI has a one-year lease from the state covering 2024, allowing 31.25 million gallons per day to be diverted from East Maui’s streams to Mahi Pono’s land—and the Sierra Club Maui is keeping a sharp eye as its legal battles continue. It’s fighting to stop the issuance of one-year leases, which avoids the rigorous review afforded to long-term leases.

De Naie says these court battles will make a difference for the future. “Eventually…we will see a standard set for trusteeship of public resources that should have been in place in the first place.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Nicholas Petris, born to Greek immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1923, could remember a time when electric trucks were a common sight on the streets of Oakland. In fact, just a couple decades before his birth, both electric and steam-powered vehicles—which were cleaner and more powerful, respectively, than early gas-powered cars—constituted far larger shares of the American car market than combustion vehicles. The electric cars of this era ran on lead-acid batteries, which had to be recharged or swapped out every 50 to 100 miles, while the steam cars relied on water boilers and hand cranks to run. But for a few historical contingencies, either model could have rendered its gas-powered alternatives obsolete.

By the time of Petris’ childhood, however, cars with internal combustion engines had become dominant. Gas guzzlers won out thanks to a combination of factors, including the discovery of vast oil reserves across the American West, improvements in the production and technology of gas-powered cars (including the invention of the electric starter, which eliminated the hand crank), the general population’s limited access to electricity, and the occasional propensity of early steam cars to explode.

Whereas electric car pioneers had envisioned communal networks of streetcars and taxis, the gas-powered automobile promised independence, unconstrained by the relatively limited distances battery-powered vehicles could travel without a charge. This meant more Americans than ever were driving on their own, rather than sharing mass transit, such as the railroads on which Petris’ father worked as a mechanic. Petris grew up in a California increasingly dense with traffic and crisscrossed by freeways.

But with the rise of combustion cars came smog. Named for its superficial resemblance to both smoke and fog, the lung-punishing, eye-burning, occasionally deadly mixture of air pollutants began settling on cities—most famously Los Angeles—in the mid-20th century. In 1949, for instance, a blanket of ammonia-smelling vapor settled on Petris’ hometown; a newspaper in nearby Palo Alto, where Petris was studying law at Stanford, declared smog “a growing menace.” By the early 1950s, scientists had identified its cause: exhaust from gas-powered cars. Legislators and regulators—especially in California, the biggest auto market in America—raced to limit the fumes that cars were permitted to spew into the atmosphere. 

The “internal combustion engine is pouring out poison,” Petris told reporters. “So why not limit it?”

In 1958, a still-youthful Petris won election to the California Assembly and was immediately placed on its transportation committee. Just months later, the legislature ordered the state department of public health to establish air quality standards such as maximum allowable levels for auto pollutants. In 1966, the year Petris won election to the state Senate, a California agency required all new cars to reduce certain pollutants in exhaust. Yet federal clean air standards remained far weaker than California’s, and Detroit-based car companies expended tremendous resources aimed at slow-walking regulation. Industry representatives begged for delays, claiming they needed more time to improve pollution-control technology.

Over the seven years Petris spent in the legislature’s lower chamber before his election to the Senate, he had been fielding a steady drumbeat of constituent concerns about air pollution. Doctors showed up at his office begging him to do something about the brownish haze poisoning their patients. He read of the thousands who died from breathing polluted air in Los Angeles alone. A turning point came when a scientist brought Petris a report attributing his state’s infamous smog problem to the automobile and suggesting that, despite its protests, the auto industry had the tools available to reduce its emissions. Despite seven years of incremental legislative progress, Petris realized the government hadn’t done nearly enough. “Oh, we can’t wait any more,” he would recall remarking. It was time, Petris concluded, for something “extreme.”

On March 1, 1967, the newly elevated state senator announced his intention to introduce a bill that would limit each California family to just one gas-powered car beginning in 1975. “[The] internal combustion engine is pouring out poison,” Petris told the press. “So why not limit it?”

The press responded with scorn. Petris’ hometown newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, dismissed his proposal as “so ridiculous that it is difficult to select from the variety of arguments that demonstrate its absurdity.” Even the senator’s campaign manager was furious. Yet rather than watering down his bill, Petris altered it to simply ban all cars with internal combustion engines by 1975.

California’s other legislators were uninterested, so Petris asked merely that his Senate colleagues study the subject further during the legislative recess, during which time he could regroup. Few of these colleagues could have suspected that Petris’ crusade was just beginning. In fact, in the years to come, the California legislature would come shockingly close to heeding his call and banning all gas-powered cars. Copycat efforts would erupt across the country and within the US Congress. For a brief moment, Petris’ pipe dream would be at the vanguard of the burgeoning environmental movement.

“We want to scare hell out of the industry,” said a New York state legislator. “We want them to come up with a clean alternative, now.”

As we now well know, this fight to ban the internal combustion engine ultimately failed, stymied by aggressive auto industry lobbying. But more than 50 years later, history appears to be repeating itself. Late in the summer of 2022, a California state agency announced a ban on the sale of new cars containing internal combustion engines. This ban, set to take full effect in 2035, ignited explosive reactions across the political spectrum. In a matter of months, almost a dozen other states had followed suit, enacting bans modeled after California’s, and the European Union appeared poised to do the same.

As it had a half-century earlier, fierce pushback came from the auto industry and its political allies. In Europe, the government of Germany (home to several powerful automakers) forced a wide loophole into the ban, and other countries (including Italy, home to other big car companies) are now pushing to delay implementation. In the United States, the House of Representatives passed a bill to strip all states of their ability to impose such bans. Though the Senate has not done likewise, the Supreme Court may well be preparing to eliminate California’s authority to set tougher auto emissions standards than the federal government, a position that former President Donald Trump would undoubtedly support if he wins another presidential term in November.

Largely unmentioned in this ongoing fracas is the fact that nearly all of this—California leading the charge to prohibit gas-powered cars, other governments following suit, intense industry resistance—has happened once before. Petris’ crusade, though it made the front pages of newspapers across the nation, is little-remembered. Yet the history of his fight and eventual failure has only taken on increased relevance as climate change has revealed the necessity of decarbonizing transportation, which accounts for almost a third of US greenhouse gas emissions. Never-before-cited archival material documenting this lost history reveals vital lessons for an effort whose time, a half-century later, may have come at last.

It was a warm, clear Wednesday in March 1969, two years after Petris’ bid to limit and then ban gas-powered cars had apparently died a quiet death, when the state senator reintroduced his bill—and received a very different reception. Just weeks earlier, the largest oil spill in US history had begun off the coast of Santa Barbara, and the California legislature had recently concluded hearings that criticized American automotive companies for failing to tackle smog. This time Petris cannily decided to submit his bill not to the Senate transportation committee, as in his initial attempt, but instead to the much more welfare-oriented health committee. The bill proposed to add the following language to California’s health and safety code: “On or after January 1, 1975, no motor vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine shall be operated on the highways of the state.”

The big car companies “laughed at first,” Petris later recalled, their lobbyists writing off the bill as too radical to merit opposition. But, as contemporaneous reporting and documents in the California State Archives show, Petris brought in doctors to tell the health committee about the “violence” smog enacted on the human body; he brought in William Lear, creator of the Lear Jet, to talk about advances in steam-powered car technology. Supportive letters poured in. On July 24, the health committee unanimously approved the bill. Late that evening, in a move even Petris acknowledged to be a “surprise,” the full Senate passed it by a vote of 26 to 5. The senators had amended the bill only slightly, to have it ban the sale of gas-powered cars in 1975, rather than their possession.

Detroit went crazy,” Petris recalled in another oral history interview. The big car companies deluged the state with lobbyists and money; they mobilized the state’s car dealers’ trade association, which sent an “all-out alert” to local members, rallying them against the bill. The state chamber of commerce, in turn, condemned the bill’s “serious economic consequences.”

But California residents mobilized, too: In Los Angeles, a group of mothers and children picketed outside a General Motors plant, telling the press they supported the bill. Ultimately, the issue reached a boiling point in a seven-hour hearing before the Assembly’s transportation committee; the chamber was packed with high-priced lobbyists and irate car dealers. As the clock approached midnight, Petris realized he was going to lose by a single vote. He tried to soften the bill’s language to persuade the last legislator, changing an outright ban to an effective one via stringent emissions standards, but to no avail.

In multiple polls conducted in 1969, more than 60 percent of respondents favored banning the internal combustion engine within a few years.

Nevertheless, the bill’s opponents did not revel in their victory. “The damage has been done,” lamented one San Jose car dealer. “The car is now looked upon like some kind of dangerous drug.”

Indeed, even before his bill died in the California Assembly, Petris had begun traveling the country, urging other legislators to try to ban the internal combustion engine. Soon, copycat bills appeared in Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai‘i, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Washington.

“We want to scare hell out of the industry,” a New York legislator told Washington Monthly. “We want them to come up with a clean alternative, now.”

Multiple members of Congress also introduced copycat bills at the federal level. One would have phased out gas engines by 1978; another sought to ban them outright within three years. The federal bill that attracted the most support was that proposed by Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the founder of Earth Day. His bill was fashioned as an amendment to the Clean Air Act, which was being debated in 1970.

“I do not believe that the automotive industry will shift to a low emission engine unless the Congress acts and requires it by statute,” Nelson wrote in a contemporaneous letter.

Perhaps the most surprising fact about the whole saga is just how popular the campaign to phase out gasoline-powered cars was among members of the public. Multiple polls in 1969 found that more than 60 percent of respondents favored banning the internal combustion engine within a few years. Supportive letters and petitions streamed into Nelson’s office. Newspaper editorial boards, including that of The Washington Post, endorsed Nelson’s bill. 

“Given a choice between the fetish of the automobile and suffocation, at least some would prefer to go on breathing,” declared The Tennessean. In California, a group called The People’s Lobby gathered a reported 425,000 signatures in an attempt to put the issue on the ballot so that state residents could vote on Petris’ proposal directly.

Bending to popular will, Mercedes started experimenting with hybrid electric buses, while General Motors tried out next-generation steam-powered cars. Even then-President Richard Nixon, in a 1970 address to Congress, announced the creation of a public-private partnership “with the goal of producing an unconventionally powered, virtually pollution-free automobile within five years.”

Among the loudest supporters of Senator Nelson’s bill was the United Auto Workers, one of the most politically outspoken and vocally environmental unions in the nation. “I do not believe we can live compatibly with the internal combustion engine,” declared Walter Reuther, the union’s president, in 1970. As public statements and unpublished documents in the union’s archive memorialize, UAW officials demanded cleaner cars despite the fact that it could theoretically put union members’ jobs in jeopardy.

“We’re concerned first as citizens as to the poisoning of the atmosphere, obviously,” Leonard Woodcock, Reuther’s successor as UAW president, told NBC’s “Today Show” later in 1970. But he was confident that the transition to clean cars would actually create more jobs for UAW members, rather than fewer.

In fact, he thought that public outcry over the dangers of auto emissions could reach such a fever pitch that car production would be jeopardized if the industry didn’t find an alternative. UAW members themselves told legislators that they wished fervently for better jobs, hoping to be freed from the horrific health and safety conditions that predominated in auto plants.

As they had in Sacramento, auto industry representatives descended on Washington to fight Nelson’s bill. Publicly, they blasted the senator as ignorant, having “little or no knowledge of the facts of automobile design.” Nelson lamented the effectiveness of such attacks. “The chief obstacle to more stringent control of the internal combustion engine or to developing alternatives to it,” reads one memo in his archival papers, “has been the auto industry itself.”

All of the bills, state and federal alike, failed in the end. Nixon’s program to create a “pollution-free automobile,” meanwhile, was underfunded and soon folded. The car companies quietly shelved their greener experiments, and much-vaunted private efforts—such as William Lear’s steam car—couldn’t attract sufficient financial backing to become true market competitors.

Yet the midcentury crusade to eliminate the internal combustion engine was not a complete failure. In California, Petris pivoted quickly, throwing his support behind the most stringent emissions standards he could get. “I’m a realist,” he told the press. “So I settle for the next best thing.” Soon the California Air Resources Board—the same agency that 50 years later would announce a phaseout of gas-powered cars—adopted the strongest emissions regulations in the nation, which effectively forced auto companies to begin installing catalytic converters en masse.

“Better we tear the factories to the ground,” wrote one UAW regional director, “than continue this doomsday madness.”

Nationally, Senator Edmund Muskie—the legislative force behind the Clean Air Act—introduced a bill requiring automakers to reduce pollutants by 90 percent by 1975, the very same deadline Petris and Nelson had set in their crusades. Despite fierce industry lobbying, that bill passed, and a reluctant Nixon signed it into law. “I won after all,” Petris later told an interviewer. But in the years that followed, industry lobbying successfully pushed the EPA to extend the deadline. In 1973, the U.S. was hit by an oil embargo from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which battered car companies’ bottom lines and gave them an argument for further delays.

Nonetheless, the companies significantly reduced emissions in the following years, leading to “99 percent cleaner” vehicles compared with 1970 models, according to the EPA. A study commissioned by the agency found that, in the two decades following its passage, the act saved hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

Today, as the fight to ban the internal combustion engine is in the headlines once again, the story of Nicholas Petris’ fight for an emissions-free engine is instructive: It takes state pressure to get industry to shoulder the expense of innovating cleanly, and it takes public pressure to turn a zany bill into a national movement.

Conversely, however, even national popularity can fail to realize legislative or legal success in the face of concerted industry opposition. As the recollections of Petris, Nelson, and many others testify, the Detroit car companies were deft and dedicated opponents of the bills to ban the internal combustion engine, and their resistance stymied the most far-reaching efforts to curb auto emissions. This history, then, counsels constant vigilance for the proponents of contemporary efforts to phase out the gas-powered car. Even the passage of the Clean Air Act did not stop beneficiaries of the status quo from slow-walking change at every step.

Above all, this history demonstrates the power of solidarity in the fight for environmental change. Even at the expense of their own convenience, members of the public united to demand a different world. “I will sell bicycles if I have to,” one car dealer reportedly wrote in a telegram to Petris. “You go get ’em.” Leaders of the UAW—a union definitionally dependent on the automobile—threw their support behind a bill to ban the very thing they produced; some called for expanded mass transit, and some went much further still.

“Better we tear the factories to the ground,” one UAW regional director wrote of the pollution problem, “than continue this doomsday madness.”

In the years following the defeat of Petris’ bill, however, the UAW dropped its environmental advocacy. The energy crisis, the escalation of union-busting, the spread of offshoring, and the rise of Ronald Reagan united to deradicalize the union, and by the late 1970s it was lobbying for weaker emissions standards. Yet in 2023, in the UAW’s first direct election, the radical candidate Shawn Fain became the union’s new president. Fain, known to sport an “eat the rich” T-shirt, has since led a drive to unionize the electric-vehicle sector.

“We have to have a planet that we can live on,” Fain told a rally. It’s a message that evokes both a long-lost past—and a hopeful future.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America—and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to make its cloud computing operations “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.

The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.

One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides.

Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance.

While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities. Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.

The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of US power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool.

Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels. 

“Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”

In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that US data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark. 

In Pennsylvania, one Amazon data center consumes about 20 percent of the electricity capacity of the nuclear power plant nearby.

It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo. 

Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors—in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures. 

Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the US is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms.

“A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio—they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.” Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability.

To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways.

The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses. 

But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing.”

“They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said.

Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.

Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers. “As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said.

As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon’s cloud operations are “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America—and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to make its cloud computing operations “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.

The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.

One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides.

Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance.

While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities. Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.

The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of US power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool.

Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels. 

“Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”

In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that US data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark. 

In Pennsylvania, one Amazon data center consumes about 20 percent of the electricity capacity of the nuclear power plant nearby.

It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo. 

Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors—in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures. 

Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the US is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms.

“A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio—they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.” Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability.

To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways.

The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses. 

But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing.”

“They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said.

Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.

Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers. “As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said.

As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon’s cloud operations are “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In a significant reversal, the Biden administration announced during two closed-door meetings this week that US negotiators will support limits on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.

The news was first reported by Reuters and confirmed to Grist on Thursday by the State Department. It represents a major shift for the United States, which had previously rejected production limits in favor of an approach focused on boosting the recycling rate and cleaning up plastic litter.

While industry groups condemned the decision as “misguided,” environmental organizations said it could sway momentum in favor of production limits at a consequential point during the negotiations. There is only one meeting left before the treaty is supposed to be finalized in 2025.

“This couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Christina Dixon, ocean campaign leader for the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency. “The US position has been one of the great unknowns and they have the power to be a constructive and collaborative player, so it’s a relief to see them setting out of their stall at this critical moment.”

Backed by industry groups, oil-producing states like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and until now, the United States, have opposed restrictions on plastics manufacturing.

Negotiations over a treaty have been ongoing since March 2022, when the UN reached a landmark agreement to “end plastic pollution.” Over the course of the four negotiating sessions that have occurred since then, however, progress has been slow—in large part due to disagreements over the treaty’s scope.

A so-called “high-ambition” coalition of countries, supported by many scientists and environmental groups, say the treaty must prevent more plastic from being made in the first place. Some 460 million metric tons are manufactured globally each year—mostly out of fossil fuels—and only 9 percent of it is recycled.

Because the manufacturing, use, and disposal of plastics contribute to climate change, experts at the nonprofit Pacific Environment have found that the treaty must cut plastic production by 75 percent by 2040 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The high-ambition coalition also supports specific bans or restrictions on the most problematic types of plastic—typically meaning those that are least likely to be recycled—as well as hazardous chemicals commonly used in plastic products. This coalition includes Canada, Norway, Peru, Rwanda, and the UK, along with more than 60 other countries.

Oil-producing states like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China—backed by industry groups—oppose these measures. They want the treaty to leave production untouched and focus on managing plastic waste. The US counted itself among those countries until this week.

Now, in addition to supporting restrictions on plastic production, the US says it will also support creating a list of problematic plastics and hazardous chemicals, according to Reuters.

Because the US carries so much weight in the treaty negotiations—and because North America produces one-fifth of the world’s plastics—Dixon said the White House’s new position could be “a welcome signal to fence-sitting countries,” encouraging them to join the high-ambition coalition. “I hope it will only further isolate the small group of countries who are unwilling to commit to the necessary binding regulations we need to see on the supply of plastics.”

Industry groups reacted less favorably to the news. 

Chris Jahn, president and CEO of American Chemistry Council, a plastics and petrochemical trade group, said in a statement that the US had “cave[d] to the wishes of extreme NGO groups.” He described the White House’s new position as a betrayal of US manufacturers that would slash jobs, harm the environment, and cause the cost of goods to rise globally.

“If the Biden-Harris administration wants to meet its sustainable development and climate goals, the world will need to rely on plastic more, not less,” he said, citing the material’s utility in renewable energy infrastructure, making buildings more energy efficient, and reducing food waste. 

Nearly 40 percent of global plastic production goes toward single-use items like packaging and food service products.

Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, shared similar sentiments to Jahn. In a statement, he said the White House had “turned its back on Americans whose livelihoods depend on our industry.”

He added that the US’s reversal would undermine its influence in the treaty negotiations, “as other countries know this extreme position will not receive support in the US Senate.” The Senate has to approve treaties before the US can ratify them.

Despite the industry’s outrage, polling suggests that ambitious policies to address the plastics crisis are broadly popular among the public. According to one recent poll from the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council, nearly 90 percent of Americans support measures to reduce plastic production. Eighty-three percent specifically support plastic production limits as part of an international treaty, and even greater numbers support treaty provisions to eliminate “unnecessary and avoidable plastic products” and toxic chemicals.

Reducing plastic production is “what the American people want,” Anja Brandon, director of US plastics policy for the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, said in a statement. She cited additional polling from her organization showing that 78 percent of Americans think ocean-bound plastic pollution is a “pressing problem.”

Brandon and other environmental advocates now say they’re eager to see how the US’s new position will translate into advocacy during the final round of plastics treaty negotiations, scheduled to begin in late November in Busan, South Korea. They’re calling for the US to sign onto the “Bridge to Busan,” a declaration put forward by a group of countries last April asking negotiators to “commit to achieve sustainable levels of production of primary plastic polymers,” potentially through “production freezes at specified levels, production reductions against agreed baselines, or other agreed constraints.”  

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Julie Teel Simmonds, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing US delegates fight for these positions at the next plastics treaty negotiations in South Korea.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In a significant reversal, the Biden administration announced during two closed-door meetings this week that US negotiators will support limits on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.

The news was first reported by Reuters and confirmed to Grist on Thursday by the State Department. It represents a major shift for the United States, which had previously rejected production limits in favor of an approach focused on boosting the recycling rate and cleaning up plastic litter.

While industry groups condemned the decision as “misguided,” environmental organizations said it could sway momentum in favor of production limits at a consequential point during the negotiations. There is only one meeting left before the treaty is supposed to be finalized in 2025.

“This couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Christina Dixon, ocean campaign leader for the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency. “The US position has been one of the great unknowns and they have the power to be a constructive and collaborative player, so it’s a relief to see them setting out of their stall at this critical moment.”

Backed by industry groups, oil-producing states like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and until now, the United States, have opposed restrictions on plastics manufacturing.

Negotiations over a treaty have been ongoing since March 2022, when the UN reached a landmark agreement to “end plastic pollution.” Over the course of the four negotiating sessions that have occurred since then, however, progress has been slow—in large part due to disagreements over the treaty’s scope.

A so-called “high-ambition” coalition of countries, supported by many scientists and environmental groups, say the treaty must prevent more plastic from being made in the first place. Some 460 million metric tons are manufactured globally each year—mostly out of fossil fuels—and only 9 percent of it is recycled.

Because the manufacturing, use, and disposal of plastics contribute to climate change, experts at the nonprofit Pacific Environment have found that the treaty must cut plastic production by 75 percent by 2040 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The high-ambition coalition also supports specific bans or restrictions on the most problematic types of plastic—typically meaning those that are least likely to be recycled—as well as hazardous chemicals commonly used in plastic products. This coalition includes Canada, Norway, Peru, Rwanda, and the UK, along with more than 60 other countries.

Oil-producing states like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China—backed by industry groups—oppose these measures. They want the treaty to leave production untouched and focus on managing plastic waste. The US counted itself among those countries until this week.

Now, in addition to supporting restrictions on plastic production, the US says it will also support creating a list of problematic plastics and hazardous chemicals, according to Reuters.

Because the US carries so much weight in the treaty negotiations—and because North America produces one-fifth of the world’s plastics—Dixon said the White House’s new position could be “a welcome signal to fence-sitting countries,” encouraging them to join the high-ambition coalition. “I hope it will only further isolate the small group of countries who are unwilling to commit to the necessary binding regulations we need to see on the supply of plastics.”

Industry groups reacted less favorably to the news. 

Chris Jahn, president and CEO of American Chemistry Council, a plastics and petrochemical trade group, said in a statement that the US had “cave[d] to the wishes of extreme NGO groups.” He described the White House’s new position as a betrayal of US manufacturers that would slash jobs, harm the environment, and cause the cost of goods to rise globally.

“If the Biden-Harris administration wants to meet its sustainable development and climate goals, the world will need to rely on plastic more, not less,” he said, citing the material’s utility in renewable energy infrastructure, making buildings more energy efficient, and reducing food waste. 

Nearly 40 percent of global plastic production goes toward single-use items like packaging and food service products.

Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, shared similar sentiments to Jahn. In a statement, he said the White House had “turned its back on Americans whose livelihoods depend on our industry.”

He added that the US’s reversal would undermine its influence in the treaty negotiations, “as other countries know this extreme position will not receive support in the US Senate.” The Senate has to approve treaties before the US can ratify them.

Despite the industry’s outrage, polling suggests that ambitious policies to address the plastics crisis are broadly popular among the public. According to one recent poll from the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council, nearly 90 percent of Americans support measures to reduce plastic production. Eighty-three percent specifically support plastic production limits as part of an international treaty, and even greater numbers support treaty provisions to eliminate “unnecessary and avoidable plastic products” and toxic chemicals.

Reducing plastic production is “what the American people want,” Anja Brandon, director of US plastics policy for the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, said in a statement. She cited additional polling from her organization showing that 78 percent of Americans think ocean-bound plastic pollution is a “pressing problem.”

Brandon and other environmental advocates now say they’re eager to see how the US’s new position will translate into advocacy during the final round of plastics treaty negotiations, scheduled to begin in late November in Busan, South Korea. They’re calling for the US to sign onto the “Bridge to Busan,” a declaration put forward by a group of countries last April asking negotiators to “commit to achieve sustainable levels of production of primary plastic polymers,” potentially through “production freezes at specified levels, production reductions against agreed baselines, or other agreed constraints.”  

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Julie Teel Simmonds, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing US delegates fight for these positions at the next plastics treaty negotiations in South Korea.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In April, at the TED conference in Vancouver, BC, I watched a woman pull a variety of mushroom powders from her purse, scoop them into a thermos, and add hot water from a nearby tea station to make an earthy beverage.

Intrigued, I asked about her favorite health practices, and she started describing a recent trip to Costa Rica to get plasmapheresis. “It’s when they take your old plasma out, and they replace it with new, fresh plasma,” she explained.

“Donated plasma?” I asked, picturing a commune’s worth of Bryan Johnson’s teenage sons, milked daily for vital proteins. But she said it had been synthetic plasma, as a detox treatment intended to manage an autoimmune disease.

Plasmapheresis can effectively remove contaminants, such as some heavy metals, from the blood of people with specific health conditions, including autoimmune and blood disease, organ failure, and for those who have recently undergone organ transplants.

Even traditionally virtuous behaviors may cause health problems. Last year, researchers found forever chemicals” in most American kale.

However, for healthy individuals, plasmapheresis cannot improve on the body’s natural detoxification processes, which are efficiently handled by the kidneys, liver, skin, lungs, and other organs—for free. Plus, most heavy metals of concern accumulate in our organs and only trace amounts can be removed in blood.

Elective plasmapheresis for healthy people represents yet another manifestation of the myth of detoxing. Private clinics with varying degrees of oversight offer it, attracting rich medical tourists—even healthy ones.

In an April 2023 Instagram post about her plasma detox treatment, the former professional racecar driver Danica Patrick described the $10,000 treatment as one that “cleans a vast majority of the blood,”getting “rid of metals and mold.”

To illustrate, she holds up a sack of dark amber liquid. “The dark bag is my old plasma,” she writes.

Healthy plasma has the color of dark urine—and that’s perfectly normal. Patrick’s admittedly startling post perpetuates the misconception that toxins in our body manifest as muck that we could cut through like grease in a dish detergent commercial, if only we had the right tool.

That methods like cleanses, juice fasts, supplements, and sauna sessions can detoxify the body is among the most misleading wellness claims. “Detox” practices might feel good, have a place in someone’s personal routine, lead to weight loss or create a placebo effect, but experts have repeatedly debunked claims that they meaningfully remove toxins from our bodies. In fact, in some cases, they may do the opposite by harming our built-in detoxification systems; nutritional supplements account for 20 percent of toxic liver damage in the US.

Aside from medical interventions prescribed for specific conditions, there’s almost nothing we can do to help our bodies detox more effectively. Instead, it’s good practice to stay hydrated, get adequate rest, exercise, and maintain good nutrition with a balanced diet high in vitamin-rich plants, all of which support the function of our kidneys, liver, and other organs.

Yet the idea of clearing out our bodies has captivated the public imagination for millennia. “We’ve been doing some version of detoxing since antiquity,” says Dr Christopher Labos, a cardiologist, epidemiologist and the author of 2023’s Does Coffee Cause Cancer? And 8 More Myths about the Food We Eat. Only with the development of modern medicine and germ theory have we realized “that much of that rationale of detoxing doesn’t actually hold true,” he says.

Buying a detox supplement at the drugstore is “obviously much more appealing and easier to grasp on to than the real solution.”

The current moment is no different. In fact, we may be talking about, believing in, and spending more money on detoxing than ever. Research estimates the global market for detox wellness products will rise from $49 billion in 2019 to $80.4 billion by 2030. In 2018 alone, Americans spent more than $62 million on detox teas. And with “detox” on the label, even basic products are sold at a premium.

Social media is a breeding ground for detox content. On TikTok, more than 132 million posts use the hashtag #detox, detailing how to fill your belly button with castor oil or drink dangerous borax highballs. Influencers can earn income through affiliate links to dubious detox products on TikTok or Instagram. Users can grow their audience by sharing health “hacks” that span from pointless to harmful, broadcasting their beliefs that lemon water revolutionized their health or that most Americans have a stomach full of parasites.

Why are we so susceptible to detox claims? It doesn’t help that most detox hacks bear a sheen of logic, making them psychologically appealing even when spurious. (I once bought liquid chlorophyll because it seemed correct that drinking pure green plant essence would bolster my health.) Nor that mainstream medical institutions leave many people feeling dismissed, making them more receptive to unverified health advice.

Almost a decade ago in the Guardian, the German physician Edzard Ernst described commercial detox products, like prefab cleanses and tinctures, as a “criminal exploitation of the gullible,” claiming they promised “a simple remedy that frees us of our sins.”

“When most of us utter the word ‘detox’, it’s usually when we’re bleary-eyed and stumbling out of the wrong end of a heavy weekend,” the article stated, and it’s true that online searches for “detox” reliably surge in January, after weeks of holiday indulgence.

It’s easy to dismiss hungover hordes desperate for a quick fix, wellness fanatics who appropriate cultural traditions or those whose health-consciousness has tipped over into conspiratorial mania.

But for the most part, people who are interested in detoxing seem to just want to treat their bodies well. This is a reasonable desire, especially in light of our growing understanding about the many contaminants in our environments and bodies. Recent research on microplastics, PFAS, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), endocrine disruptors, and air pollution paints a disturbing picture of how contact with everyday products and pollutants may harm us.

Even traditionally virtuous behaviors may cause health problems. Last year, researchers found PFAS in most American kale—organic kale harbors even more of the chemicals than its conventionally grown counterparts. A recent study by researchers at Ocean Conservancy and the University of Toronto found microplastic particles in 88 percent of protein sources, including seafood, beef, chicken, and tofu. Millions of Americans have unsafe drinking water. A growing body of research is exploring how we may be dermally absorbing harmful chemicals from synthetic clothing like yoga pants, especially when we work out and sweat. When even flossing our teeth carries the risk of harmful chemical exposure, the question of how to do the right thing feels impossible to answer.

While there is some early research on effective ways of removing plastics and chemicals from our bodies, we’re woefully short on solutions beyond reducing our exposure to harmful compounds. This lack of recourse only exacerbates the fundamental, collective sense of disempowerment and betrayal, compounded by the longstanding injustice of marginalized communities having disproportionately borne the brunt of toxic exposures for decades.

Labos emphasizes that people need access to quality medical care above all else, so that their medical questions can be answered by trustworthy experts, and that the role of a strong scientific education is paramount when it comes to helping people understand why detox products often don’t work the way their marketing suggests.

Buying a detox supplement at the drugstore is “obviously much more appealing and easier to grasp on to than the real solution” to environmental pollution that affects us, says Labos. Yet, by hyperfixating on mostly futile attempts to purify our individual bodies, we allow industry to shift the burden of detoxification on to us, rather than addressing the root cause of contamination. “The real solution to environmental pollution is we stop polluting the air, the water,” he says. “We need to pass legislation to address these issues in the same way that we addressed the depletion of the ozone layer,” he says. “We have fixed similar problems before. We just have to do it again.”

If we started thinking about detoxification as prevention at the source, we could reroute the energy and emotion we expend on buying and trying products and treatments toward collective demands for harm mitigation. We could stop trying to cleanse our colons and focus on forcing stricter regulations on corporations that treat our environment like a toilet. We could save money on liquid chlorophyll and support government spending on PFAS elimination in waterways instead.

“Anyone who says, ‘I have a detox treatment’ is profiting from a false claim and is by definition a crook,” Ernst proclaimed in the Guardian 10 years ago. But our willingness to embrace wishful thinking and wellness trends isn’t criminal; it’s understandable. Nevertheless, if we want to purge pollution, our efforts must extend beyond the body—that’s our bitter pill to swallow.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In April, at the TED conference in Vancouver, BC, I watched a woman pull a variety of mushroom powders from her purse, scoop them into a thermos, and add hot water from a nearby tea station to make an earthy beverage.

Intrigued, I asked about her favorite health practices, and she started describing a recent trip to Costa Rica to get plasmapheresis. “It’s when they take your old plasma out, and they replace it with new, fresh plasma,” she explained.

“Donated plasma?” I asked, picturing a commune’s worth of Bryan Johnson’s teenage sons, milked daily for vital proteins. But she said it had been synthetic plasma, as a detox treatment intended to manage an autoimmune disease.

Plasmapheresis can effectively remove contaminants, such as some heavy metals, from the blood of people with specific health conditions, including autoimmune and blood disease, organ failure, and for those who have recently undergone organ transplants.

Even traditionally virtuous behaviors may cause health problems. Last year, researchers found forever chemicals” in most American kale.

However, for healthy individuals, plasmapheresis cannot improve on the body’s natural detoxification processes, which are efficiently handled by the kidneys, liver, skin, lungs, and other organs—for free. Plus, most heavy metals of concern accumulate in our organs and only trace amounts can be removed in blood.

Elective plasmapheresis for healthy people represents yet another manifestation of the myth of detoxing. Private clinics with varying degrees of oversight offer it, attracting rich medical tourists—even healthy ones.

In an April 2023 Instagram post about her plasma detox treatment, the former professional racecar driver Danica Patrick described the $10,000 treatment as one that “cleans a vast majority of the blood,”getting “rid of metals and mold.”

To illustrate, she holds up a sack of dark amber liquid. “The dark bag is my old plasma,” she writes.

Healthy plasma has the color of dark urine—and that’s perfectly normal. Patrick’s admittedly startling post perpetuates the misconception that toxins in our body manifest as muck that we could cut through like grease in a dish detergent commercial, if only we had the right tool.

That methods like cleanses, juice fasts, supplements, and sauna sessions can detoxify the body is among the most misleading wellness claims. “Detox” practices might feel good, have a place in someone’s personal routine, lead to weight loss or create a placebo effect, but experts have repeatedly debunked claims that they meaningfully remove toxins from our bodies. In fact, in some cases, they may do the opposite by harming our built-in detoxification systems; nutritional supplements account for 20 percent of toxic liver damage in the US.

Aside from medical interventions prescribed for specific conditions, there’s almost nothing we can do to help our bodies detox more effectively. Instead, it’s good practice to stay hydrated, get adequate rest, exercise, and maintain good nutrition with a balanced diet high in vitamin-rich plants, all of which support the function of our kidneys, liver, and other organs.

Yet the idea of clearing out our bodies has captivated the public imagination for millennia. “We’ve been doing some version of detoxing since antiquity,” says Dr Christopher Labos, a cardiologist, epidemiologist and the author of 2023’s Does Coffee Cause Cancer? And 8 More Myths about the Food We Eat. Only with the development of modern medicine and germ theory have we realized “that much of that rationale of detoxing doesn’t actually hold true,” he says.

Buying a detox supplement at the drugstore is “obviously much more appealing and easier to grasp on to than the real solution.”

The current moment is no different. In fact, we may be talking about, believing in, and spending more money on detoxing than ever. Research estimates the global market for detox wellness products will rise from $49 billion in 2019 to $80.4 billion by 2030. In 2018 alone, Americans spent more than $62 million on detox teas. And with “detox” on the label, even basic products are sold at a premium.

Social media is a breeding ground for detox content. On TikTok, more than 132 million posts use the hashtag #detox, detailing how to fill your belly button with castor oil or drink dangerous borax highballs. Influencers can earn income through affiliate links to dubious detox products on TikTok or Instagram. Users can grow their audience by sharing health “hacks” that span from pointless to harmful, broadcasting their beliefs that lemon water revolutionized their health or that most Americans have a stomach full of parasites.

Why are we so susceptible to detox claims? It doesn’t help that most detox hacks bear a sheen of logic, making them psychologically appealing even when spurious. (I once bought liquid chlorophyll because it seemed correct that drinking pure green plant essence would bolster my health.) Nor that mainstream medical institutions leave many people feeling dismissed, making them more receptive to unverified health advice.

Almost a decade ago in the Guardian, the German physician Edzard Ernst described commercial detox products, like prefab cleanses and tinctures, as a “criminal exploitation of the gullible,” claiming they promised “a simple remedy that frees us of our sins.”

“When most of us utter the word ‘detox’, it’s usually when we’re bleary-eyed and stumbling out of the wrong end of a heavy weekend,” the article stated, and it’s true that online searches for “detox” reliably surge in January, after weeks of holiday indulgence.

It’s easy to dismiss hungover hordes desperate for a quick fix, wellness fanatics who appropriate cultural traditions or those whose health-consciousness has tipped over into conspiratorial mania.

But for the most part, people who are interested in detoxing seem to just want to treat their bodies well. This is a reasonable desire, especially in light of our growing understanding about the many contaminants in our environments and bodies. Recent research on microplastics, PFAS, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), endocrine disruptors, and air pollution paints a disturbing picture of how contact with everyday products and pollutants may harm us.

Even traditionally virtuous behaviors may cause health problems. Last year, researchers found PFAS in most American kale—organic kale harbors even more of the chemicals than its conventionally grown counterparts. A recent study by researchers at Ocean Conservancy and the University of Toronto found microplastic particles in 88 percent of protein sources, including seafood, beef, chicken, and tofu. Millions of Americans have unsafe drinking water. A growing body of research is exploring how we may be dermally absorbing harmful chemicals from synthetic clothing like yoga pants, especially when we work out and sweat. When even flossing our teeth carries the risk of harmful chemical exposure, the question of how to do the right thing feels impossible to answer.

While there is some early research on effective ways of removing plastics and chemicals from our bodies, we’re woefully short on solutions beyond reducing our exposure to harmful compounds. This lack of recourse only exacerbates the fundamental, collective sense of disempowerment and betrayal, compounded by the longstanding injustice of marginalized communities having disproportionately borne the brunt of toxic exposures for decades.

Labos emphasizes that people need access to quality medical care above all else, so that their medical questions can be answered by trustworthy experts, and that the role of a strong scientific education is paramount when it comes to helping people understand why detox products often don’t work the way their marketing suggests.

Buying a detox supplement at the drugstore is “obviously much more appealing and easier to grasp on to than the real solution” to environmental pollution that affects us, says Labos. Yet, by hyperfixating on mostly futile attempts to purify our individual bodies, we allow industry to shift the burden of detoxification on to us, rather than addressing the root cause of contamination. “The real solution to environmental pollution is we stop polluting the air, the water,” he says. “We need to pass legislation to address these issues in the same way that we addressed the depletion of the ozone layer,” he says. “We have fixed similar problems before. We just have to do it again.”

If we started thinking about detoxification as prevention at the source, we could reroute the energy and emotion we expend on buying and trying products and treatments toward collective demands for harm mitigation. We could stop trying to cleanse our colons and focus on forcing stricter regulations on corporations that treat our environment like a toilet. We could save money on liquid chlorophyll and support government spending on PFAS elimination in waterways instead.

“Anyone who says, ‘I have a detox treatment’ is profiting from a false claim and is by definition a crook,” Ernst proclaimed in the Guardian 10 years ago. But our willingness to embrace wishful thinking and wellness trends isn’t criminal; it’s understandable. Nevertheless, if we want to purge pollution, our efforts must extend beyond the body—that’s our bitter pill to swallow.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

BP’s shareholders can expect a multibillion-dollar payout this year after the oil giant reported better than expected quarterly profits of almost $2.8 billion and set out plans to develop a new oil hub in the Gulf of Mexico.

The oil company has angered green groups by giving the go-ahead to develop potential oil resources of 10 billion barrels from the new Kaskida project 250 miles Southwest of New Orleans, after scaling back its green investments in the last quarter.

At the same time it will raise its dividend payments by 10 percent while buying back stock worth $1.75 billion over the next three months to bring its total buy-backs for the first half of the year to $3.5 billion—and $7 billion for 2024 as whole.

In total BP has paid out $14.8 billion to shareholders since June 2023, the month that marked the start of the world’s first year-long breach of the 1.5 C heating limit, according to an analysis by Global Witness.

Alice Harrison, head of fossil fuel campaigns at the campaign group, said: “While millions of us struggle with high temperatures and high bills, BP are raking in billions of profits, paying out massive dividends, and doubling down on dirty new oil and gas projects.”

The shareholder windfall comes after BP reported better-than-expected profits of $2.76 billion for the three months to the end of June, compared with analyst forecasts of $2.54 billion for the quarter. The shares rose 2 percent in early trading on Tuesday.

“Fossil fuel companies like BP are turning a blind eye to climate breakdown, so now governments must act.”

The company warned investors earlier this month to expect “significantly lower” profit margins from its refining business, which could wipe between $500 million and $700 million from its earnings for the quarter.

It also told investors it would take a $2 billion writedown resulting from a plan to scale back its refining operations at its Gelsenkirchen biofuels refinery in Germany by a third from next year in response to weaker demand.

The chief executive, Murray Auchincloss, said BP was committed to delivering “a simpler, more focused and higher-value company” for shareholders. But the strategy has angered climate campaigners by appearing to scale back its green investments while pushing forward high-value fossil fuel projects.

In addition to cutting investment in its German biofuels refinery the company has also ruled out further investment in offshore wind while driving forward plans for major oil projects.

Auchincloss told the Guardian that BP is committed to transforming the company from an oil company to an “integrated energy company” and has set out plans to build between five and 10 green hydrogen projects this decade to help produce sustainable aviation fuel and decarbonize BP’s refining operations.

He said BP was poised to go ahead with two green hydrogen projects, which produce the carbon-free gas through electrolysis using renewable power, at its Castellón refinery in Spain and at its Lingen plant in Germany.

BP is also leading the world in biofuels, biogas, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure, Auchincloss said. “What the world needs now is construction—not more targets and pathways. That’s what we’re doing. We’re getting things done.”

Although the oil company’s underlying replacement cost profit—the metric most closely observed by City analysts—reached $2.8 billion for the second quarter, its reported result showed a $165 million loss, compared with a reported profit of $2.3 billion in the same quarter last year, because of the refinery writedown.

Harrison said: “Fossil fuel companies like BP are turning a blind eye to climate breakdown, so now governments must act. Rather than propping up the climate-wrecking fossil fuel industry, we need them to make polluters pay for the damage they have already caused, and steer us towards a cleaner, greener future.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Talking about climate change doesn’t come naturally to most people, even those who are worried about it. Roughly two-thirds of Americans report discussing it with family and friends “rarely” or “never,” a survey found last fall. They might be intimidated by the science, nervous about starting an argument, or afraid of being a Debbie Downer. The resulting silence is part of why there’s not more social pressure to reduce fossil fuel emissions: People dramatically underestimate public support for climate policies, because that’s the cue they’re getting from those around them. The only way to break this cycle, communication experts have said for many years, is to please, please, start talking about it.

But a recently published book makes the case that not just any kind of talking is good; anything that resembles the phrasing of fossil fuel propaganda, even unwittingly, undermines what should be the central goal of reducing emissions. In The Language of Climate Politics, Genevieve Guenther, a former Renaissance scholar turned climate activist, writes that fossil fuel talking points have weaseled their way into becoming the “common-sense position,” espoused not just by the right, but also by the left.

Guenther founded the New York City-based volunteer group End Climate Silence in 2018, in the hopes of provoking the media into talking more about climate change. The common-sense philosophy behind her work is that words shape ideas, and ideas have consequences, so we should rethink the words we use. “To secure a livable future, one thing we will need to do is dismantle and reframe the terms dominating the language of climate politics,” Guenther writes.

“The book is positioned not so much as a guide to communication, but as a guide to taking a side in a battle of words: “One of the most powerful weapons you have is your voice.”

Her book lays out six key terms that she believes command the conversation, to the detriment of climate action: “alarmist,” “costs,” “growth,” “India and China,” “innovation,” and “resilience.”

These words are often used to prop up fossil fuels: by accusing people who speak out about the risks as overly alarmed, by pitting climate action against economic prosperity, by deflecting attention away from the US and onto other countries, and by protecting the status quo by pointing to carbon removal technologies and societies’ ability to bounce back. The book seeks to debunk these points of view, smartly documenting, for example, how economic models failed to account for the true costs of climate change for so long.

For each term, Guenther offers substitute arguments that “will be hard for fossil fuel interests to appropriate.” Don’t talk about “resilience,” she says, because it implies people can tough out extreme weather; talk about “transformation” instead. The result is a binary approach that suggests there is a right way and a wrong way to talk about the climate. This quest for black-and-white moral clarity risks antagonizing potential allies—such as the climate-concerned folks who think that carbon removal has promise or advocates who worry that a message could backfire if it sounds too scary, not to mention younger Republicans, two-thirds of whom favor prioritizing renewable energy over expanding fossil fuels. But that’s a risk Guenther is willing to take.

The opening chapter of The Language of Climate Politics scrutinizes the word “alarmist,” often used to accuse scientists of exaggerating dangers, in the service of embracing “alarmed,” which Guenther thinks is “a perfectly appropriate” response to the planet exiting the comfortable conditions that complex societies evolved in over the last 10,000 years. She criticizes the various factions within the climate discourse, from “lukewarmers” and “techno-optimists” who imagine a warmer future won’t be so bad, to “doomers” who imagine it’s too late to fix anything. 

In the same spirit of putting people into boxes, Guenther’s critics might classify her as a “carbon reductionist” whose dogged focus on ending CO2 emissions elides the complex social and political factors behind weather disasters. In her view, anyone who questions those sounding the alarm, even a scientist who dislikes hyperbole, is overstepping. After the UN Secretary-General António Guterres proclaimed last year that the era of “global boiling” had arrived, NASA climate scientist Chris Colose criticized it as a “cringe” phrase that lets “bad faith people get an easy laugh.” Guenther condemns this critique as a distraction.

She acknowledges that her argument—“climate change will become catastrophic for everyone if the world does not phase out fossil fuels”—may not resonate broadly. “You may repel people who are generally disengaged from the climate crisis—not to mention centrist optimists—because it will be too much for them to take in at once. But that’s OK.” Her audience clearly isn’t the general public. To support this narrow focus, Guenther points to the “3.5 percent rule,” the idea that you only need to mobilize a small minority, 3.5 percent of a population, to force serious political change. 

To make the “vast, swift system change now needed to head off collapse, we will need to take a pretty large swathe of the 99 percent with us,” wrote an Extinction Rebellion strategist.

The problem is that this number comes from political science research on how nonviolent campaigns can overthrow authoritarian governments, not campaigns seeking social change in democracies. It doesn’t necessarily translate to the process of implementing laws to reduce emissions over decades. The Harvard researcher behind the rule, Erica Chenoweth, has warned that aiming to mobilize 3.5 percent of a population without building wide public support is no guarantee of success. “It can be easy to conclude, I think wrongly, that all you need is 3.5 percent of the population on your side,” Chenoweth said on a podcast in 2022.

One climate activist group that was inspired by the 3.5 percent rule has since shifted away from the strategy. Extinction Rebellion drew the world’s attention in 2018 when its members in the United Kingdom began blockading bridges, supergluing their hands to government buildings, and pouring fake blood on the streets.

For years, critics within the organization warned that it was misusing the rule, potentially missing out on more effective strategies that would bring in the broader approval needed to enact climate policies. “To actually effect the kind of vast, swift system change now needed to head off collapse, we will need to take a pretty large swathe of the 99 percent with us,” wrote Rupert Read, a former XR strategist, in 2019.

Three years later, recognizing this need, Extinction Rebellion UK announced that it was shifting tactics from smashing windows to building bridges, “prioritizing attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks.” Since then, organizers say, support has grown and more people are becoming members.

Near the end of The Language of Climate Politics, in what could be read as a self-critique, Guenther gestures toward the need for a broad movement to force the US to move away from fossil fuels—one that includes Black communities fighting toxic pollution, young people worried about their future, and possibly even (gasp) climate tech entrepreneurs. The book as a whole, with its emphasis on reinforcing divisions, feels firmly placed in a time when social media has inflamed polarization, and a moment when a Democratic president has been in power for years.

Having a climate-friendly face like President Joe Biden in the White House tends to cause the environmental movement to splinter, with some groups focused on “insider” tactics, like lobbying Congress and crafting policies, and others focusing on “outsider” tactics, pushing for more ambitious change by protesting. By contrast, if former president and vigorous climate denier Donald Trump gets reelected this fall, even the vaguely climate-concerned could be mobilized for a revived “Resistance” movement, once again united by a common enemy.

What Guenther’s book gets right is that conversations about climate change have to be steered away from tired talking points toward new, productive ground. But the book is positioned not so much as a guide to communication, but as a guide to taking a side in a battle of words, with Guenther writing, “One of the most powerful weapons you have is your voice.”

Research shows that the hard work of persuasion, however, usually starts with listening to people with an empathetic, nonjudgmental ear, as opposed to debating them. It involves asking questions, building trust, and accepting that you’re not always right. Guenther eventually embraces this practical advice for approaching conversations with real people in a three-page afterword, and it seems to counter the strident tone of the nearly 200 pages that preceded it. That’s because there isn’t one right way to talk about climate change, but many.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A class-action lawsuit against American Airlines filed by employees opposed to Environmental, Social, and Governance funds used in their 401(k)s could redefine how employers handle ESG investing and respond to further litigation. 

The American Airlines suit, filed in federal court in Texas, is one of the first in the private sector to focus on the use of ESG funds in employees’ retirement accounts. The lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, pilot Bryan Spence, alleges that American mismanaged employees’ retirement savings by investing with fund managers who “pursue leftist political agendas” through ESG strategies, proxy voting and shareholder activism. 

The lawsuit, certified as a class action in May, could include as many as 100,000 plan members. American Airlines employees like Spence contribute to their 401(k)s by choosing from a menu of investment options pre-selected by the company. All plan members, whether they decided to invest their individual 401(k) in an ESG plan or not, are included in the class action. 

ESG funds that refrain from owning fossil fuel stocks purely due to moral concerns about climate change may run afoul of the law.

The class is inclusive because the lawsuit argues that, by engaging with investment firms that “pursue pervasive ESG agendas,” American Airlines failed its duty to employees. It claims that firms like BlackRock are prioritizing “socio-political outcomes rather than exclusively financial returns” and accuses American Airlines of failing to safeguard its employees’ financial interests by doing business with such investors.  

The political battle raging over sustainable investing in the US is changing how fund managers use and promote ESG factors in their work, said Chris Fidler, head of the global industry standards team at the CFA Institute, a nonprofit based in Charlottesville, Virginia, that provides investment professionals with finance education. Efforts to define the term as a moral and political tool rather than a financial one has “made asset managers more reluctant to talk about what they’re doing,” Fiddler said. 

BlackRock, American Airlines and Spence’s lawyer, Hacker Stephens LLP, did not immediately respond to requests for comments. 

The lawsuit falls under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). How it’s interpreted has come under serious debate in recent years, especially concerning ESG investments. 

In 2022, the Biden administration released new rules designed to encourage social and policy goals such as renewable energy by making ESG investing easier. The rules were challenged by 26 Republican state attorneys general, but a district court judge in Texas ultimately upheld Biden’s rule. The Biden regulation itself reversed a Trump-era rule that had aimed to limit ESG investing for retirement plans, given fossil fuel companies’ hostility to ESG.

Despite the back-and-forth, ERISA still dictates that an employer should make decisions based exclusively on financial factors, said Max Schanzenbach, Seigle Family professor of law at Northwestern University. Under the new regulations, moral or political ESG considerations cannot be used by employers to select investment funds. 

Only in limited circumstances can non-financial ESG factors be used to pick an investment. A “tiebreaker” rule allows fund managers to use “collateral benefits,” such as greenhouse gas emissions, only when two investments provide equal financial returns otherwise. 

The difference between Trump’s 2020 rule and Biden’s 2022 rule is a matter of nuance, Schanzenbach said. “The Biden administration tried to make ESG investing easier, but they ultimately wound up with a very centrist rule. And Trump tried to make it harder and also wound up with a very centrist rule.” 

“If funds are using ESG factors to evaluate the financial risks and opportunities of the company, they’re going to continue to do that.”

While both rules were painted as watershed attacks or defenses of ESG, Schanzenbach noted that they both upheld “sole financial interests” as the standard dictating retirement investing for American companies. This means that employers are expected to use a financial analysis, rather than ethical or political concerns, to choose investments. 

Under this framework, the American Airlines pilot and his lawyers must demonstrate that the company violated its fiduciary duty—the legal obligation to act in the best interest of its plan members—when it decided to work with BlackRock and similar investment firms. Whether they succeed could have a chilling effect on companies and investment funds’ decisions to engage with, or disclose their use of ESG, Schanzenbach said.  

ESG, as it is used in the US, does not refer to a single type of investment, explained Schanzenbach. The distinction between two types of ESG investments will dictate how American Airlines and other employers navigate ERISA rules and litigation.

First, an ESG investing strategy might screen out industries or companies based on ethical or environmental objectives. For example, ESG funds that refrain from owning fossil fuel stocks purely due to moral concerns about climate change are using non-financial factors to make investment decisions—and could violate federal ERISA law, he said. 

The other way to use the term ESG refers more specifically to how fund managers or individual investors assess risk and returns. It’s a way to value companies and stocks by looking at how environmental or social shifts could make them more or less valuable down the line. This is what Schanzenbach calls “ESG for a profit.”

Susan Gary, professor emerita at the University of Oregon’s School of Law, said the lawsuit against American Airlines alleges that the company is using ESG for the first purpose: as a tool to achieve political and moral ends. The original complaint cited “leftist activist groups” that it claims sought to advance their “ESG agendas” rather than maximizing profits and the interests of workers. The attempts in various states, including Texas, to block the use of ESG for political reasons echo a common misunderstanding about how investment managers do their jobs, she added. 

“It’s much more nuanced, much more complicated than (the lawsuit) is describing,” Gary said of American’s use of ESG funds. Investment managers use ESG information to develop their strategy, she continued. “It’s not that there’s one ESG investment strategy.” 

When deciding to invest in a company, plan managers assess a wide range of information. 

This is where ESG comes in, said Fidler, who led the development of the Global ESG Disclosure Standards for Investment Products at the CFA Institute. When considering where to put money, plan managers might take into account how environmental, social, and governance issues will impact the value of the stock. 

“Not everything about a company is captured in its financial statements or in market data,” he continued. “You can use ESG information as part of a holistic fundamental analysis that looks at all the different risks and opportunities that face a business, and evaluate them through the lens of: Is this a good investment?” 

A real estate investor might, for example, consider whether a property is in a floodplain before buying it. Environmental information like flood risks would potentially diminish or ruin the value of the investment down the line. “If funds are using ESG factors to evaluate the financial risks and opportunities of the company, they’re going to continue to do that,” Fidler said. 

“This is ideology and American cultural wars brought to the financial markets.”

But rising backlash against sustainability and climate considerations has caused companies to go quiet about this. The behavior is so prevalent that a term has been coined for it: “greenhushing.” BlackRock, the asset manager repeatedly mentioned in the lawsuit, stopped using the term ESG last year. The firm’s CEO Larry Fink says the company maintains its stance on issues such as climate change, but that the term “ESG” had become too political. 

Litigation like the American Airlines case might exacerbate the phenomenon and push fund managers to scale down using “ESG” or “sustainable” in names, marketing and advertising. “But I don’t think that means that managers will ignore these sorts of risks or information if it’s helping their analysis,” Fidler added.

Rodrigo Zeidan, a professor of business and finance at NYU Shanghai, agreed. This kind of lawsuit, he added, won’t impact the way fund managers do their jobs. “The environment doesn’t care if the American law decides that American funds cannot call their investments ESG,” he said. “Good fund managers will still try to allocate their portfolio to companies that they believe will survive in the long run.” 

Whether fund managers find a new term for ESG or stop calling it anything at all, these lawsuits won’t bring about a revamping of the financial industry, he said. 

Nonetheless, litigation risk does have an impact on companies. Zeidan said it has already kept management teams and boards of directors away from ESG initiatives. “Board members will claim that they don’t want to make any decisions that deviate from a very narrow reading of what fiduciary duty means,” he said. “And that this narrow reading is mainly to limit the legal risk.” 

The cost of these lawsuits, too, might have a chilling effect on companies’ approach to ESG and sustainability. Employees at companies like Google have recently asked their employers to divest their 401(k)s from fossil fuels, but such a policy could expose companies to similar fiduciary duty lawsuits. 

“I think that’s probably part of the litigation strategy, to make it expensive,” Gary said. “Expensive to engage in anything that appears to be ESG investing.”

Much of the politicization of ESG boils down to pensions and government spending, Gary noted. The American Airlines case is not the first time that Texas has been at the forefront of litigation attempting to restrict these two areas. Last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton co-led the multistate lawsuit against the Biden administration’s ERISA rules. The lawsuit is now on appeal in the northern district of Texas court. 

In 2021, Texas passed two laws to ban municipalities from doing business with banks that have ESG policies. The legislation was aimed at protecting Texas’ reliance on oil and gas and firearm industries, but research from economists at Wharton and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago suggests that Texas cities could end up paying $300 million to $500 million in additional interest as a result.

Public pensions in Texas are already barred from investing in funds run by asset management firms such as BlackRock. Supporters of those bills claim that these firms “boycott” Texas energy companies through their ESG policies, despite the banned funds investing a combined $5 billion in oil and gas, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. 

While the lawsuit awaits its next hearings and likely lengthy litigation and potential subsequent appeals, fund managers will continue to do their jobs, Zeidan said.  

“This, for me, is immaterial and has no systemic long-run effect. This is ideology and American cultural wars brought to the financial markets.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A class-action lawsuit against American Airlines filed by employees opposed to Environmental, Social, and Governance funds used in their 401(k)s could redefine how employers handle ESG investing and respond to further litigation. 

The American Airlines suit, filed in federal court in Texas, is one of the first in the private sector to focus on the use of ESG funds in employees’ retirement accounts. The lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, pilot Bryan Spence, alleges that American mismanaged employees’ retirement savings by investing with fund managers who “pursue leftist political agendas” through ESG strategies, proxy voting and shareholder activism. 

The lawsuit, certified as a class action in May, could include as many as 100,000 plan members. American Airlines employees like Spence contribute to their 401(k)s by choosing from a menu of investment options pre-selected by the company. All plan members, whether they decided to invest their individual 401(k) in an ESG plan or not, are included in the class action. 

ESG funds that refrain from owning fossil fuel stocks purely due to moral concerns about climate change may run afoul of the law.

The class is inclusive because the lawsuit argues that, by engaging with investment firms that “pursue pervasive ESG agendas,” American Airlines failed its duty to employees. It claims that firms like BlackRock are prioritizing “socio-political outcomes rather than exclusively financial returns” and accuses American Airlines of failing to safeguard its employees’ financial interests by doing business with such investors.  

The political battle raging over sustainable investing in the US is changing how fund managers use and promote ESG factors in their work, said Chris Fidler, head of the global industry standards team at the CFA Institute, a nonprofit based in Charlottesville, Virginia, that provides investment professionals with finance education. Efforts to define the term as a moral and political tool rather than a financial one has “made asset managers more reluctant to talk about what they’re doing,” Fiddler said. 

BlackRock, American Airlines and Spence’s lawyer, Hacker Stephens LLP, did not immediately respond to requests for comments. 

The lawsuit falls under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). How it’s interpreted has come under serious debate in recent years, especially concerning ESG investments. 

In 2022, the Biden administration released new rules designed to encourage social and policy goals such as renewable energy by making ESG investing easier. The rules were challenged by 26 Republican state attorneys general, but a district court judge in Texas ultimately upheld Biden’s rule. The Biden regulation itself reversed a Trump-era rule that had aimed to limit ESG investing for retirement plans, given fossil fuel companies’ hostility to ESG.

Despite the back-and-forth, ERISA still dictates that an employer should make decisions based exclusively on financial factors, said Max Schanzenbach, Seigle Family professor of law at Northwestern University. Under the new regulations, moral or political ESG considerations cannot be used by employers to select investment funds. 

Only in limited circumstances can non-financial ESG factors be used to pick an investment. A “tiebreaker” rule allows fund managers to use “collateral benefits,” such as greenhouse gas emissions, only when two investments provide equal financial returns otherwise. 

The difference between Trump’s 2020 rule and Biden’s 2022 rule is a matter of nuance, Schanzenbach said. “The Biden administration tried to make ESG investing easier, but they ultimately wound up with a very centrist rule. And Trump tried to make it harder and also wound up with a very centrist rule.” 

“If funds are using ESG factors to evaluate the financial risks and opportunities of the company, they’re going to continue to do that.”

While both rules were painted as watershed attacks or defenses of ESG, Schanzenbach noted that they both upheld “sole financial interests” as the standard dictating retirement investing for American companies. This means that employers are expected to use a financial analysis, rather than ethical or political concerns, to choose investments. 

Under this framework, the American Airlines pilot and his lawyers must demonstrate that the company violated its fiduciary duty—the legal obligation to act in the best interest of its plan members—when it decided to work with BlackRock and similar investment firms. Whether they succeed could have a chilling effect on companies and investment funds’ decisions to engage with, or disclose their use of ESG, Schanzenbach said.  

ESG, as it is used in the US, does not refer to a single type of investment, explained Schanzenbach. The distinction between two types of ESG investments will dictate how American Airlines and other employers navigate ERISA rules and litigation.

First, an ESG investing strategy might screen out industries or companies based on ethical or environmental objectives. For example, ESG funds that refrain from owning fossil fuel stocks purely due to moral concerns about climate change are using non-financial factors to make investment decisions—and could violate federal ERISA law, he said. 

The other way to use the term ESG refers more specifically to how fund managers or individual investors assess risk and returns. It’s a way to value companies and stocks by looking at how environmental or social shifts could make them more or less valuable down the line. This is what Schanzenbach calls “ESG for a profit.”

Susan Gary, professor emerita at the University of Oregon’s School of Law, said the lawsuit against American Airlines alleges that the company is using ESG for the first purpose: as a tool to achieve political and moral ends. The original complaint cited “leftist activist groups” that it claims sought to advance their “ESG agendas” rather than maximizing profits and the interests of workers. The attempts in various states, including Texas, to block the use of ESG for political reasons echo a common misunderstanding about how investment managers do their jobs, she added. 

“It’s much more nuanced, much more complicated than (the lawsuit) is describing,” Gary said of American’s use of ESG funds. Investment managers use ESG information to develop their strategy, she continued. “It’s not that there’s one ESG investment strategy.” 

When deciding to invest in a company, plan managers assess a wide range of information. 

This is where ESG comes in, said Fidler, who led the development of the Global ESG Disclosure Standards for Investment Products at the CFA Institute. When considering where to put money, plan managers might take into account how environmental, social, and governance issues will impact the value of the stock. 

“Not everything about a company is captured in its financial statements or in market data,” he continued. “You can use ESG information as part of a holistic fundamental analysis that looks at all the different risks and opportunities that face a business, and evaluate them through the lens of: Is this a good investment?” 

A real estate investor might, for example, consider whether a property is in a floodplain before buying it. Environmental information like flood risks would potentially diminish or ruin the value of the investment down the line. “If funds are using ESG factors to evaluate the financial risks and opportunities of the company, they’re going to continue to do that,” Fidler said. 

“This is ideology and American cultural wars brought to the financial markets.”

But rising backlash against sustainability and climate considerations has caused companies to go quiet about this. The behavior is so prevalent that a term has been coined for it: “greenhushing.” BlackRock, the asset manager repeatedly mentioned in the lawsuit, stopped using the term ESG last year. The firm’s CEO Larry Fink says the company maintains its stance on issues such as climate change, but that the term “ESG” had become too political. 

Litigation like the American Airlines case might exacerbate the phenomenon and push fund managers to scale down using “ESG” or “sustainable” in names, marketing and advertising. “But I don’t think that means that managers will ignore these sorts of risks or information if it’s helping their analysis,” Fidler added.

Rodrigo Zeidan, a professor of business and finance at NYU Shanghai, agreed. This kind of lawsuit, he added, won’t impact the way fund managers do their jobs. “The environment doesn’t care if the American law decides that American funds cannot call their investments ESG,” he said. “Good fund managers will still try to allocate their portfolio to companies that they believe will survive in the long run.” 

Whether fund managers find a new term for ESG or stop calling it anything at all, these lawsuits won’t bring about a revamping of the financial industry, he said. 

Nonetheless, litigation risk does have an impact on companies. Zeidan said it has already kept management teams and boards of directors away from ESG initiatives. “Board members will claim that they don’t want to make any decisions that deviate from a very narrow reading of what fiduciary duty means,” he said. “And that this narrow reading is mainly to limit the legal risk.” 

The cost of these lawsuits, too, might have a chilling effect on companies’ approach to ESG and sustainability. Employees at companies like Google have recently asked their employers to divest their 401(k)s from fossil fuels, but such a policy could expose companies to similar fiduciary duty lawsuits. 

“I think that’s probably part of the litigation strategy, to make it expensive,” Gary said. “Expensive to engage in anything that appears to be ESG investing.”

Much of the politicization of ESG boils down to pensions and government spending, Gary noted. The American Airlines case is not the first time that Texas has been at the forefront of litigation attempting to restrict these two areas. Last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton co-led the multistate lawsuit against the Biden administration’s ERISA rules. The lawsuit is now on appeal in the northern district of Texas court. 

In 2021, Texas passed two laws to ban municipalities from doing business with banks that have ESG policies. The legislation was aimed at protecting Texas’ reliance on oil and gas and firearm industries, but research from economists at Wharton and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago suggests that Texas cities could end up paying $300 million to $500 million in additional interest as a result.

Public pensions in Texas are already barred from investing in funds run by asset management firms such as BlackRock. Supporters of those bills claim that these firms “boycott” Texas energy companies through their ESG policies, despite the banned funds investing a combined $5 billion in oil and gas, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. 

While the lawsuit awaits its next hearings and likely lengthy litigation and potential subsequent appeals, fund managers will continue to do their jobs, Zeidan said.  

“This, for me, is immaterial and has no systemic long-run effect. This is ideology and American cultural wars brought to the financial markets.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

René Heiden pulls two glass yogurt jars off the shop shelf, and lists the nearby supermarkets in which they can be returned once empty.

His Berlin grocery shop avoids single-use packaging in favor of reusable containers, a waste reduction model that is having something of a revival in Germany. But it’s surprisingly hard to get right.

“You need a range of packaging to make it as convenient as possible for the consumer,” says Heiden. An oil bottle, for example, needs a thin neck and a small spout to help it drip—“you would never put yogurt in one of those.” Marmalade and spreads, on the other hand, work best in cylindrical jars that a knife can fully scrape.

Germany has long been praised for its recycling prowess, but its efforts to reuse packaging are perhaps more impressive. Three of its favorite drinks—beer, water and milk (arguably in that order)—are covered by nationwide deposit schemes. Food companies are starting to embrace the refill movement for other foods as well.

Europe’s packaging problems have piled up as consumerism spreads and countries across Asia have closed their ports to ships full of western trash.

“I’m seeing more and more products that use reusable packaging,” says Heiden, who has devoted a wall of his shop Samariter Unverpackt to dispensers of grains and cereals from which customers can fill home-brought containers. “But I also see some producers who are trying to expand, but have to go back because the handling costs are too high.”

The problem that Heiden and others are trying to tackle is a glut of garbage that is fouling waterways, killing wildlife and—after plastics break down into tiny particles—infiltrating our organs. In 2021, the average German generated about eight times their bodyweight in waste: a whopping 651 kilograms, more than the average residents of all but four countries in Europe. Germany created 64 percent more plastic waste that year than it did two decades earlier, and it burned most of it.

But it’s not just a problem here. Europe’s packaging problems have piled up as consumerism has spread and countries across Asia have closed their ports to ships full of western trash. As part of efforts to stop harmful garbage clogging landfills or being burned in incinerators, the EU has set targets to reduce packaging 5 percent by 2030, 10 percent by 2035 and 15 percent by 2040.

Recycling is one option, but plastic recycling is a knotty and unresolved issue. Besides, the European hierarchy of waste has put prevention and reuse above recycling since 2008. But campaigners say rules to reduce packaging are riddled with loopholes—and are calling not just for tighter regulations, but also a culture shift.

“The best packaging is the one you don’t produce,” says Nathan Dufour, who leads efforts to promote reuse systems at the campaign group Zero Waste Europe. If you need to use it—for hygiene reasons, say—“then that packaging needs to stay in the loop for as long as possible.”

Germany has a head start on many of its neighbors with its bottle deposit schemes, in which customers are charged a bit more upfront for their purchase—whether fancy juice from an organic store or cheap beer from an off-license—and given the money back when they return the empty glass. The bottles, which get dropped off in “reverse vending machines” in supermarkets, are then transported, cleaned and refilled.

Hidden behind this process is a delicate alliance of companies that have agreed to standardise and share their packaging, some of which go back a long way. The Milch Mehrweg Pool—Milk Reuse Pool (MMP)—for example, was started by the German dairy industry in the 80s and formalised in the 90s.

Countries that lack Germany’s infrastructure to process bottles—and the culture around returning them—may also find it tricky to build up such a system from scratch.

The process has not been smooth sailing, and after 2008, the organisation was disbanded. The system continued, ungoverned, until 2022 when it was reactivated as the Mach Mehrweg Pool (“Make Reuse Pool”). Now it is working on strengthening cooperation between members and increase efficiency. It has also expanded to include other foods and drinks.

“Reusable systems are most efficient if they are scaled, if they are used a lot, if they are used in every region,” says Julia Klein, a former engineer from Siemens who runs the MMP. “Only keeping this to the dairy sector limits the potential.”

One customer is the coffee retailer Truesday; its brown bottles are on the shelves of Heiden’s store. The aim is to sell the beans for their “true price”—accounting for hidden costs and compensating for damages that can’t be avoided. To cut down on plastic waste, its founder, Henning Reiche, decided to sell the beans in MMP bottles, which he thinks also helps with the marketing. The brown glass keeps the beans safe from sunlight but customers can still see through it. “It’s a nice symbol of the transparency that we want to express with the pricing.”

The MMP has little raw data on its environmental footprint—an issue Klein chalks up to years of inactivity—but based on numbers from the mineral water industry, it estimates the average milk bottle in its pool lasts about 50 cycles in the system.

The benefits of a reuse pool include economies of scale and lower barriers to entry for newcomers. The standardisation process means bottles can be used by all companies in the pool, so “empties” need only to be taken to the nearest buyer. This cuts transport costs—and emissions.

But there are also costs. Glass bottles are heavier than single-use packaging, which increases emissions from transport, and they may need expensive cleaning equipment that small firms lack. Heide, who runs Samariter Unverpackt, says they also take more time to process within the store—and the extra seconds add up.

Countries that lack Germany’s infrastructure to process bottles—and the culture around returning them—may also find it tricky to build up such a system from scratch.

“I realized it’s a totally different story for other European countries that are starting from zero,” says Klein. Brands don’t know which labels and machinery to use, supermarkets don’t have space to stack crates and consumers aren’t used to returning empty containers.

But starting a new system offers the chance to make it more efficient than Germany’s, she adds.

“If you look from an outside perspective, it doesn’t make so much sense to carry dirty empty jars and bottles back to the supermarket,” says Klein. “In the long run, what makes much more sense is if reusable packaging is being picked up at home.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

René Heiden pulls two glass yogurt jars off the shop shelf, and lists the nearby supermarkets in which they can be returned once empty.

His Berlin grocery shop avoids single-use packaging in favor of reusable containers, a waste reduction model that is having something of a revival in Germany. But it’s surprisingly hard to get right.

“You need a range of packaging to make it as convenient as possible for the consumer,” says Heiden. An oil bottle, for example, needs a thin neck and a small spout to help it drip—“you would never put yogurt in one of those.” Marmalade and spreads, on the other hand, work best in cylindrical jars that a knife can fully scrape.

Germany has long been praised for its recycling prowess, but its efforts to reuse packaging are perhaps more impressive. Three of its favorite drinks—beer, water and milk (arguably in that order)—are covered by nationwide deposit schemes. Food companies are starting to embrace the refill movement for other foods as well.

Europe’s packaging problems have piled up as consumerism spreads and countries across Asia have closed their ports to ships full of western trash.

“I’m seeing more and more products that use reusable packaging,” says Heiden, who has devoted a wall of his shop Samariter Unverpackt to dispensers of grains and cereals from which customers can fill home-brought containers. “But I also see some producers who are trying to expand, but have to go back because the handling costs are too high.”

The problem that Heiden and others are trying to tackle is a glut of garbage that is fouling waterways, killing wildlife and—after plastics break down into tiny particles—infiltrating our organs. In 2021, the average German generated about eight times their bodyweight in waste: a whopping 651 kilograms, more than the average residents of all but four countries in Europe. Germany created 64 percent more plastic waste that year than it did two decades earlier, and it burned most of it.

But it’s not just a problem here. Europe’s packaging problems have piled up as consumerism has spread and countries across Asia have closed their ports to ships full of western trash. As part of efforts to stop harmful garbage clogging landfills or being burned in incinerators, the EU has set targets to reduce packaging 5 percent by 2030, 10 percent by 2035 and 15 percent by 2040.

Recycling is one option, but plastic recycling is a knotty and unresolved issue. Besides, the European hierarchy of waste has put prevention and reuse above recycling since 2008. But campaigners say rules to reduce packaging are riddled with loopholes—and are calling not just for tighter regulations, but also a culture shift.

“The best packaging is the one you don’t produce,” says Nathan Dufour, who leads efforts to promote reuse systems at the campaign group Zero Waste Europe. If you need to use it—for hygiene reasons, say—“then that packaging needs to stay in the loop for as long as possible.”

Germany has a head start on many of its neighbors with its bottle deposit schemes, in which customers are charged a bit more upfront for their purchase—whether fancy juice from an organic store or cheap beer from an off-license—and given the money back when they return the empty glass. The bottles, which get dropped off in “reverse vending machines” in supermarkets, are then transported, cleaned and refilled.

Hidden behind this process is a delicate alliance of companies that have agreed to standardise and share their packaging, some of which go back a long way. The Milch Mehrweg Pool—Milk Reuse Pool (MMP)—for example, was started by the German dairy industry in the 80s and formalised in the 90s.

Countries that lack Germany’s infrastructure to process bottles—and the culture around returning them—may also find it tricky to build up such a system from scratch.

The process has not been smooth sailing, and after 2008, the organisation was disbanded. The system continued, ungoverned, until 2022 when it was reactivated as the Mach Mehrweg Pool (“Make Reuse Pool”). Now it is working on strengthening cooperation between members and increase efficiency. It has also expanded to include other foods and drinks.

“Reusable systems are most efficient if they are scaled, if they are used a lot, if they are used in every region,” says Julia Klein, a former engineer from Siemens who runs the MMP. “Only keeping this to the dairy sector limits the potential.”

One customer is the coffee retailer Truesday; its brown bottles are on the shelves of Heiden’s store. The aim is to sell the beans for their “true price”—accounting for hidden costs and compensating for damages that can’t be avoided. To cut down on plastic waste, its founder, Henning Reiche, decided to sell the beans in MMP bottles, which he thinks also helps with the marketing. The brown glass keeps the beans safe from sunlight but customers can still see through it. “It’s a nice symbol of the transparency that we want to express with the pricing.”

The MMP has little raw data on its environmental footprint—an issue Klein chalks up to years of inactivity—but based on numbers from the mineral water industry, it estimates the average milk bottle in its pool lasts about 50 cycles in the system.

The benefits of a reuse pool include economies of scale and lower barriers to entry for newcomers. The standardisation process means bottles can be used by all companies in the pool, so “empties” need only to be taken to the nearest buyer. This cuts transport costs—and emissions.

But there are also costs. Glass bottles are heavier than single-use packaging, which increases emissions from transport, and they may need expensive cleaning equipment that small firms lack. Heide, who runs Samariter Unverpackt, says they also take more time to process within the store—and the extra seconds add up.

Countries that lack Germany’s infrastructure to process bottles—and the culture around returning them—may also find it tricky to build up such a system from scratch.

“I realized it’s a totally different story for other European countries that are starting from zero,” says Klein. Brands don’t know which labels and machinery to use, supermarkets don’t have space to stack crates and consumers aren’t used to returning empty containers.

But starting a new system offers the chance to make it more efficient than Germany’s, she adds.

“If you look from an outside perspective, it doesn’t make so much sense to carry dirty empty jars and bottles back to the supermarket,” says Klein. “In the long run, what makes much more sense is if reusable packaging is being picked up at home.”

This investigation was reported in collaboration with The Examination, The Post and Courier, Columbia Journalism Investigations, and RTBF, and co-published in partnership with Mother Jones.

Propulsion without the need for petroleum: That’s the lithium-ion battery’s promise.

Backed by government incentives across the globe, lithium-ion batteries are hailed as key to a green transportation revolution—and for good reason. They cut planet-warming emissions. They promote independence from fossil fuels.

Today, electric vehicle purchases are soaring. They’re expected to account for half of car sales worldwide in the next decade.

But as battery production ramps up—amid record spending to combat climate change—so does a hidden risk that few outside New Jersey or southern France may recognize. And it’s a risk residents of Augusta, Georgia, and communities along the South’s “battery belt” and elsewhere ought to know.

The same companies that spewed “forever chemicals” linked with cancer and other diseases in neighborhoods around the world are now key players in the development of EV batteries—sometimes with hefty taxpayer support. Often those companies keep their chemical formulas and emissions from the public, an investigation by The Examination, reported in collaboration with Columbia Journalism Investigations, the Post and Courier, and Belgian public broadcaster RTBF, and published in partnership with Mother Jones, has found.

New Jersey has previously sued the makers of battery chemicals, citing “abnormally dangerous activities” that contaminated drinking water with “forever chemicals.”

Companies making battery chemicals stand accused of misleading regulators, hiding information, and contaminating communities while making similar, related products.

For decades, forever chemical makers have been “trying to get away with having to tell the authorities as little as possible,” said Gretta Goldenman, a retired attorney who consulted with European Union agencies to improve chemical regulations. “There’s been a real wake-up call in the last five years about how much these companies have not been disclosing.”

Transitioning quickly from gas-guzzling cars and trucks to electric vehicles remains important to reducing motor vehicle exhaust, a leading factor in death and disease, as well as carbon dioxide, a key driver of climate change. So, experts say, it’s crucial to make lithium-ion batteries in ways that don’t pollute communities.

At a facility in Pierre-Bénite, France, chemical giant Arkema produces PVDF, a key polymer used in EV batteries. The plant created such a stew of chemical waste, while making PVDF for other purposes, that it ignited recent protests, led 41 cities to haul the company into court, and prompted French investigators to search it and other Arkema sites. Arkema says activists are overstating the risks and that it is phasing out those waste products anyway. Company representatives also say Arkema uses a different method to make PVDF for electric cars but did not provide details.

In Pedricktown, New Jersey, Richard and Kim Bond spend their days visiting doctors for scores of ailments, and they believe forever chemicals are the culprit. They’re four years into a legal battle in federal district court against chemical companies, including Arkema and Solvay Specialty Polymers—the former and current owners of a nearby PVDF plant.

Both companies dispute the claim that the facility contributed to the Bond family’s health issues.

The state of New Jersey sued the companies, too, claiming they conducted “abnormally dangerous activities” that contaminated drinking water for thousands of people with some of the highest levels of forever chemicals ever recorded. Solvay Specialty Polymers, in particular, downplayed risks, withheld details about chemicals it was using, and did not disclose how its work might harm people, the state alleged.

Arkema has tentatively agreed to pay the state up to $75 million—without admitting wrongdoing. In March, Solvay Specialty Polymers agreed to pay $394 million, although it, too, did not admit fault.

One month later, 745 miles south in Augusta, Georgia, city officials joined executives from Syensqo, the new parent company of Solvay Specialty Polymer. They stood on a sand-filled stage near a 30-acre patch of pine forest where landowners once raised hogs and butter beans, and used golden shovels to break ground on a plant expansion. Here, the company aims to make PVDF exclusively for EV batteries—with a $178 million grant from the US Department of Energy.

The company said there’s no cause for worry; this product will be made using a different process. Safeguards are in place. Government scrutiny will be heavier.

Outside experts say Solvay’s new approach is likely safer but aren’t convinced that makes it safe.

As Ian Cousins, a professor at Stockholm University in Sweden and one of Europe’s leading “forever chemical” experts, put it: “I wouldn’t want it on my doorstep.”

Much has been made of the risks of mining lithium and other precious metals for EV batteries. That process has disrupted sensitive environments, drained water supplies and, with cobalt, even led to slave labor.

Less attention has been paid to the production of batteries’ chemical ingredients—or to the track records of the companies making them.

The chemicals needed for lithium-ion batteries pose tricky problems. They must withstand heat and corrosion, repel water, and be electrochemically stable while meeting performance standards. The industry has often counted on materials that use—or produce as waste—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

This group of more than 10,000 chemicals is found in nonstick coatings, cleaning products, and firefighting foams. Exposure to small amounts of some may decrease fertility, weaken immune systems, and delay development. Others have been linked to kidney disease, liver issues, or prostate, ovarian and testicular cancers. They’ve earned the nickname “forever chemicals” because they take a long time to break down.

Europe and the US for decades have largely relied on chemical companies to self-report production and emissions of these contaminants. Other major forever chemical manufacturing hubs—notably China and India—have barely been regulated.

Too many industry practices aren’t shared with the public, said Jonatan Kleimark of ChemSec, a European nonprofit that advocates for the substitution of hazardous chemicals. “We have a very big lack of transparency in the supply chain and in the production.”

Consider Chemours. The DuPont spinoff was discovered in 2017 to have contaminated North Carolina’s Cape Fear River—and drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people—with forever chemicals it used to make Teflon. The Environmental Protection Agency has linked those PFAS to cancer, and even the UN Human Rights Commission chastised the company for its emissions. Only after Chemours got caught polluting did the public find out what else was in its wastewater: 250 “previously unidentified” PFAS.

Chemours, in a statement, said it has spent millions of dollars installing waste-capturing technologies and has committed to dramatically curtailing PFAS emissions in North Carolina.

Today Chemours markets Teflon for use in EV batteries.

Richard Bond is a 71-year-old retired truck driver whose family hails from southern New Jersey. He has lived most of his life 14 miles downriver of Solvay Specialty Polymers. He and his wife, Kim, moved there in the 1970s, eventually settling in the hamlet of Pedricktown. The couple relished the expansive farmland and the close-knit community of fewer than 1,000.

After Kim gave birth to the couple’s eldest daughter, Christina, in 1978, they noticed she wasn’t walking and talking like other toddlers. Doctors attributed her issues to developmental delays.

At age 8, Christina was diagnosed with a rare disorder often caused by a gene mutation that stalls bone, muscle, and brain development. Genetic testing would later reveal that neither Kim nor Richard has the mutation.

And Christina wasn’t the only one with a baffling health condition. Kim began suffering from gastrointestinal problems shortly after her daughter’s diagnosis. She was often nauseous, doubled over in pain. Richard, too, noticed his hands and feet growing weak; sometimes they went numb. Their other daughters experienced unusually painful periods later attributed to endometriosis. Two of them have since gotten hysterectomies. The family found no explanation for these ailments.

“This has been our life,” Kim said. “Just going from one specialist to another, trying to find answers.”

Then in 2019, the Bonds received a letter from New Jersey officials offering to test the drinking water from their private well.  

The results shocked them. Tests showed their drinking water was riddled with forever chemicals—which they’d never heard of before.

“For 45 years we’ve lived in it, bathed in it, cooked with it, drank it,” Richard said.

One year later, the family sued Solvay and Arkema, among other chemical companies, blaming the area’s PFAS pollution for the health ailments of their daughter. Solvay, along with the other companies, are fighting the claims. The case is ongoing.

While the court battle is over Christina’s health issues, the rest of the Bonds believe their sicknesses, too, stem from exposure to forever chemicals. Today, Richard’s kidneys have shut down, forcing him to undergo dialysis every day. He’s ineligible for a kidney transplant. Christina, now 46, needs help with life’s daily tasks like cooking a meal and sorting her medication. Kim, 65, balances taking care of her husband and adult daughter with 12-hour shifts as a nurse at a nearby hospital.

“I feel guilty for moving my family into the neighborhood,” Richard said.

And, he said, another thought haunts him: “How do I know what is safe?”

The risks of PFAS are becoming increasingly apparent. Research published just this week in the journal Nature Communications shows that one forever chemical can now be found in water, soil, and sometimes snow even miles away from a 3M facility in Minnesota where it was made for about 20 years. The study suggests that this class of PFAS (bis-perfluoroalkyl sulfonimides)—often used to boost lithium-ion battery performance—can affect the behavior of fish in concentrations as small as 25 parts per trillion. Concentrations found in Minnesota were up to 97 times that.

And yet, few studies have explored whether this contaminant might harm people. It’s not even clear how many companies make it. (Solvay advertises it for sale for EVs.) Nor does anyone know how ubiquitous it has become in the environment. Already, small amounts have been found in German drinking water sources.

3M, which recently agreed to a $10.3 billion class-action lawsuit settlement with drinking water suppliers for PFAS pollution without admitting liability, said it is phasing out production of the chemical as part of a wider exit from PFAS manufacturing. Solvay won’t say where or for how long it has produced the chemical.

With the need for EV batteries growing, demand for PVDF is soaring. Six years ago, less than 10 percent of PVDF global production was for batteries, with the rest used for pipes, cable coatings, electronics, and other uses. Today, more than 40 percent of PVDF manufactured is used in EV batteries. And by 2028, global production of PVDF is expected to double, JP Morgan data show.

At the urging of climate scientists, governments around the world have offered tax breaks, grants, and loans to speed up the energy transition. So far, 267 new battery projects have been announced in the U.S. just since President Joe Biden took office, 69 of them in the Southeast, which is now often called the “battery belt.”

While PVDF can be considered a forever chemical, it is largely inert. Some byproducts of producing it, however, can cause trouble for communities. Just ask Edith Metzger.

From her bedroom window in Pierre-Bénite, the 82-year-old can see Arkema’s plant. Her husband worked for many years at the facility, which advertises that some of its PVDF products are “used by all major battery manufacturers in Asia and the US.” In 2022, she learned the facility had been polluting her town with PFAS.

A television report that year showed residents already carried significant forever chemicals in their blood from PFAS the plant no longer used. Health experts urged residents to avoid local eggs and vegetables. The report showed the company was still spraying a different forever chemical into the air and water. Authorities were alarmed enough to demand that Arkema stop its use by 2025. “It’s bad news after bad news,” Metzger said. “And we don’t know where it is going to stop.”

Arkema said its French plant is reducing PFAS emissions faster than originally planned and added that the company “has been engaged in a process of elimination and substitution” of PFAS additives for years because its products are at the heart of the clean energy transition. The European Commission authorized the French government to give Arkema more than 100 million euros in recent years for PVDF-related operations. Government officials wouldn’t disclose how much they actually awarded the company.

The chemical industry says it has made major strides reducing PFAS—and it has. Companies have eliminated some chemicals with the highest-known risks, are adopting new procedures, and are adding emissions and wastewater controls.

“We remain committed to site remediation, advancing water treatment technologies at sites where we have historically manufactured PFAS,” 3M said in a written statement to The Examination.

Still, neither 3M nor Solvay would say how much battery-related PFAS either company has made—or clarify how much, if any, pollution has accompanied that production.

When Augusta, Georgia, officials joined Syensqo executives for the battery-chemical maker’s groundbreaking, details about the company’s New Jersey operation didn’t come up.

Georgia leaders focused on the economic benefits of the company’s expansion. The endeavor is expected to bring in more than $800 million for the state’s third-largest city, a one-time textile hub perhaps best known as the home of the Masters golf tournament.

New Jersey leaders declined to answer questions for this story. But court documents, emails, memos, and letters show just how difficult it was for the Garden State to get Solvay to stop belching chemicals and clean them up.

“Solvay was recalcitrant from the beginning,” said Erica Bergman, a retired case manager who spent 34 years with New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection.

Today Bergman lives in a modest gray home with a nicely kept garden in Johns Island, a Charleston County, South Carolina, community, 150 miles from Augusta.

But Bergman grew up in Hamilton, a suburb of Trenton, and joined her state’s environmental agency out of college in the 1980s. In 2013, she became the regulator charged with overseeing Solvay’s cleanup of chemical contamination at its New Jersey plant. She did that for eight years until she retired in 2021.

If she lived closer to the Georgia facility, “I’d be asking some serious questions,” she said.

For decades, Solvay had been among the world’s biggest chemical conglomerates. Founded by Belgian brothers in the 1860s, it operated in dozens of countries, making gases for semiconductors and solvents for cement, as well as flavorings, fragrances, and plastics. (Last year Solvay split in two; Solvay Specialty Polymers is now run by a new company, Syensqo.)

In 1990, Solvay took over a maze of pipes and tanks on 240 acres in West Deptford, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia International Airport. Lodged in this suburban community of 20,000 near one of the nation’s busiest petroleum and crude oil ports, the chemical plant had been run for years by companies that were later bought by Arkema. The facility used a compound containing another in the alphabet soup of forever chemicals: perfluorononanoic acid, or PFNA. Solvay used PFNA to make PVDF.

“Solvay uses obfuscation and sleight of hand to avoid providing anything that might make them stop using the chemicals they want to use.”

By the time Solvay quit using PFNA in 2010, its sprawling facility, which looms over West Deptford’s landscape of cookie-cutter homes and cul-de-sacs, had discharged more than 100,000 pounds of the chemical into the surrounding air and water, according to state regulators.

In 2013, the public learned that PFNA had been found in the Delaware River at higher levels than anywhere else in the world. Drinking water concentrations of it in tiny Paulsboro, an industrial borough a few miles away, were 15 times above what EPA now considers safe.

While PFNA was not yet regulated, studies suggested it may be toxic at extremely low levels. It builds up and persists in the body years after exposure, and it can pose risks to the liver, spleen, kidneys, and reproductive organs.

New Jersey health officials urged area parents to feed infants formula made with bottled water. Solvay provided the water, conducted sampling, and installed treatment on the well.

All the while, Solvay Specialty Polymers, and the state were at war.

Solvay took the state to court for setting emergency limits on PFNA in groundwater. When state regulators proposed limits for the chemical in drinking water, Solvay objected to that too. Then, in 2019, EPA chemists found evidence that Solvay was releasing yet another generation of toxic PFAS. New Jersey’s environmental agency demanded details from Solvay, which the company provided—on the condition that its information be kept from the public.

Those disclosures, first reported in 2020 by Consumer Reports, showed that long before Solvay stopped spewing PFNA, it had been pumping out hundreds of thousands of pounds of other forever chemicals too—and still was. Solvay has known since 2006 that these new substances were toxic to rats. Since 2011, a sister plant in Italy has studied the chemicals in its workers’ blood and found markers for liver damage and other health risks, which the company insists have not led to any “pathological effects on our employees.”

Danger from this new generation of chemicals appeared “similar or higher,” than for the PFAS they’d replaced, the state determined.

“What do we know, toxicologically? Nothing,” said EPA chemist Mark Strynar. “Do they degrade? Not sure. Do they accumulate? We don’t know.”

“Solvay uses obfuscation and sleight of hand to avoid providing anything that might make them stop using the chemicals they want to use,” said Tracy Carluccio, an activist with the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an environmental group.

In 2020, the state sued. The scope and extent of Solvay’s remediation work “have been woefully inadequate,” the state charged. “Solvay has consistently failed to take responsibility, correct its past actions, and cease polluting.”

Solvay characterized things differently. In letters and emails to the state, the company highlighted steps it had taken: sampling water, hiring remediation engineers, modeling how its air pollution might have dispersed, adding new treatment to its groundwater. It repeatedly reminded the state that there could be other sources of contamination. Solvay argued—and maintains to this day—that another company was responsible for water contamination in Paulsboro.

The company insisted it was honoring regulators’ expectations.

The state disagreed, arguing that the company’s assertions were “demonstrably false.”

In March 2021, amid this legal battle, Solvay told state officials it was eliminating the use of all PFAS in its processing. It already had completed a phaseout of forever chemical aids used to make PVDF. The company said that marked an 80 percent reduction in PFAS use overall.

The implication: Company waste would no longer contain PFAS.

Within days, the state collected wastewater samples from the plant and shipped them to North Carolina.

Mark Strynar, an EPA chemist, works from a massive office complex in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, a forested hub for scientists and techies sandwiched between Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham. He calls his work “environmental forensics.” That means he’s a sleuth.

Strynar and colleagues analyze water, soil, and blood sent to them by other scientists. Their job: identifying synthetic compounds that find their way into nature. Their specialty: uncovering new stuff. 

Strynar had helped find PFAS in the Cape Fear River. And he’d helped his EPA colleagues discover Solvay’s “alternative PFAS.” So when containers of chemical waste from New Jersey arrived in the spring of 2021, Strynar and colleague James McCord knew what to do.

They ran the samples through a high-resolution mass spectrometer, which identifies individual chemical molecules by weight, distinguishing between known and unknown substances.

McCord and Strynar found a surprise: dozens of largely unknown PVDF-like chemicals. By definitions used in Europe, most would be considered PFAS. By definitions the EPA used, many would not. “Oh, these are weird,” McCord recalled thinking. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“It is possible for companies to make mistakes, to learn from them and, you know, operate better going forward, and we want to create space for that,” says an Energy Department official.

There was no way to track their abundance. Nor could they ascribe any potential risk. That would require months, if not years, of health studies. They are unregulated.

“What do we know, toxicologically? Nothing,” Strynar said. “Do they degrade? Not sure. Do they accumulate? We don’t know.”

The pair dug into patent literature. They talked to organic chemists about polymers. They learned that with processes like the one in use in New Jersey, making PVDF could create residual forever-chemical byproducts—even if none were introduced intentionally.

“You don’t have to add it in at the very get-go,” Strynar hypothesized. PFAS may be generated in the mix and be part of the waste stream.

McCord and Strynar wrote a report and shared it with the state in February 2022.

Today Solvay Specialty Polymers will neither refute nor confirm the chemists’ findings.

The company said the transition to its new process had not been complete when samples were taken and that it’s following all the regulatory requirements.

Asked if its new production process still released—then or today—the same byproducts found by the EPA, Solvay Specialty Polymers declined to say. Nor would it say if it is still spewing PFAS of any kind into New Jersey’s air or water.

The state of New Jersey, too, declined to tell the public whether Solvay is still releasing PFAS and would not say if it is monitoring the plant’s air emissions at all for forever chemicals.

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” said Carluccio, the regional activist. “This is exactly how the PFAS battle started in the early 2000s—with denial, cover-ups, and cat- and-mouse games…This makes my blood boil.”

While oversight of forever chemicals has increased substantially in the US, one element remains largely unchanged: It’s up to governments to prove chemicals are dangerous, not companies to prove they are safe. With businesses routinely swapping out old PFAS when new ones better suit their needs, regulators are often many steps behind.

“It’ll take centuries before there’s enough data to figure out how dangerous each PFAS is,” said Eve Gartner, director of toxic exposure and health at the environmental law firm Earthjustice.

It’s not easy to find Cal Wray’s office in Enterprise Mill, a refurbished flour mill that also happens to be the oldest industrial building in Augusta, built in 1848.

As president of the quasi-governmental Augusta Economic Development Authority, he leads efforts to bring in new companies and help existing ones expand. These days, the greatest rainmaker is Syensqo, spun off from Solvay.

It’s a familiar story playing out across the region’s “battery belt” as the clean car revolution takes root. Less than two hours away in Covington, Georgia, the nation’s largest lithium-ion battery recycling plant recently opened. EV startup Rivian is building a massive manufacturing site in the next county over. Scout Motors, an all-electric brand, is building a plant outside South Carolina’s capital city, and Redwood Materials has broken ground on a battery recycling operation that promises to be 10 times larger than the Covington plant. Together, those investments total around $11 billion.

In Augusta, Wray expressed little concern about potential downsides, such as possible chemical pollution.

“We tend to make the assumption they’re going to follow the right procedures and follow the safety steps necessary,” Wray said.

While the White House was cracking down on PFAS, Congress in 2021 and 2022 adopted two massive spending bills that set aside more than $850 billion to usher in clean energy projects.

The new laws amounted to the largest investment in history to combat climate change. But they also meant money wound up going to businesses, like Solvay, that previously had been responsible for pollution.

When production starts, no earlier than 2027, Syensqo, the new parent company of Solvay Specialty Polymers, intends to make enough PVDF to supply more than 5 million EV batteries per year—nearly half of North America’s projected demand, according to a company statement.

And the process the company plans to use at the new plant will not require the intentional introduction of PFAS, Michael Finelli, North America leader for Syensqo, said in an April interview in Augusta.

“It never did, it never will,” Finelli said. “It’s not necessary for this chemistry.”

That distinction was helpful when the company was applying for a federal grant, US Energy Department officials said.

“It is possible for companies to make mistakes, to learn from them and, you know, operate better going forward, and we want to create space for that,” said Giulia Siccardo, director of the Energy Department’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains.

Even experts suspicious of this industry concede that the company’s approach makes potential worst-case scenarios—tons of PFAS pollution spreading through communities like it did in New Jersey—unlikely.

It’s still possible, however, for PFAS to be produced as waste even while making PVDF this way, said Joost Dalmijn, one of few independent experts worldwide familiar with this manufacturing process, and a Ph.D. student in Stockholm, who studies chemical company emissions. It depends on the chemicals involved, and those details remain “a bit of a black box for us.”

An analysis by environmental authorities in France this month found chemicals, some of which could be PFAS, in wastewater at a Syensqo plant in Tavaux, France, that makes PVDF using a process similar to the one proposed for Georgia. It’s not clear how much, if any, of those actually were forever chemicals—or how much might be reaching nearby waterways—but an environmental organization, Generation Futures, which specializes in PFAS testing, did its own sampling and found significant quantities of one PFAS in a waste pond that feeds into one of France’s largest rivers.

A Syensqo spokesperson said the chemicals could be from other sources, including nearby companies, or may be legal, permitted discharges. The representative added that Syensqo does not use the PFAS found by the environmental group, and said operations in Augusta don’t include all the production steps that are used in Tavaux.

Earlier this year, experts hired by the Guardian found that PFAS emissions outside Chemours’ North Carolina Plant were up to 30 times higher than the company claimed.

With Syensqo still in the early stages of permitting in Augusta, details have been slow to emerge. An air emissions permit application filed in Georgia shows the company plans to incinerate waste using a thermal oxidizer. Finelli said that could capture 99 percent of air emissions.

But experts said many factors will determine if that’s true.

After significant legal battles over its PFAS pollution, Chemours, in North Carolina, spent $100 million to install a similar incineration system in 2019, saying it would make the company “best-in-class” when it comes to air emissions. While PFAS emissions are way down, Chemours already has violated its permit conditions several times, according to the state.

Then, earlier this year, experts hired by The Guardian news organization found PFAS emissions outside the plant were up to 30 times higher than the company claimed.

Chemours said such claims about its technology are “not just misleading, they are irresponsible.” The company said its oxidizer’s ability to destroy PFAS were validated in “multiple tests by an independent lab” and by the EPA.

Siccardo said Syensqo will be required to submit to a lengthy public process and publicize all chemical ingredients and byproducts.

Yet when asked by The Examination which chemicals will become part of its waste stream, Syensqo officials again declined to answer.

With a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions coming from transportation, lithium-ion batteries will likely remain central to the energy revolution.

For the moment, at least, the same may be true of PFAS.

From Rivian to Rolls Royce, few in the automotive industry see promising alternatives in the short term. Substitutes for battery chemicals exist. But finding commercially scalable options that are less hazardous and meet performance standards has been hard.

The European Chemicals Agency has been moving to ban most forever chemicals from the EU but appears likely to provide an exemption for batteries. Batteries made with PFAS chemicals “will continue to be the mainstay until around 2035,” according to a report from Nissan.

That makes it more important that chemical waste be better managed and not be released into the environment, scientists say. That means more treatment and better monitoring—and more openness from industry and scrutiny by everyone else, said Martin Scheringer, an environmental science professor and renowned PFAS expert at ETH Zurich, a public university.

This industry “has a very bad track record,” Scheringer said. Its plans “need to be followed very closely by watchdogs of all kinds.”

On that sunny April morning, down a small lane off Augusta’s Tobacco Road, a throng of dignitaries passed below an orange-and-white balloon arch to celebrate Solvay Specialty Polymers’ massive investment in their city.

The mayor was on hand. A congressman, too, along with a White House adviser and a federal energy official. They cheered as a flight of executives from the company heralded the company’s workers as explorers and shouted “Go, Dawgs!” to show their affinity for University of Georgia football.

The tattered old Solvay flag no longer flew outside the compound. Instead, a fluorescent orange sign announced Syensqo’s arrival, complete with a fresh logo. Everything seemed brand new.

Noticeably absent were the neighbors of the factory.

For years, Robert Jordan, 60, wondered what went on at the plant near his home where freight trains arrived before the sun most mornings. Neighbors talked of the plant “making plastics,” but few knew specifics of the operation—or its planned expansion.

Not long ago, Augusta had paid for a new road that made the plant’s entrance more private, its workings more mysterious. Local officials like Wray say the road will protect residents from industrial traffic. But all the activity made Jordan and some of his neighbors more leery of what might be spewing from the plant’s steaming towers.

As golden shovels bit into the red clay, few on hand appeared concerned about what the new operation might mean for neighbors.

Most walked right by the small glass case where a set of beakers sat on display, partially filled with white powders. Little placards identified the contents: PVDF—a building block of batteries whose own building blocks may be with us forever.

Craig Welch reported this story for The Examination, Clare Fieseler for The Post and Courier, and Emilie Rosso for Belgian public broadcaster RTBF. Jana Cholakovska, Pooja Sarkar, and Alec Gitelman were fellows at Columbia Journalism Investigations, the investigative-reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. The Examination, The Post and Courier, and CJI provided editing, fact-checking, data analysis, photography, graphic illustration, and other support.

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the time it takes you to read this sentence—say, four seconds—the world produces nearly 60 metric tons of plastic, almost entirely out of fossil fuels. That’s about 53,000 metric tons an hour, 1.3 million metric tons a day, or 460 million metric tons a year. Those numbers are fueling widespread and growing contamination of Earth’s oceans, rivers, and the terrestrial environment with plastic trash.

In March 2022, the United Nations’ 193 member states got together in Nairobi, Kenya, and agreed to do something about it. They pledged to negotiate a treaty to “end plastic pollution,” with the goal of delivering a final draft by 2025. The most ambitious vision espoused by member states in the negotiating sessions that have taken place so far would require petrochemical companies to stop making so much of the darn stuff by putting a cap on global plastic production.

Given the existential threat this would pose to fossil fuel and chemical companies, you might expect them to be vociferously opposed to the treaty. Yet they claim to support the agreement. They’re even “championing” it, according to statements from a handful of industry groups. The American Chemistry Council has repeatedly “welcome[d]” progress on the treaty negotiations, while an executive from the International Council of Chemical Associations told Plastics Today in April that the industry is “fully committed” to supporting an agreement.

While plastics manufacturers concede that pollution is a scourge, they don’t think the solution is to decrease the production and use of their products.

So what exactly do plastic-producing companies want from the treaty? To answer this question, Grist sifted through dozens of public statements and policy documents from five of the world’s largest petrochemical industry trade organizations, as well as two product-specific industry groups. These documents included press releases reacting to treaty negotiating sessions and longer position statements detailing the industry’s desired pathway to a “world without waste.” 

Much of what these groups have published is vague—many documents call for “targets,” for example, without saying what they should be. Grist reached out to all of the groups for clarification, but only two agreed to answer questions about the policies they support.

What we found is that, although they fall far short of what so-called “high-ambition” countries and advocacy groups would like to get out of the treaty, industry groups’ proposals to bolster recycling and waste collection could cause a significant reduction in mismanaged plastic waste—even in the absence of a cap on plastic production. According to a policy analysis tool developed by researchers at the University of California, the elements of the treaty that industry groups support, cobbled together, could cut global plastic pollution by 43 million metric tons annually by 2050—a 36 percent reduction below business-as-usual estimates.

Meanwhile, a realistic production cap could cut annual pollution by 48 million metric tons all by itself. Excluding a production cap from the treaty will make it much harder to rein in plastic pollution, said Douglas McCauley, an associate professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the creators of the policy tool. “It means you really have to ramp up your ambition on what some of the other policies would need to do,” he told Grist.

These numbers matter, because the plastic industry’s influence over the treaty negotiations seems to be growing stronger. At the most recent round of talks—held in Ottawa, Canada, at the end of April—nearly 200 petrochemical and fossil fuel lobbyists registered to attend. That’s 37 more than were registered for the previous session, and more than the number of representatives from European Union member states. 

At the same time, several delegations promoted solutions on the industry’s terms. Malaysia warned about the unintended economic consequences of limiting plastic production, and India said the treaty should focus on pollution while considering plastics’ utility to modern society. Given the power of the plastics industry and the tendency of international negotiations to cater to the lowest common denominator, it’s possible that the treaty will strongly reflect these industry priorities.

To understand the industry position on the plastics treaty, it’s important to understand how plastic makers conceptualize the plastics crisis. While they agree that pollution is a scourge, they don’t think the solution is to reduce society’s production and use of plastic. After all, plastics come with myriad benefits. They’re inexpensive, lightweight, and widely used in important sectors like clean energy and medicine—their “unmatched properties and versatility have allowed for incredible innovations that conserve resources and make more things in life possible,” as the Plastics Industry Association has put it. America’s Plastic Makers, an arm of the American Chemistry Council, says policymakers should ensure that the material stays “in our economy and out of our environment.”

The way to do this, according to industry groups, is through “plastics circularity,” a concept that seeks to keep the material in use for as long as possible before it’s thrown away. Generally, this means more recycling. But circularity can also refer to scaled-up systems allowing plastic to be reused, or better infrastructure for waste collection. As plastic makers see it, the plastic treaty’s function should be to increase circularity while retaining the social and economic benefits derived from plastic products. 

Perhaps the biggest problem faced by circularity proponents is plastic’s abysmal recycling rate. At present, the world only recycles about 9 percent of all plastic it produces; the rest gets sent to landfills or incinerators, or winds up as litter. What’s more, in most cases the material can only be reprocessed once or twice — if at all—before it has to be “downcycled” into lower-quality products like carpeting. Although some experts believe it’s impossible to recycle much more plastic due to technological and economic constraints, plastic makers say otherwise. Indeed, plastics circularity hinges on the possibility of a better recycling rate.

Plastic pellets are notorious for spilling into waterways from manufacturing facilities or cargo ships. In Europe, 20 truckloads worth escape into the environment every day.

To that end, several industry groups—including the World Plastics Council, the self-described “global voice of the plastics industry”—are advocating for “mandatory minimum recycling rates” as part of the treaty, as well as higher targets for recycled content used in new products.

This could mean that countries, regions, or other jurisdictions would set legally binding quotas for the amount of plastic recycled within their borders and then converted into new items. Plastic makers typically favor targets that are set at the local or national level and that differentiate based on the type of plastic, since some types are harder to recycle than others.

Industry groups also want recycling targets to be “technology-neutral,” meaning they should count plastics processed through controversial “chemical recycling” techniques. Although these techniques do not yet work at scale, the industry says they will one day be able to break down mixed post-consumer plastic into their constituent polymers using high heat and pressure, and then turn those polymers back into new plastic products. Environmental experts oppose chemical recycling, pointing to evidence that it is primarily used to burn plastics or turn them into fuel.

The two policies—on plastics recycling and recycled content—could be mutually reinforcing, with the latter creating a more reliable market for the recycled material generated by the former. Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, told Grist via email that recycling and recycled content targets would “create demand signals and provide added certainty for companies to make additional investments for a circular economy, so more plastic products are reused or remade into new plastic products.”

According to Plastics Europe, the continent’s main plastic trade group, boosting the recycling rate would decrease countries’ dependence on fossil fuels used to make virgin plastics.

Plastics Europe and the World Plastics Council declined to be interviewed for this article. They did not respond to questions about their support for specific recycling and recycled content targets, although Plastics Europe has voiced support for “mandatory data and reporting objectives for all stages of the life cycle of the plastics system.” For the US, America’s Plastic Makers supports a 30 percent recycled content requirement in plastic packaging by 2030, and for 100 percent of plastic packaging to be “reused, recycled, or recovered by 2040.”

Additional policies supported by industry groups could indirectly facilitate an increase in the plastics recycling rate by raising money for recycling infrastructure. These policies typically involve systems for “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, requiring companies that make and sell plastics to help pay for the collection and recycling of the waste they generate, as well as the cleanup of existing plastic pollution.

Every industry group Grist reached out to says it supports EPR as a part of the treaty, although some specifically note in their policy documents that such policies should be adopted at the local or national level, rather than globally. Some groups, including the American Chemistry Council and Global Partners for Plastics Circularity—an umbrella group supported by a dozen plastics associations and companies—also call more vaguely for additional financing through “public-private partnerships and blended finance.”

For plastic packaging—which accounts for about 36 percent of global plastic production—a European industry consortium called the Circular Economy for Flexible Packaging supports “mandatory legislation on product design” to make products easier to recycle. It doesn’t back any specific design elements, but points to ideas laid out by the Consumer Goods Forum, an industry-led network of consumer product retailers and manufacturers.

To achieve climate goals, some environmental groups have estimated that the world must reduce plastic production by 12 to 17 percent every year starting in 2024.

These ideas include using clear instead of colored plastics, limiting the use of unnecessary plastic wrap, and ensuring that any adhesives or inks applied to plastic packaging don’t render it nonrecyclable. Plastics Europe additionally supports technical and design standards for biodegradable and compostable plastics intended to replace those made from fossil fuels.

Many groups also say they support targets for “pellet containment,” referring to the tiny plastic pieces that are melted down and shaped into larger items. These pellets are notorious for spilling out of manufacturing facilities or off of cargo ships and into waterways; in Europe, 20 truckloads of them escape into the environment every day. Several trade groups say in their public statements that they support an industry-led program called Operation Clean Sweep to help companies achieve “zero resin loss” by “fostering a venue for precompetitive collaboration and peer-learning opportunities.” 

However, Operation Clean Sweep has been around since 1991 and has not yet achieved its goal; some policymakers have recently called for stricter regulations on plastic pellet loss.

In addition to capping plastic production, many countries’ delegates—along with scientists and environmental groups—would like the treaty to ban or restrict some of the most problematic plastic polymers, as well as certain chemicals used in plastics. They call these “chemicals and polymers of concern,” meaning those least likely to be recycled, or most likely to damage people’s health and the environment. Potential candidates include polyvinyl chloride, widely used in water pipes, upholstery, toys, and other applications; expanded polystyrene, or EPS, the foamy plastic that’s often used in takeout food containers; and endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as phthalates, bisphenols, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

The general idea of identifying problematic chemicals and polymers in the plastics treaty is very popular; observers of the negotiations say it’s been one of the areas of greatest convergence among delegates. Industry groups are also supportive—but only of a very specific approach. According to the World Plastics Council, the treaty shouldn’t include “arbitrary bans or restrictions on substances or materials,” but rather regulations based on the “essential use and societal value” of particular types of plastic.

For instance, polystyrene used in packing peanuts and takeout containers is virtually never recycled and might be a good candidate for restriction. But the Global Expanded Polystyrene Sustainability Alliance—a trade group for EPS makers—points to evidence that, in Europe and Japan, the material can be recycled at least 30 percent of the time when it’s in a different format—namely, insulation for products like coolers, as well as big pieces used to protect fragile shipments.

One expert puts the maximum recycled content for consumer product packaging at about 5 percent due to technological constraints.

“We’ve got five major types” of polystyrene, said Betsy Bowers, executive director of the Expanded Polystyrene Industry Alliance, a trade group representing the US EPS market. “Some of them can be recycled, and some of them can’t.”

Plastics Europe has said an application-based approach could also consider plastic products on the basis of “leakage,” how easily the products become litter; the feasibility of redesigning them; or “effects on human or animal health.” That said, the organization does not support restricting plastic-related chemicals as part of the treaty, beyond what is already spelled out in existing international agreements like the Stockholm Convention. The International Council of Chemical Associations, whose members include individual chemical manufacturers and regional trade groups, does not support any chemical regulation as part of the treaty. 

In an email to Grist, the American Chemistry Council said it supports a “decision-tree approach” to prevent specific plastic products from leaking into the environment. The organization said in a letter sent to President Joe Biden last May that it opposes “restrictions of trade in chemicals or polymers” because they would “make U.S. manufacturers less competitive and/or jeopardize the many benefits plastics provide to the economy and the environment.”

The International Council of Chemical Associations, the Plastics Industry Association, and the Circular Economy for Flexible Packaging initiative did not respond to Grist’s request to be interviewed for this story, or to questions about the policies they support.

While it’s clear that self-preservation is at the heart of the petrochemical industry’s agenda for the plastics treaty, the policies it supports could have a positive impact on plastic pollution. According to the policy analysis tool created by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Santa Barbara, a suite of ambitious policies to hit recycling and recycled content rates of 20 percent, reuse 60 percent of plastic packaging (where applicable), and dedicate $35 billion to plastics recycling and waste infrastructure could prevent 43 million metric tons of plastic pollution annually by midcentury. Most of this reduction would come from the infrastructure funding.

McCauley, one of the creators of the tool, said these policies are certainly better than nothing. They can bring the world “closer to a future without plastic pollution,” he told Grist, although he emphasized that recycling is not a silver bullet. 

The policy tool takes for granted that higher recycling and recycled content rates are achievable, but this might not be the case. Bjorn Beeler, executive director and international coordinator for the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, said a 20 percent recycling rate would be “nearly impossible” to reach, given the relatively low cost of virgin plastic and the petrochemical industry’s projected expansion over the coming decades.

Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer and founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup, estimated the maximum possible recycled content rate for consumer product packaging would be about 5 percent, due to insurmountable technological constraints related to plastics’ toxicity.

“Whether the treaty includes plastic production cuts is not just a policy debate. It’s a matter of survival.”

Experts tend to favor plastic production caps as a much faster, reliable, and more straightforward way to reduce plastic pollution than relying on recycling. According to McCauley’s policy tool, capping plastic production at the level reached in 2019 would prevent 48 million metric tons of annual plastic pollution by 2050—even in the absence of any efforts to boost recycling or fund waste management. “It’s possible to be effective without the cap,” said Sam Pottinger, a senior research data scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a contributor to the policy tool. “But it requires a huge amount of effort elsewhere.”

There’s no reason the plastics treaty couldn’t incorporate a production cap in addition to the industry’s preferred recycling interventions. Some experts say this would form the most effective agreement; according to the policy tool, a production cap at 2019 levels plus the suite of recycling targets and funding for waste infrastructure could prevent nearly 78 million metric tons of annual plastic pollution by 2050. Bumping up the funding for recycling and waste infrastructure to an aggressive $200 billion, in combination with the production cap and other policies, would avert nearly 109 million metric tons of pollution each year.

“We need to use all of the tools in our toolbox,” said Zoie Diana, a postdoctoral plastics researcher at the University of Toronto who was not involved in creating the policy tool. She too emphasized, however, that governments should prioritize reducing plastic production.

The case for a production cap goes beyond plastic litter concerns. It would also address the inequitable impact of toxic pollution from plastic manufacturing facilities, as well as the industry’s contribution to climate change. In April, a study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that plastic production already accounts for 5 percent of global climate pollution, and that by 2050—given the petrochemical industry’s plans to dramatically ramp up plastic production—it could eat up one-fifth of the world’s remaining carbon budget, the amount of emissions the world can release while still limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). To achieve international climate goals, some environmental groups have estimated that the world must reduce plastic production by 12 to 17 percent every year starting in 2024.

“Whether the treaty includes plastic production cuts is not just a policy debate,” said Jorge Emmanuel, an adjunct professor at Silliman University in the Philippines, in a statement describing the mountains of plastic trash that are harming Filipino communities. “It’s a matter of survival.”

Petrochemical companies, for their part, do not deeply engage with these arguments—at least not in their public policy documents. They claim that plastics actually help mitigate climate change, since the lightweight material takes less fuel to transport than alternatives made of metal and glass. And industry groups’ public statements mostly do not address environmental justice concerns related to plastic use, production, and disposal, except to vaguely say that the treaty shouldn’t harm waste pickers—the millions of workers, most of them in the developing world, who make a living collecting plastic trash and selling it to recyclers. 

The fifth and final round of negotiations for the plastics treaty is scheduled to take place in Busan, South Korea, this November. Although many observers, including a group of US Congressional representatives and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, have called for conflict-of-interest policies to limit trade groups’ influence over the talks, these requests face long odds. The dozens of countries advocating for production limits may have to defend their proposals against an even larger industry presence than they did at the last session in Ottawa.