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

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going.”

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China, but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail, planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90 percent in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. “That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy, which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

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

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going.”

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China, but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail, planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90 percent in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. “That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy, which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

I meet Baba Anwar in a crowded, chaotic market in the city of Lagos, Nigeria. He claims he’s in his early 20s, but he looks 15 or 16. Maybe all of 5 feet tall, he’s wearing plastic flip-flops, shorts, and a filthy “Surf Los Angeles” T-shirt and clutching a printed circuit board from a laptop computer, which he says he found in a trash bin. That’s Anwar’s job, scrounging for discarded electronics in Ikeja Computer Village, one of the world’s biggest and most hectic marketplaces for used, repaired, and refurbished electronic products.

The market fills blocks and blocks of narrow streets, all swarming with people jostling for access to hundreds of tiny stalls and storefronts offering to sell, repair, or accessorize digital machinery—laptops, printers, cellphones, hard drives, wireless routers, and every variety of adapter and cable needed to run them. The cacophony of a thousand open-air negotiations is underlaid with the rumbling of diesel generators, the smell of their exhaust mixing with the aroma of fried foods hawked by sidewalk vendors. Determined motorcyclists and women in brightly colored dresses carrying trays of little buns on their heads thread their way through the crowds.

It’s no place for an in-depth conversation, but with the help of my translator, local journalist Bukola Adebayo, I gather that Anwar arrived here about a year before from his deeply impoverished home state of Kano. “No money at home,” he explains. In Lagos, a pandemoniac megalopolis of more than 15 million, he shares a room with a couple of friends from home, also e-waste scrappers. On a good day, he says, he can make as much as 10,000 naira—about $22 at the time of my visit.

Thousands of Nigerians make a meager living recycling e-waste, a broad category that can consist of just about any discarded item with a plug or a battery. This includes the computers, phones, game controllers, and other digital devices that we use and ditch in ever-growing volumes. The world generates more than 68 million tons of e-waste every year, according to the UN, enough to fill a convoy of trucks stretching right around the equator. By 2030, the total is projected to reach 75 million tons.

Only 22 percent of that e-waste is collected and recycled, the UN estimates. The rest is dumped, burned, or forgotten—particularly in rich countries, where most people have no convenient way to get rid of their old Samsung Galaxy phones, Xbox controllers, and myriad other gadgets. Indeed, every year, humanity is wasting more than $60 billion worth of so-called critical metals—the ones we need not only for electronics, but also for the hardware of renewable energy, from electric vehicle (EV) batteries to wind turbines.

Millions of Americans, like me, spend their workdays on pursuits that lack any physical manifestation beyond the occasional hard-copy book or memo or report. It’s easy to forget that all these livelihoods rely on machines. And that those machines rely on metals torn from the Earth.

Consider your smartphone. Depending on the model, it can contain up to two-thirds of the elements in the periodic table, including dozens of metals. Some are familiar, like the gold and tin in its circuitry and the nickel in its microphone. Others less so: Tiny flecks of indium make the screen sensitive to the touch of a finger. Europium enhances the colors. Neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium are used to build the tiny mechanism that makes your phone vibrate.

Your phone’s battery contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Ditto the ones that power your rechargeable drill, Roomba, and electric toothbrush—not to mention our latest modes of transportation, ranging from plug-in scooters and e-bikes to EVs. A Tesla Model S has as much lithium as up to 10,000 smartphones.

The millions of electric cars and trucks hitting the planet’s roads every year don’t spew pollutants directly, but they’ve got a monstrous appetite for electricity, nearly two-thirds of which still comes from burning fossil fuels—about one-third from coal. Harvesting more of our energy from sunlight and wind, as crucial as that is, entails its own Faustian bargain. Capturing, transmitting, storing, and using that cleaner power requires vast numbers of new machines: wind turbines, solar panels, switching stations, power lines, and batteries large and small.

You see where this is going. Our clean energy future, this global drive to save humanity from the ever-worsening ravages of global warming, depends on critical metals. And we’ll be needing more.

A lot more.

In all of human history, we have extracted some 700 million tons of copper from the Earth. To meet our clean energy goals, we’ll have to mine as much again in 20-odd years. By 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates, global demand for cobalt for EVs alone will soar to five times what it was in 2022. Demand for nickel will be 10 times higher. Lithium, 15 times. “The prospect of a rapid increase in demand for critical minerals—well above anything seen previously in most cases—raises huge questions about the availability and reliability of supply,” the agency warns.

Metals are natural products, but the Earth does not relinquish them willingly. Mining conglomerates rip up forests and grasslands and deserts, blasting apart the underlying rock and soil and hauling out the remains. The ore is processed, smelted, and refined using gargantuan, energy-guzzling, pollution-spewing machines and oceans of chemicals. “Mining done wrong can leave centuries of harm,” says Aimee Boulanger, head of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, which works with companies to develop more sustainable extraction practices.

“The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies.”

The harm is staggering. Metal mining is America’s leading toxic polluter. It has sullied the watersheds of almost half of the rivers in the American West. Chemical leaks and mining runoff foul air and water. The mines also generate mountains of hazardous waste, stored behind dams that have a terrifying tendency to fail. Torrents of poisonous sludge pouring through collapsed tailings dams have contaminated waterways in Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere and killed hundreds of people—in addition to the hundreds, possibly thousands, of miners who die in workplace accidents each year.

To get what they’re after, mining companies devour natural resources on an epic scale. They dig up some 250 tons of ore and waste rock to get just 1 ton of nickel. For copper, the ratio is double that. Just to obtain the metals inside your 4.5-ounce iPhone, 75 pounds of ore had to be pulled up, crushed, and smelted, releasing up to 100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Mining firms also suck up massive quantities of water and deploy fleets of drill rigs, trucks, diggers, and other heavy machinery that collectively belch out up to 7 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

These operations are not popular with the neighbors. Irate locals and Indigenous communities at this moment are fighting proposed critical-metal mines across the United States, in addition to Brazil, Canada, the Philippines, Serbia, and many other countries. At least 320 anti-mining activists have been killed worldwide since 2012—and they are just the ones we know about.

All this said, while researching my book Power Metal, I was surprised to learn that the mining industry no longer gets away—not easily, anyway—with much of the nasty behavior it has been known for. Some collateral damage is inevitable, but a growing awareness of the industry’s history of human rights abuses and dirty environmental practices—as well as public pressure on consumer-facing companies like Apple and Tesla to clean up their supply chains—has made for some real improvements in how big mining firms operate.

Yet even these beneficial developments come with an asterisk: In the 1950s, it took three or four years to bring a new copper mine online in the United States. Now the average windup is 16 years. “The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies,” the International Energy Agency warned in 2022.

If this demand can’t be met, the agency added, nations will fail “to achieve the goals in the Paris Agreement,” the 2016 UN treaty aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (and from which President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to withdraw—again—during his second term).

And then we’re really in trouble.

It’s a vexing conundrum. In my reporting, I have talked to a wide range of people who are deeply and justifiably concerned about the threats our new mining frenzy will pose to the environment. While acknowledging their fears, I would always ask, “Yes, but what’s the alternative?”

Their answer, almost always, was, “Recycling!”

That may sound straightforward. It isn’t. Metal recycling is a completely different proposition from recycling the paper and glass we toss into our home bins for pickup. It turns out that retrieving valuable raw materials sustainably from electronic products—toasters, iPhones, power cables—is a fiendishly complex endeavor, requiring many steps carried out in many places. Manufacturing those products required a multistep international supply chain. Recycling them requires a reverse supply chain almost as complicated.

Part of the problem is that our devices typically contain only a small amount of any given metal. In developing countries, though, there are lots of people willing to put in the time and effort required to recover that little bit of value—an estimated tens of thousands of e-waste scavengers in Nigeria alone. Some go door to door with pushcarts, offering to take or even buy unwanted electronics. Others, like Anwar, work the secondhand markets, buying bits of broken gear from small businesses or rescuing them from the trash. Many scavengers earn less than the international poverty wage of about $2.15 per day.

I ask Anwar where he’s planning to take his circuit board. “To TJ,” he replies, as if I’d asked him what color the sky is.

TJ is Tijjani Abubakar, an entrepreneur who has built a thriving business turning unwanted electronics into cash. His third-floor office, in a dingy concrete building across a roaring four-lane road from the Ikeja market, is a charnel house of dead mobile phones. At one end of the long, crowded room, two skinny young men with screwdrivers pull phone after phone from a sack and crack them like walnuts. Their practiced fingers pull out the green printed circuit boards and toss them with a clatter onto a growing heap at their feet.

Thousands of such boards gleam flatly under the glaring LED ceiling lights. More young men sit around on plastic stools sorting them into piles and pulling aside those with the most valuable chips. The air is thick with sweat despite the open windows.

At a scuffed wooden desk sits Abubakar himself—a big man with a steady demeanor, lordly in an embroidered brown caftan, red cap, and crisp beard. I await an audience as he fields calls and messages on three different phones and a laptop while negotiating a deal with a couple of visiting traders over an unlabeled bottle of something.

Abubakar, who looks to be in his mid-40s, has been in the trade nearly 20 years. He, too, hails from Kano, where his father sold clothes—“not a rich man,” he tells me in his even baritone. He earned a business degree from a local university and made his way to Lagos, where a friend introduced him to the e-waste business. “We started small, small, small, small,” he says. But getting a foothold was easier then. Scrap was cheap, even free, because few people were willing to pay for it. Then, as the trade mushroomed, deep-pocketed foreign buyers—from India, Lebanon, and, above all, China—began flocking to Nigeria in search of deals.

“Now everybody knows the prices,” Abubakar says. But his business has flourished. He exports several shipping containers full of e-waste every month to buyers in China and Europe. He’s grown wealthy enough to donate textbooks, meals, and cows to families back in Kano. Dead cellphones converted into education and food. Trash into possibilities.

In 2022, some 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded globally. Placed end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back.

Abubakar handles all manner of e-waste, but the phones are his specialty. There is just shy of one mobile account for every one of Nigeria’s 220 million people. “What do I see here?” he asks, indicating his roomful of workers. “I don’t know whether any of these people have a computer. But I know all of them have a phone.” And all of those phones will one day wear out, malfunction, or get tossed by someone eager for a newer model. In 2022, an estimated 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded worldwide. If you put them end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back.

Abubakar deploys a vast network of buyers and pickers to source spent phones from Nigeria and neighboring countries, and occasionally as far away as France. They arrive by truck, train, and in sacks carried by people like Anwar. These precisely engineered products were manufactured in sophisticated, high-tech factories under ultra-clean conditions. Here, they are eviscerated by hand on a grimy concrete pad.

Abubakar estimates he has about 5,000 workers bringing in millions of phones each year. When I express polite skepticism, he rises and gestures for me to follow. A door in the back of the office leads into a warren of rooms filled either with enormous sacks stuffed with phones, people cracking and sorting phones, or bales of circuit boards ready for shipping.

The most desirable components are those circuit boards, etched with copper and often precious metals, including gold, that carry signals among the soldered-on chips and capacitors. The chips are removed for assessment. If they still work, they can be sold for use in refurbished phones. Abubakar shows me a lunch bag-sized sack of Android chips with serial numbers so tiny I can barely make them out. “This bag is worth around $35,000,” he says. A sack of phone cameras—consisting of the lens you see from the outside attached to a strip of metal foil on the inside—is also valuable. Abubakar trains security cameras on his workers to discourage pilfering. He fired someone the week before for stealing chips, he tells me.

None of the phones were made in Nigeria, and their remains won’t stay here either. Extracting the metals therein requires sophisticated and expensive equipment that no facility in Africa has, so Abubakar sells to recyclers in China and Western Europe that do.

The problem of rich countries “dumping” e-waste on poorer ones has received plenty of attention over the past couple of decades. But in West Africa and other parts of the developing world, most e-waste is now generated domestically. The gadgets passing through Abubakar’s facility were largely imported as new or refurbished products, sold to Nigerian consumers, and later discarded. Relatively little goes to waste. If you live on $2 a day, after all, making a dime from a discarded electric toothbrush is worth your effort. The result is that about 75 percent of Nigeria’s e-waste is collected for some kind of recycling. In nearby Ghana, estimates run as high as 95 percent.

The landscape is different in the United States, where fewer than 1 in 6 dead mobile phones is recycled. The same stat holds in Europe, where roughly two-thirds of all e-waste never makes it into official recycling streams. This is “surprising,” says Alexander Batteiger, an e-waste expert with the German development organization GIZ, “because we have fully functioning recycling systems.”

Or maybe not so surprising. Nobody in the rich world, after all, goes house to house asking for old iPhone 6s or Bluetooth speakers. Sure, there are e-waste collection drives at schools and churches, and you can take old electronics to Best Buy or the local hazardous waste facility—but few people bother. Instead, countless millions of phones and laptops and blenders and microwaves accumulate in attics, closets, junk drawers, garages, and, all too often, the dump.

In Africa, businesses like Abubakar’s keep countless tons of toxic trash out of landfills, reduce the need for mining, and create thousands of jobs—hardly a trivial consideration in a nation where nearly two-thirds of people live in poverty. There’s much to celebrate here. But neither is it the whole story.

An hour’s drive from Abubakar’s office, through a maelstrom of Lagos traffic, sits the Katangua dumpsite, a sprawling, teeming maze of tiny workshops, scrapyards, wrecking zones, and slums, loosely built around a mountain of trash at least 20 feet tall.

This colossus is surrounded by a corroded tin fence held up with bits of scrap wood. Plumes of thick black smoke wend upward from within. The squalor here is unfathomable. The ground underfoot consists of churned-up mud and trampled-in plastic trash. Barefoot children wander among shacks of cardboard, plywood, and plastic sheeting. Adebayo, the local journalist helping me out, and I pick our way around huge puddles, following men and women carrying sacks of discarded metals, all of us retreating to the roadside as trucks piled high with aluminum cans and other scrap wallow past.

Practically every type of metal and e-waste is recycled somewhere in this labyrinth. The resourcefulness of the people is as astonishing as the conditions are appalling. At one yard, owner Mohammed Yusuf proudly shows me his aluminum recycling operation. Pickers bring him cans from all over the city, 2 or 3 tons a day. At the rear of the yard, there’s a covered area with a brick-lined, rectangular hole in the ground about the size of a bathtub, and a smell reminiscent of rotting chicken.

At night, Yusuf tells me, his workers fill the hole with cans, melt them down with a gas-powered torch, then scoop the molten metal into molds using a long ladle. This results in silvery, 2-kilogram ingots pure enough to sell to a manufacturer that makes new cans. The process generates intensely toxic fumes and dust, and his workers wear protective masks. “What about the others nearby?” I ask him. Yusuf nods sagely. That’s why they do it at night, he explains, when the people who live near the yard are asleep in their shacks.

Later, squeezing through a gap in the ragged fence, Adebayo and I find ourselves in an open area at the base of the towering garbage pile. There, four young men are tending small fires, burning the coatings off piles of wire to get at the copper inside. The flames are beautiful—deep cupric blues and greens licking up amid the orange. The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system. The men are wearing shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops—no respirators or other safety gear in sight.

The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system.

Between the open-air smelting, wire burning, and other miscellaneous wrecking, I’m horrified by the thought of how thoroughly poisoned Katangua must be. “Do you worry about breathing the smoke?” I ask one of the burners, a muscular 36-year-old named Alabi Mohammed. He shrugs: “We don’t know any other job. We don’t have any other option.” He’s been living here since he was 8, he says.

There are other harmful recycling practices I don’t see at Katangua. Scrapped circuit boards are a good source of palladium, gold, and silver—according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, a ton of circuit boards contains from 40 to 800 times the amount of gold found in a ton of ore. You can run them through a shredder and ship the fragments to special refineries, typically in Europe or Japan, where the gold is extracted with chemicals. “It’s a precise, mostly clean method of recycling, but it’s also very, very expensive,” author Adam Minter explains in his 2014 book, Junkyard Planet. In many developing countries, he notes, the gold is “removed using highly corrosive acids, often without the benefit of safety equipment for the workers. Once the acids are used up, they’re often dumped in rivers and other open bodies of water.”

The latter poses clear health and environmental hazards, but it’s cheap and easy, just as extracting copper from plastic-coated wires requires no special equipment—only gasoline and matches. Which is why low-wage laborers around the globe risk their lives burning old extension cords or dousing circuit boards with chemicals to retrieve metals that other low-wage workers risked their lives to dig up in the first place. In Guiyu, home to China’s biggest e-waste recycling complex, studies have found extremely high levels of lead and other toxins in the blood of local children. A 2019 study by Toxics Link, an Indian nonprofit, identified more than a dozen unlicensed e-waste recycling “hotspots” around Delhi employing some 50,000 people—unprotected workers exposed to chemical vapors, metallic dusts, and acidic effluents—and where hazardous wastes were improperly dumped.

Spent lithium batteries present their own recycling challenge. They are potentially among the world’s best sources for critical metals—one study found that battery recycling theoretically could satisfy nearly half of global demand for certain metals. Yet only about 5 percent of them get recycled because they are uniquely hard to handle—and dangerous.

Nigeria, for example, is awash in lithium-ion batteries, but no place on the continent recycles them. They need to be exported. Shippers don’t want to take them, however, because of their disturbing tendency to burst into flames when punctured, crushed, or overheated. Battery fires can exceed 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They also emit toxic gases and are very hard to extinguish. American consumers are asked to bring unwanted lithium batteries to a domestic recycler or a hazardous waste site, and for good reason. Every year, batteries from everything from old Priuses to sex toys cause hundreds of fires in US scrapyards, landfills, and even on garbage trucks, causing millions of dollars in damage. Residents of Fredericktown, Missouri, even had to evacuate their homes earlier this month when a local battery recycling facility exploded dramatically into flames.

Even in developing countries, unwanted batteries often end up in local landfills, where, beyond the fire risk, they leak toxic chemicals. Or unscrupulous exporters mislabel them, bribing port officials to not examine their shipments too closely. “I’ve heard there’s a major fire every six months,” says Eric Frederickson, vice president of operations at Call2Recycle, America’s largest battery-collection organization, “but you never hear about most of them, because they just tip the container over the side of the boat.”

Reinhardt Smit is trying something different. He’s the supply chain director for Closing the Loop, a Netherlands-based startup that aims to recycle phones from Africa using certifiably sound environmental and social methods: no burned cables, battery fires, trashed plastics, or unprotected workers—every step of the process done responsibly, the way Western consumers like it.

In a 2021 pilot project, Closing the Loop collected and sent 5 tons of phones—plastic, batteries, cables, and all—from Nigeria to a Belgian recycler in what it claims was the first such legally sanctioned shipment ever. The project succeeded from a sustainability standpoint, but it was a money-loser. Clean recycling, it turns out, is hideously expensive.

The phones were sourced from Hinckley Recycling, one of Nigeria’s two (yes, only two) fully licensed e-waste handlers. At Hinckley’s compound on the outskirts of Lagos, workers dismantle phones, computers, and TVs in a clean and well-lit warehouse, wearing reflective vests and protective gloves. It’s clearly a safer and more humane workplace than the others I witnessed, but that adds to the cost.

Convincing a shipper to transport the batteries also required a pricey workaround: They were removed from the phones and placed in barrels filled with sand, eliminating the fire danger. But that meant Closing the Loop had to pay extra to transport hundreds of pounds of sand per shipment.

“It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius noted in 2021.

Dealing with unwanted materials was another cost. “If I recycle every component in a phone, I lose money,” explains Adrian Clewes, Hinckley’s managing director. Everyone wants copper, for instance, but phones are mostly plastic, which Closing the Loop must pay a recycler to take. Clewes talks about “positive” and “negative” fractions, meaning the profitable components vs. those that cost him money.

Some fractions toggle between positive and negative depending on the prevailing prices. Say you want to sell a bag of circuit boards containing a total of 1 pound of copper. And say it will cost the smelter $2 to extract the metal. If copper is selling for $4 a pound, the smelter can buy the boards for $1 and make a tidy profit. If copper drops to $3, the deal’s off and the boards are sitting in your warehouse. If you have ample space, you can wait for prices to bounce back. If not, maybe you’re tempted to bring those boards to the dump.

Finally, you have your administrative costs. Global regulations preventing rich countries from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones have, ironically enough, made it harder to get waste out of the poor countries. The Basel Convention, for one, requires any ship carrying e-waste to get approval from the exporting and importing countries and consent from any country where it might dock en route. This creates oceans of red tape. “Observing the Basel notifications can be painful. It takes months,” says Batteiger, the German e-waste expert. “The Basel Convention is valuable—without it, there would be more dumping—but it has the side effect of blocking exports from the developing world to industrialized countries.”

All told, the cost of doing things by the book makes it almost impossible to turn a profit. Smit’s idea is to get green-minded corporations to cover the difference by paying him to recycle one dead African phone for each new phone it buys.

The concept is akin to selling carbon offsets, and it’s gaining some traction. Closing the Loop now operates in some 10 African countries and has collected several million dead electronic devices. Its near-future target is 2 million phones per year, though that’s admittedly a drop in the bucket. “There are 2 billion phones sold every year,” concedes founder Joost de Kluijver. “We can’t collect all that.”

Comparing the efforts of companies like Closing the Loop and those of the “informal” sector in Nigeria and elsewhere, which provides jobs for thousands of desperate people, it’s hard to say which is better. One might ask, better for whom? Unregulated dumping, wire burning, and the lack of safety equipment don’t meet Western environmental and labor standards. But those standards aren’t top of mind for people who can barely feed and house themselves.

There are other geopolitical aspects to the race for critical metals. Russia, for example, is a prodigious exporter of copper, nickel, palladium, and other metals so crucial that they were spared from international sanctions after Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine. And then there’s China, which—via its own resources, lax standards, diplomatic clout, and overseas investments—has come to dominate the global supply chain.

Regardless of origin, most critical metals will at some point pass through China, which controls more than half of global refining capacity for cobalt, graphite (another battery ingredient), and lithium, and almost as much for nickel and copper. Using those metals, its factories pump out most of the world’s solar panels, a hefty share of its wind turbines, and a majority of its EVs. It also produces nearly three-quarters of lithium-ion batteries and recycles far more of them than any other nation. A subsidiary of CATL, China’s biggest battery maker, can now recycle up to 120,000 tons per year and is investing billions in new plants.

Congress, having deemed China’s dominance in these sectors a threat “to economic growth, competitiveness, and national security,” has responded by sinking money into alternative sources. The 2022 infrastructure bill included $7 billion to develop a domestic supply chain for battery minerals, and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed the same year, unlocked billions more to subsidize batteries and EVs manufactured with domestically sourced metals—though some of the funds may be clawed back or left unspent under the new Republican leadership.

“The economics are very challenging…There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.”

In the United States and elsewhere, major automakers are partnering with recyclers and even building their own plants, recognizing that old batteries are a cheaper, cleaner, and more appealing source of critical metals than mining is. “It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius said at a 2021 climate summit. In remote Nevada, a company called Redwood Materials has built an enormous EV battery recycling operation. Redwood has inked deals with Tesla, Amazon, and Volkswagen and has attracted nearly $2 billion in capital.

Redwood’s main rival is Canada-based Li-Cycle, which had more than 400 employees at the time of my visit. The company partners with commodities giant Glencore and boasts facilities in Arizona, Alabama, New York; Kingston, Ontario; and elsewhere. Earlier this month, Li-Cycle secured a $475 million line of credit from the Department of Energy. It is now capable of processing about 53,000 tons a year of shredded battery material, which consists mainly of copper and aluminum flakes, plus a grainy sludge known as “black mass” that contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel.

At the company’s Kingston headquarters, I get a tour from Ajay Kochhar, a chemical engineer with neatly combed black hair who co-founded Li-Cycle in 2016 with a metallurgist pal. “We heard lots of people say, ‘You guys are too early,’” he tells me with a smile. The company produced its first batch of shredded battery material that year. “It took us three months to get 20 tons,” Kochhar says. Five years later, his company went public at a valuation of almost $1.7 billion. (As of this writing, the number is considerably lower.)

On the day of my visit, an aggregator had delivered a truckload of batteries from laptops, cellphones, and power tools. I watch as the batteries are loaded onto a conveyor belt, where workers strip off plastic casings and packaging and check labels to make sure they are indeed lithium-ion batteries. Further along, the batteries are dumped into a column of water leading to a shredder whose mighty steel teeth rip them into tiny pieces. Any remaining plastic floats to the surface and is skimmed off. The metals are separated in further steps. Breakfast-cereal-sized flakes of copper and aluminum are poured into large, heavy plastic bags, leaving the black mass behind. Li-Cycle currently sells the former metals to companies like Glencore, which make them into ingots. The black mass goes to other firms that use chemicals to extract the remaining metals.

Perhaps the biggest immediate challenge for companies like Li-Cycle, oddly, is a dearth of batteries to shred. It’s mostly pre-consumer factory scrap and defective batteries from manufacturers keeping their conveyers busy. EVs are so new to the market that few have been junked—and even those are often snapped up for uses such as off-grid power storage. Most consumer lithium batteries aren’t collected at all. “We’ve looked at doing the collection ourselves, but the economics are very challenging,” Kochhar told me. “There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.”

The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, which grows on the nickel-rich island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel.

So how can more e-waste be brought into the reverse supply chain? One approach is to shift the onus onto the firms that manufactured the gadgets in the first place, a policy known as “extended producer responsibility.” China and much of Europe have codified this policy in laws that govern not only e-waste, but also glass, plastics, and even cars. Sometimes, it just means charging manufacturers a fee to help cover the downstream recycling costs. In the EU, though, carmakers are responsible for collecting and recycling their own dead vehicles. China, which since 2018 has required manufacturers to collect and recycle lithium-ion batteries, also mandates that new batteries contain minimum amounts of certain recycled materials.

China now recycles at least half of its batteries, according to CATL. “In North America, it’s mainly us and Redwood,” Kochhar says. “There are many more in Europe.” But what’s happening in China, he says, “is way ahead of what we’re doing here.”

As a strictly economic proposition, it’s often cheaper to mine fresh metals than recycle them. And some of the relevant products are tremendously hard to recycle: Less than 5 percent of rare earth magnets are currently recycled, for example, and an estimated 9 in 10 spent solar panels—which cost roughly $20 to $30 to recycle vs. $1 to $2 to bring to the dump—end up in landfills. Ditto the massive blades on wind turbines, of which more than 720,000 tons are projected to be trashed by 2040. The bottom line is that meaningful e-waste recycling in the United States is probably going to require government support.

And why not subsidize? China, our biggest rival in the clean energy sector, offers tax breaks to metal recyclers, even as US taxpayers spend billions subsidizing fossil fuels and mining operations. Under the Biden administration, Congress directed some $370 billion to bolster renewable energy technologies, including nearly $40 billion for nuclear energy and more than $12 billion to promote sales and manufacturing of EVs and their batteries, but has included only a couple of billion toward recycling.

If you’re dissatisfied with your old iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in developing countries who would love to have it.

New technologies might help somewhat. British researchers are working on inexpensive reactors they hope can facilitate recovery of rare earths. In Texas, Apple is testing a robot that can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour to aid in recycling. Mining giant Rio Tinto is experimenting with ways to extract lithium that exists in boron mining waste, and a Canadian startup is working to recover rare earths from tin-mine tailings.

Scientists are even studying plants that can suck up trace metals through their roots and concentrate them in their sap, stems, or leaves. The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, a tree that grows on the nickel-rich Pacific island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel. Other “hyperaccumulators” slurp up cobalt, lithium, and zinc. Startups are springing up, hoping to capitalize on these special properties, which could also be used to clean up polluted soil.

None of this is a silver bullet. Even if humanity could recover all of the critical metals in use—and we can’t—we’d still have to mine more to meet rising demand. Consider that we now recycle less than 1 percent of the lithium used around the world, and we’ll be mining hard-to-recover rare earths for decades to come. “Nothing—nothing—is 100 percent recyclable, and many things, including things we think are recyclable, like iPhone touch screens, are unrecyclable,” Minter writes in Junkyard Planet. “Everyone from the local junkyard to Apple to the US government would be doing the planet a very big favor if they stopped implying otherwise, and instead conveyed a more realistic picture of what recycling can and can’t do.”

Recycling is important, yes. But it is also utterly insufficient to meet our needs. We tend to think of it as the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it often can be one of the worst. Consider a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to smash it to pieces, melt down the bits, and mold them into a whole new bottle—an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time, and expense.

Or you could just wash it and reuse it.

That’s a better alternative—and hardly a new idea. For much of the last century, gas stations, dairies, and other companies sold products in glass bottles that they would later collect, wash, and reuse.

Rendering a phone, car battery, or solar panel down to its constituent metals requires a great deal more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, unsafe labor than refurbishing that product. You can buy refurbished computers, phones, and even solar panels online and in some stores. But refurbishing is only really widespread in the developing world. If you’re a North American no longer satisfied with your iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in less-affluent countries who would be happy to take it.

There are important lessons here, and perhaps the most important of all is this: As we look ahead, we will need to start thinking beyond merely replacing fossil fuels with renewables and increasing our supplies of raw materials. Rather, we will need to reshape our relationship to energy and natural resources altogether. That seems like a tall order, but there’s a range of things we can do—as consumers, as voters, as human beings—to assuage the downstream effects of our technological arms race.

Moving forward, our critical metals will come from all sorts of mines and scrapyards and recycling centers around the globe. Some will emerge from new sources, using new methods and technologies. And the choices we make about where and how we get those metals, and who prospers and suffers in the process, are tremendously important. But no less important is the question of how much of all these things we truly need—and how to reduce that need.

We’re lucky in one respect: We’re still only at the beginning of a historic worldwide transition. The key will be figuring out how to make it work without repeating the worst mistakes of the last one.

Follow Vince Beiser’s ongoing reporting at powermetal.substack.com.

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

It was 2:30 in the morning on November 6, 2014, when flames engulfed the New Orleans home of political consultant Mario Zervigon. Someone had lit his cars on fire, and the flames spread to his house. Zervigon and his family barely made it out of the three-unit building alive. Multiple cats didn’t. 

Law enforcement deemed it arson and investigated whether the fire was related to Zerivigon’s campaign work. (They would ultimately close the case without naming a suspect.) The night before, Zervigon had celebrated the primary election victory of one of his clients for a seat on Louisiana’s Public Service Commission (PSC), a down-ballot position with vast power over the state’s oil, gas, and utility companies.

The candidate, Forest Bradley-Wright, was running as a Republican on a reform platform. He had rejected donations from companies the PSC oversees—a rarity in Louisiana. But the firebombing rattled his campaign. Zervigon took a leave of absence, Bradley-Wright’s fundraising flagged, and another candidate, who had received generous support from the companies in question, eked out a 1.6 percent win in the general election. 

Bradley-Wright now says he believes the firebombing was an act of “political terrorism” meant “to intimidate or at least cripple my campaign.” He argues the incident is worth revisiting because it shows just how high the stakes can get in the election of regulators charged with making, in some cases, billion-dollar decisions and shaping a state’s energy policies. 

“Public utility commissions—especially in the context of climate change—are really important institutions that most people aren’t even aware exist,” said Jared Heern, a Brown University researcher who studies the relationship between the commissions and the industries they regulate. 

But fossil fuel companies and electric utilities, and their lawyers and consultants, are well aware of their importance. 

A new Floodlight analysis of campaign finance data in nine of the 10 states that elect their commissioners found that more than a third of their campaign contributions of $250 and up came from fossil fuel and electric utility interests—more than $13.5 million in all. The analysis covered contributions to the 54 commissioners elected in the 10 years ending on December 31, 2023.

On Tuesday, voters will choose among 33 candidates vying for utility commission seats in eight of those states. 

The states examined were Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Nebraska, which elects its commissioners but has no private electric utilities, was excluded. (In the remaining 40 states, utility regulators are appointed by governors and/or legislative leaders.)

Topping the influence list is Alabama, where commissioners get almost 55 percent of their financial support from fossil fuel and utility interests. Louisiana is second, with nearly 43 percent. Overall, those sources contribute more than twice as much as the renewables industry does to elect commissioners they believe will be friendly to their interests. The renewables donations accounted for only $5.1 million, or 13 percent, of the roughly $39 million analyzed.

These findings suggest that the electoral influence of fossil fuel and utility contributors may be interfering with some states’ ability to decarbonize, with consequences for consumers and the environment alike.

Indeed, a number of the states are located in the sun belt, making them ideal for solar energy development, yet their commissioners’ decisions have ensured that only a tiny fraction of their power mix comes from the sun. In some cases, commissioners appear openly hostile to the adoption of renewables, far more of which will be needed to limit the catastrophic effects of climate change.

This failure to adapt is a bad deal for homeowners and businesses. Residential energy bills in Alabama, for example, exceed the national average by $32 a month, and bills in Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi have increased faster than the national average over the past five years, according to data from Findenergy.com. This year in Arizona, power bills spiked amid the state’s hottest summer on record. And in Oklahoma, commissioners approved so many fracking applications that the state briefly led the country in earthquakes. 

“It's kind of ludicrous on its face,” said journalist David Roberts, who hosts an energy policy podcast called  Volts, “that commercial entities directly regulated by these people are allowed to give these people money.”

In fact, laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi prohibit regulated utilities from making direct campaign contributions to commissioners. But in all of those states, Floodlight’s analysis found, contractors, attorneys, or political action committees closely aligned with the utilities keep the money flowing. “(When) the people regulating the utility are essentially propped up by the utility itself, it's problematic,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law initiative at Harvard University. “I think everybody can recognize that as a conflict of interest.” 

It also turns out that the commissioners who get a large share of their campaign cash from sources linked to fossil fuel firms and utilities tend to stay in office longer than their colleagues. 

Nationwide, utility commissioners serve 5.9 years on average. In states where they are elected, these officials became more entrenched, serving 7.4 years—and a whopping 9.2 years in states where fossil fuel and utility interests account for at least 30 percent of their campaign contributions, according to Floodlight’s analysis of data provided by Heern. 

Consider Alabama PSC member Jeremy Oden. During his 12 years in office, Oden, a Republican, received about $1.3 million, roughly 80 percent of his campaign funds, from sources with links to fossil fuel companies and utilities. 

While Alabama commissioners cannot take money directly from the companies they oversee, our analysis and leaked records revealed that Oden’s top donors were political action committees operated by accountants with long-standing ties to consultants for Alabama Power, the state's largest utility. 

Oden did not respond to requests for comment. Tim Whitt, a principal of the campaign committee to elect Oden, provided a written statement. “All of his campaign contributions have been received and reported in accordance with Alabama law,” it stated, adding: “Commissioner Oden has not received any campaign contributions from regulated utilities.”

The cash flowing into Oden’s campaign coffer has come in handy for tight races, like the first round of the Republican primary in May 2022. If he won the primary, Oden, already in office for a decade at the time, would be certain to win the general election in deep red Alabama.

The three Republicans running against him were calling for more renewable energy and cheaper bills. Alabama, a state with strong solar potential, generates less power from rooftop solar than even low-potential states such as Maine and Michigan. It also has very little utility-scale solar, and saddles utility ratepayers with some of the nation’s highest electric bills. 

So what did Oden do? He took to the airwaves, appearing in TV ads dressed in hunting gear and wielding a shotgun. Calling himself “a Christian conservative pro-Trump Republican,” who “would always fight and defend our God-given Second Amendment rights,” the bald, bespectacled commissioner took aim, but not at his opponents: “With your help, I’ll shoot down Biden’s Green New Deal and keep the left from jacking up our energy prices,” Oden narrated over footage of him downing clay pigeons. 

Bolstered by his advertising budget, he won 34 percent of the vote in the four-candidate field before going on to clinch the primary runoff, and later, the general election. 

As a commissioner, Oden has taken aim at clean energy, imposing steep fees on families who install home solar panels, making it a bad investment choice even though those households were using far less utility-generated power than before. And he voted for a series of rate increases that have led to Alabama having the Deep South’s second highest energy prices. 

Oden and his fellow commissioners have also blocked utility-scale solar and battery storage projects, even some requested by Alabama Power. Such moves—raising the cost of electricity while preventing customers from generating their own—benefit the shareholders and top officials of the utilities Oden is charged with regulating. 

“The influence of money in [utility commission] elections is very high because in a vacuum of information, whoever has the most money gets their message out the best,” said Joshua Basseches, an assistant professor at Tulane University who studies energy and climate policy. “In theory, the elected commissioners would be less susceptible to regulatory capture, because they would have to face the voters,” but "in practice, what happens is that these are very low-visibility elections.” 

Voters, in other words, have little to go on.

Utility commissions, writ broadly, are charged with overseeing the complex activities and fielding the demands of massive energy conglomerates that the state has granted regional monopoly powers. Commissioners vet new projects, monitor utility financials, and evaluate rate hike requests. The companies, meanwhile, are ensured a guaranteed return on investment, which averages about 10 percent nationally. 

Though each commission is different, their basic mission is the same: to ensure a safe and reliable grid and affordable energy for consumers. But sometimes the relationship between regulator and regulated gets a little too cozy, a phenomenon economists call “regulatory capture.”

“Investments in political candidates—and particularly for economic regulators like a utility commissioner—there's no better market return,” said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at Public Citizen, a consumer-advocacy nonprofit . “The amount of benefit that a utility can get, that a fossil fuel interest can get, from a friendly regulator, is better than anything that the stock market can provide.”

Regulatory capture can be costly to consumers. Since 2017, electricity bills in Georgia have increased by about $45 a month, more than double the national average, according to data from FindEnergy.com. Electricity rates, which constitute just a portion of the bill, have kept pace with the national average. Most of the increase is due to surcharges to pay for the $35 billion buildout of a nuclear generating station originally forecast to cost $14 billion.

Commissioner Bob Anthony deemed one PSC decision “the largest fleecing of the Oklahoma ratepayer in the history of the state.” Asked why his colleagues voted for it, he said: “Follow the money."

Back in 2012, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Georgia Power permission to build two new reactors at Plant Vogtle, the state’s utility commissioners were receiving 70 percent of their campaign support from companies or people that stood to benefit financially, or not, from their decisions, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Over the next decade, the five commissioners approved $3.2 billion in cost overruns. ”This nuclear expansion does not make sense. It’s way over budget, way behind schedule,” Jennette Gayer, director of the nonprofit Environment Georgia, told Floodlight. 

Although Georgia law bars utilities from donating in PSC elections, nearly one-third of the campaign contributions to its commissioners since 2014 have come from fossil fuel and utility interests. Among the donors are Georgia Power executives, regulatory attorneys with business before the commission, and construction companies that specialize in utility work.

Thanks to a series of legal battles, Georgia hasn’t held elections for its PSC since 2020, and sitting commissioners have not had to disclose their campaign contributions since 2021. “The commissioners follow all campaign finance laws,” said PSC spokesman Tom Krause. “This includes disclosure of all donors and donated amounts as required by state and federal law.”

Critics have also pointed to Oklahoma as a place where commissioners’ close relationships to the companies they oversee might be harming residents. Members of the state Corporation Commission (utility commissions go by various names) have taken in more than $1 million—nearly 35 percent of donations of $250 or more over the last decade—from sources linked to fossil fuel firms and utilities.

In 2022, the commission rapidly approved a plan for ratepayers to shoulder historic increases on their gas bills. The decision followed 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, which depleted the state’s gas reserves, forcing utilities to purchase gas on the spot market at exorbitant prices. The $3 average cost for 1,000 cubic feet of gas skyrocketed to $1,200 for a brief time, saddling the utilities with $3 billion in extra costs.

“What’s the result of all this fossil fuel industry money? ... Very little renewable energy, and in some cases, like Alabama and Mississippi, overt hostility.”

The companies  wanted to pass that loss along to their ratepayers. After the Legislature passed a bill allowing them to issue bonds to finance the debt, the corporation commissioners gave the utilities exactly what they wanted. “We paid more for natural gas in three days than we do in a year,” said Nick Singer, a leader with VOICE Oklahoma, a civic engagement coalition. “And they just created a debt instrument to put it on the backs of ratepayers for the next 25 years. And they did it in a couple months.”

This spring, Oklahoma’s attorney general filed a pair of lawsuits against gas pipeline firms, alleging they helped bid up prices to historic highs during the storm. Commissioner Bob Anthony was the only one of the state’s three commissioners to vote against securitization. In a July op-ed in the Oklahoman, he called the panel’s vote “the largest fleecing of the Oklahoma ratepayer in the history of the state.” 

Asked why his fellow commissioners voted the other way, Anthony, who is serving his final term, told Floodlight: “Follow the money, that’s the heart of it.”

“Correlation does not necessarily determine causation,” Trey Davis, a spokesman for the commission responded in an email, “and, while you might want to argue a majority decision is analogous to some form of quid-pro-quo, you do not appear to have provided any substance in support of what is tantamount to a spurious and seemingly subliminal allegation.”

Almost all of the states that elect their commissioners are led by Republicans—only Arizona has a Democratic governor. The Deep South states in particular stand out for their dearth of renewable energy.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi all derive less than 1 percent of their electricity from solar despite ample solar potential in those states. (Utility-scale solar is the cheapest form of energy currently available.) That’s less than one-quarter of the national average.

In Mississippi, where PSC members got 12 percent of their campaign cash from fossil fuel interests, commissioners are openly dismissive of calls to improve the state’s 37th-place solar energy ranking. During an August “solar summit,” two commissioners abruptly cut off public discussion and ended the session early after pro-solar representatives stood up to speak. 

“What’s the result of all this fossil fuel industry money in commission elections?” said Daniel Tait, research and communications director for the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog. “Very little renewable energy, and in some cases, like Alabama and Mississippi, overt hostility.”

Several utilities in Arizona and Alabama have been caught making large, unreported, and difficult-to-trace dark money contributions to support commissioner candidates.

One state recently switched how it picks energy regulators. New Mexico, a Democratically controlled state with a powerful oil and gas industry, transitioned from electing commissioners to appointing them in 2023. The state law governing the transition also required commissioners to have degrees in fields related to energy. 

Its fresh slate of appointed commissioners has since approved a rate increase for the primary utility, the Public Service Company of New Mexico—but the amount was only about a quarter of what the utility requested. They also ordered PNM to return some $115 million in excess profits to its ratepayers. (The utility has appealed the latter decision to the state Supreme Court.)

One energy activist now says she preferred the elected commissioners, because campaign finance data made utility influence easier to trace—and counteract. “I think that the elected commission was more democratic, even though PNM spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to elect the commissioners they wanted,” said Mariel Nanasi, executive director of New Energy Economy, a renewable energy nonprofit. “That backfired for them, and their preferred candidates—at least in more recent times—lost because [their campaign spending] was exposed.” 

The patchwork nature of campaign finance record-keeping and disclosure laws in the United States also can make it difficult to track industry money flowing into state utility commission elections. 

In Mississippi and South Dakota, for example, Floodlight journalists had to manually enter into a database thousands of campaign contributions from records that were handwritten or kept in unsearchable formats. 

The money also can also come through supposedly independent groups—like political committees and 501(c)(4) (dark money) groups that don’t have to reveal their donors—making it harder to trace. These groups are allowed to support (or oppose) particular candidates but are not legally allowed to coordinate with any candidate’s campaign.

Arizona is the only one of the nine states analyzed that makes tracking independent campaign spending easy. For example, the dominant utility, Arizona Public Service, donated nearly $4.2 million in 2016 to the Arizona Coalition for Reliable Electricity, a political action committee that then spent nearly that exact amount to support the company’s preferred commissioners. (Arizona also provides commission candidates with public financing, which was not included in our analysis.)

Over the past decade, several utilities in Arizona and Alabama have been caught making large, unreported, and difficult-to-trace dark money contributions to support PSC candidates.

Clearly, utilities and fossil fuel interests are not donating to lawmakers and energy regulators out of the goodness of their hearts. But campaign donations, to be fair, don’t always predict how a legislator or regulator will act. Oklahoma commissioner Anthony received 65 percent of his donations from such sources, and he has often been a lone dissenting voice on the commission against policies that he says put consumers on the hook for the utilities’ mistakes. 

Bob Burns, an Arizona Corporation Commission member, got 41 percent of his donations from industry sources. Yet in 2016, he used his position to crusade for campaign finance transparency from the holding company that owns Arizona Public Service, which stood accused of using millions of dollars of dark money to support its preferred commissioner candidates. (Under pressure from the commission, the company eventually acknowledged its tactics.)

At least one energy regulator told Floodlight he struggled over whether to take donations from the companies he oversees. “I went through the process of trying to figure out from whom do I accept a donation?” said Gary Hanson, who sits on the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission. His conclusion: “I’m either going to accept donations from everyone or from no one—you either accept from everyone or you don’t accept from anyone.”

He took the money. 

Floodlight reporter Kristi E. Swartz contributed to this story.

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

Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president this summer, national attention on the issue of fracking in Pennsylvania—and what it means for the outcome of the election in this key swing state—has reached new highs. But what do Pennsylvanian voters really think about fracking? And what bearing do those opinions have on their choice for president? 

A new poll of likely voters in Pennsylvania attempts to answer those questions. The poll, commissioned by the Appalachia-based nonprofit Ohio River Valley Institute, echoes previous polling in that it shows that while Pennsylvanians are divided on fracking, a significant majority support more regulations on the natural gas industry. The poll also shows that energy and natural gas issues are not among voters’ most important priorities, something that is often overlooked in national conversations about the political implications of the practice.

When asked which two issues were most “personally motivating” to them when casting a vote, voters selected issues like jobs, border security, preserving democracy, reproductive rights, and cutting taxes ahead of issues like climate change and reducing energy costs. 

Fracking is a divisive issue in Pennsylvania, and support for it is highly partisan. Fifty-one percent of all Pennsylvania voters say they support fracking, 30 percent say they’re opposed and 19 percent aren’t sure either way, which is indicative of the fact that fracking is not the most important issue for many voters. Eighty-one percent of Republicans support spending taxpayer money on more fracking and pipeline development, and only 43 percent of Democrats do. Support for fracking is regionally driven, with voters who live in areas near Pittsburgh, where the fracking industry is concentrated in Pennsylvania, recording the highest percentage of support. 

“A large section of the state’s population lives outside the shale play. They’ve never seen a fracking pad..”

Just 42 percent of respondents said they’d support an outright ban of fracking in Pennsylvania, one reason that Republicans like former president Donald Trump and Senate candidate Dave McCormick have tried to paint their Democratic opponents as proponents of a ban. The number of voters who would support a ban is lower among independents, at only 38 percent. 

Fifty-two percent of respondents agreed with the statement “fracking can be done in a way that protects the health and safety of my family.” This belief is at odds with the ninth edition of the compendium of findings and reports on fracking from the Concerned Health Professionals of New York, which states it has found “no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends.”

Forty-eight percent agreed that “living near fracking activity can lead to a higher risk of asthma, childhood lymphoma, and other health problems.” This statement closely mirrors the findings of a set of 2023 studies on fracking and public health from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania Department of Health.

Christopher Borick, director of Muhlenberg College’s Institute of Public Opinion, which polls Pennsylvanians about their views on fracking, said this new poll’s findings “generally align” with what he’s seen in polling over the years: Although Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the United States, Pennsylvanians have long been divided over fracking. Pennsylvanians have “significant reservations” about fracking and its impacts on health and the environment, even as they tend to view it as economically beneficial. 

“It’s a big fracking state. But that doesn’t mean it’s monolithic in its views,” Borick said. “A large section of the state’s population lives outside the shale play. They’ve never seen a fracking pad. The idea that everybody’s in the industry is absolutely false.” 

There’s also no evidence that fracking is an electoral “slam dunk” for politicians seeking to win the state, he said. Muhlenberg’s polling has shown similar results as this poll when voters are asked to name their most important issues. “Fracking doesn’t register,” he said.

“There’s just a significant lack of recognition about the drawbacks that people perceive.”

Perhaps most heartening for environmental activists who have long raised the alarm about evidence showing that fracking harms public health, the environment, and the climate, the poll shows broad bipartisan support for tougher regulations on the fracking industry than currently exist. Ninety-four percent of respondents said they supported mandatory disclosure of the chemicals companies use to frack, 93 percent said they supported safer transportation of fracking waste and 90 percent supported increasing the distance the wells can be drilled near hospitals and schools. 

“I was genuinely surprised about the level of support for increased restrictions,” said Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher in energy and petrochemicals at the Ohio River Valley Institute. O’Leary said support for more regulation has grown since the last time the organization conducted a poll on this topic three years ago. 

Although he was surprised, O’Leary said the numbers made sense to him. “My sense of being on the ground in the region is that most people are pretty deeply ambivalent about fracking. It’s not a pleasant thing to have around or nearby,” he said. “I suspect most of the concern about the industry and the desire for greater regulation simply comes from people’s firsthand experience with it.”

In listening to national discussions of voters’ feelings about the issue, he said, this fact does not seem to be well-represented. “There’s just a significant lack of recognition about the drawbacks that people perceive, and the desire that they feel to have the industry’s effects on quality of life and pollution and health better managed and mitigated,” he said. 

Some people in Pennsylvania continue to associate fracking with jobs and economic gains, but that does not mean they are happy with the industry’s disruptive impacts on their daily lives.

The regulations suggested in the polling are similar to policy recommendations made in a 2020 grand jury report on fracking from the state attorney general’s office, then led by the current governor, Josh Shapiro. The goal of these recommendations was to “create a more comprehensive legal framework that would better protect Pennsylvanians from the realities of industry operations.” 

In an echo of the three regulations that voters were most supportive of, the report recommended that well setbacks be increased from 500 feet to 2,500 feet, that companies publicly share which chemicals are used in fracking operations and that the transportation of fracking waste be made safer. None of these three recommendations have been implemented.

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

Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president this summer, national attention on the issue of fracking in Pennsylvania—and what it means for the outcome of the election in this key swing state—has reached new highs. But what do Pennsylvanian voters really think about fracking? And what bearing do those opinions have on their choice for president? 

A new poll of likely voters in Pennsylvania attempts to answer those questions. The poll, commissioned by the Appalachia-based nonprofit Ohio River Valley Institute, echoes previous polling in that it shows that while Pennsylvanians are divided on fracking, a significant majority support more regulations on the natural gas industry. The poll also shows that energy and natural gas issues are not among voters’ most important priorities, something that is often overlooked in national conversations about the political implications of the practice.

When asked which two issues were most “personally motivating” to them when casting a vote, voters selected issues like jobs, border security, preserving democracy, reproductive rights, and cutting taxes ahead of issues like climate change and reducing energy costs. 

Fracking is a divisive issue in Pennsylvania, and support for it is highly partisan. Fifty-one percent of all Pennsylvania voters say they support fracking, 30 percent say they’re opposed and 19 percent aren’t sure either way, which is indicative of the fact that fracking is not the most important issue for many voters. Eighty-one percent of Republicans support spending taxpayer money on more fracking and pipeline development, and only 43 percent of Democrats do. Support for fracking is regionally driven, with voters who live in areas near Pittsburgh, where the fracking industry is concentrated in Pennsylvania, recording the highest percentage of support. 

“A large section of the state’s population lives outside the shale play. They’ve never seen a fracking pad..”

Just 42 percent of respondents said they’d support an outright ban of fracking in Pennsylvania, one reason that Republicans like former president Donald Trump and Senate candidate Dave McCormick have tried to paint their Democratic opponents as proponents of a ban. The number of voters who would support a ban is lower among independents, at only 38 percent. 

Fifty-two percent of respondents agreed with the statement “fracking can be done in a way that protects the health and safety of my family.” This belief is at odds with the ninth edition of the compendium of findings and reports on fracking from the Concerned Health Professionals of New York, which states it has found “no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends.”

Forty-eight percent agreed that “living near fracking activity can lead to a higher risk of asthma, childhood lymphoma, and other health problems.” This statement closely mirrors the findings of a set of 2023 studies on fracking and public health from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania Department of Health.

Christopher Borick, director of Muhlenberg College’s Institute of Public Opinion, which polls Pennsylvanians about their views on fracking, said this new poll’s findings “generally align” with what he’s seen in polling over the years: Although Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the United States, Pennsylvanians have long been divided over fracking. Pennsylvanians have “significant reservations” about fracking and its impacts on health and the environment, even as they tend to view it as economically beneficial. 

“It’s a big fracking state. But that doesn’t mean it’s monolithic in its views,” Borick said. “A large section of the state’s population lives outside the shale play. They’ve never seen a fracking pad. The idea that everybody’s in the industry is absolutely false.” 

There’s also no evidence that fracking is an electoral “slam dunk” for politicians seeking to win the state, he said. Muhlenberg’s polling has shown similar results as this poll when voters are asked to name their most important issues. “Fracking doesn’t register,” he said.

“There’s just a significant lack of recognition about the drawbacks that people perceive.”

Perhaps most heartening for environmental activists who have long raised the alarm about evidence showing that fracking harms public health, the environment, and the climate, the poll shows broad bipartisan support for tougher regulations on the fracking industry than currently exist. Ninety-four percent of respondents said they supported mandatory disclosure of the chemicals companies use to frack, 93 percent said they supported safer transportation of fracking waste and 90 percent supported increasing the distance the wells can be drilled near hospitals and schools. 

“I was genuinely surprised about the level of support for increased restrictions,” said Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher in energy and petrochemicals at the Ohio River Valley Institute. O’Leary said support for more regulation has grown since the last time the organization conducted a poll on this topic three years ago. 

Although he was surprised, O’Leary said the numbers made sense to him. “My sense of being on the ground in the region is that most people are pretty deeply ambivalent about fracking. It’s not a pleasant thing to have around or nearby,” he said. “I suspect most of the concern about the industry and the desire for greater regulation simply comes from people’s firsthand experience with it.”

In listening to national discussions of voters’ feelings about the issue, he said, this fact does not seem to be well-represented. “There’s just a significant lack of recognition about the drawbacks that people perceive, and the desire that they feel to have the industry’s effects on quality of life and pollution and health better managed and mitigated,” he said. 

Some people in Pennsylvania continue to associate fracking with jobs and economic gains, but that does not mean they are happy with the industry’s disruptive impacts on their daily lives.

The regulations suggested in the polling are similar to policy recommendations made in a 2020 grand jury report on fracking from the state attorney general’s office, then led by the current governor, Josh Shapiro. The goal of these recommendations was to “create a more comprehensive legal framework that would better protect Pennsylvanians from the realities of industry operations.” 

In an echo of the three regulations that voters were most supportive of, the report recommended that well setbacks be increased from 500 feet to 2,500 feet, that companies publicly share which chemicals are used in fracking operations and that the transportation of fracking waste be made safer. None of these three recommendations have been implemented.

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

At a congressional hearing on the greenhouse effect in 1981, Al Gore, then a member of the House of Representatives from Tennessee, remarked that it was hard to come to terms with the fact that rising carbon dioxide emissions could radically alter our world. “Quite frankly, my first reaction to it several years ago was one of disbelief,” he said. “Since then, I have been waiting patiently for it to go away, but it has not gone away.”

Gore’s hearings didn’t spark the epiphany he’d hoped among his fellow members of Congress. More than four decades later, the problem still hasn’t resonated with many of them, even as the devastating weather changes scientists warned about have become reality. Wildfires have turned towns to ash, and the rains unleashed by storms like Hurricane Helene have left even so-called climate havens like Asheville, North Carolina, in a post-apocalyptic state, with power lines tossed around like spaghetti.

“Even when Pope Francis, for goodness’ sake, speaks out on [climate issues], they attack him and say that he’s meddling in partisanship.”

“I’ll have to admit to you that I’ve been surprised at how difficult it’s been to implement the kinds of policies that will solve the climate crisis,” Gore said in an interview with Grist.

So he isn’t exactly surprised that the issue is on the back burner this election season. When asked about their plans to fight climate change in the presidential debate last month, Vice President Kamala Harris assured voters she wasn’t against fracking for natural gas, while former President Donald Trump went on a tangent about domestic vehicle manufacturing. The subject took on a more prominent role in the vice presidential debate last Tuesday, when the Republican, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, hedged by calling global warming “weird science” while not actually dismissing it, and the Democrat, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, envisioned America “becoming an energy superpower for the future.” And that was about it.

“Since the struggle for votes is almost always focused on undecided voters, most of them in the center of the political spectrum, it’s not at all unusual to see immediate, visceral issues like jobs and the economy take the foreground,” Gore said.

As told in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s interest in climate change was first sparked at Harvard University, where Gore took a population studies class taught by the Roger Revelle, a climate scientist who had played a pivotal role in setting up experiments to measure rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It was the 1960s, a decade in which the American public first started learning about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. Gore was stunned by the evidence Revelle presented, but “never imagined for a second that it would take over my life.”

He’s spent the decades since advocating for climate action. As vice president under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, he unsuccessfully pushed to pass the Kyoto Protocol, the first international attempt to push countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Six years after he lost the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that turned his traveling climate change slideshow into a hit, launched the issue into the national conversation. Today, he leads the educational nonprofit The Climate Reality Project, which trains people how to mobilize their neighbors to elect climate champions, counter greenwashing, and advance green solutions.

Fossil fuel polluters “use their legacy networks of economic and political power to try to block any solutions.”

As a prominent Democrat, Gore’s impassioned advocacy has been blamed for making climate change seem like a liberal thing to care about. To Gore, that’s an example of attacking the messenger without looking at the deeper reasons why climate change is politically contentious in the first place. “Even when Pope Francis, for goodness’ sake, speaks out on it, they attack him and say that he’s meddling in partisanship.” If there’s anyone to blame for polarization, he said, it’s the fossil fuel industry, which has tried to take control of the conversation about climate change. 

“This is the most powerful and wealthiest business lobby in the history of the world, and they spare no effort and no expense to try to block any progress,” Gore said. “Whoever sticks his or her head up above the parapet draws fire from fossil fuel polluters, and they use their legacy networks of economic and political power to try to block any solutions of any sort that might reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.”

In his decades of talking to the public about climate change, he says he’s learned a few things. You have to keep in mind a “time budget” that people will give you to speak with them, as well as a “complexity budget” so that you avoid dumping facts and numbers onto people. Finally, he says, you need to allot a “hope budget” so they don’t get too overwhelmed and depressed.

Even while progress has been slower than he’d hoped, Gore sees signs that things are moving in the right direction. Last year, 86 percent of new electricity generation installed worldwide came from renewables, for example. Not to mention that Congress, where climate legislation had long gone to die, finally managed to pass a landmark climate law in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to drastically trim US emissions through green incentives and rebates. 

“It’s the kind of challenge that is so compelling—once you pick it up, you can’t put it back down again—because it really requires any person of conscience, I think, to keep working on it until we get the kind of progress that’s needed.”

Kamala Harris is starting to respond to calls by media outlets and voters to share a detailed economic policy plan ahead of November, including making billionaires “pay their fair share.”

Harris delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday, along with the release of a policy book that lays out her strategy to lower costs and “create an opportunity economy” for the middle class. 

In Pittsburgh, Harris attempted the delicate balance of reaching out to undecided voters while also appealing to those already excited by her campaign as she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. 

“I believe we shouldn’t be constrained by ideology, and instead should seek practical solutions to problems,” Harris said. “Part of being pragmatic means taking good ideas from wherever they come.”

The result was a speech that didn’t do much to elaborate on policy, instead seeking to avoid language or commitments that could reinforce Republicans’ description of Harris as a “Marxist.”

But the 82-page document, “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” gets into some of those details, including “making the wealthiest Americans play by the same rules as the middle class.” 

To do this, Harris proposes a minimum income tax for billionaires—at an amount yet to be disclosed—and “commonsense tax reforms for corporations.” 

The policy guide cites the federal budget for fiscal year 2025—according to which Donald Trump’s 2017 tax breaks brought effective corporate tax rates to less than 10 percent—and a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nongovernmental think tank, that found that large companies didn’t pass the profits from those cuts to workers or into other investments. 

Harris states that she will raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent—notably still less than the 35 percent rate for the richest companies that was in place from 1993 until Trump’s 2017 cuts. In the document, the vice president emphasized the difference with Trump’s tax policy, which by 2020 allowed at least 55 of the largest American corporations to pay no federal income tax and to make $3.5 billion in rebates. 

Voters remain concerned about economic policy. According to a September poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College among undecided voters in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, about one in eight said Harris’ handling of the economy was their most pressing concern. What her latest economic strategy means for such voters remains to be seen. 

Kamala Harris is starting to respond to calls by media outlets and voters to share a detailed economic policy plan ahead of November, including making billionaires “pay their fair share.”

Harris delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday, along with the release of a policy book that lays out her strategy to lower costs and “create an opportunity economy” for the middle class. 

In Pittsburgh, Harris attempted the delicate balance of reaching out to undecided voters while also appealing to those already excited by her campaign as she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. 

“I believe we shouldn’t be constrained by ideology, and instead should seek practical solutions to problems,” Harris said. “Part of being pragmatic means taking good ideas from wherever they come.”

The result was a speech that didn’t do much to elaborate on policy, instead seeking to avoid language or commitments that could reinforce Republicans’ description of Harris as a “Marxist.”

But the 82-page document, “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” gets into some of those details, including “making the wealthiest Americans play by the same rules as the middle class.” 

To do this, Harris proposes a minimum income tax for billionaires—at an amount yet to be disclosed—and “commonsense tax reforms for corporations.” 

The policy guide cites the federal budget for fiscal year 2025—according to which Donald Trump’s 2017 tax breaks brought effective corporate tax rates to less than 10 percent—and a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nongovernmental think tank, that found that large companies didn’t pass the profits from those cuts to workers or into other investments. 

Harris states that she will raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent—notably still less than the 35 percent rate for the richest companies that was in place from 1993 until Trump’s 2017 cuts. In the document, the vice president emphasized the difference with Trump’s tax policy, which by 2020 allowed at least 55 of the largest American corporations to pay no federal income tax and to make $3.5 billion in rebates. 

Voters remain concerned about economic policy. According to a September poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College among undecided voters in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, about one in eight said Harris’ handling of the economy was their most pressing concern. What her latest economic strategy means for such voters remains to be seen. 

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

Every day, the sun’s rays send 173,000 terawatts of energy to Earth, 10,000 times the amount used by all of humanity. Which is to say, the potential for solar energy is immense, and we’re nowhere near the limit.

That’s why solar energy is such an appealing prospect, particularly as an alternative to the fossil fuels that cause climate change. And over the past decade, solar energy technology has vastly improved in performance and plummeted in cost.

As a result, photovoltaic panels have cropped up like dandelions across fields and rooftops at a stunning pace. Yet even the people most plugged-in to the energy industry and most optimistic about solar power continue to underestimate it. In fact, it’s a long-running joke among energy nerds that forecasters keep predicting solar will level off as it continues to rocket up to the sun.

“In fact, it’s a long-running joke among energy nerds that forecasters keep predicting solar will level off as it continues to rocket up to the sun.”

“Solar does continue to surprise us,” said Gregory Nemet, who wrote How Solar Energy Became Cheap, in an email. “It seems like it shouldn’t at this point. It’s been roughly 30 percent growth each year for 30 years. And costs continue to fall so new users—and new uses—continue to emerge.”

In the past year, solar power has experienced Brobdingnagian growth, even by solar standards. According to a new report from Ember, an energy think tank, the world is on track to install 29 percent more solar energy capacity this year—a total of 593 gigawatts—compared to last year, which was already a record year. This is more than one-quarter of the electricity produced by every operating coal plant in the world combined. In 2020, the whole world had installed just 760 GW of solar in total. Yes, this deserves all the italics I’m using.

That solar power installations are going up as the technology improves and prices come down isn’t too surprising, but the sustained surge is still stunning.

“When you look at the absolute numbers that we’re on track for this year and that we installed last year, it is completely sort of mind-blowing,” said Euan Graham, lead author of the report and an electricity data analyst at Ember.

Several factors have aligned to push solar power installations so high in recent years, like better hardware, economies of scale, and new, ripe, energy-hungry markets. Right now, solar still just provides around 5.5 percent of the world’s electricity, so there’s enormous room to expand. But solar energy still poses some technical challenges to the power grid, and the world’s ravenous appetite for electrons means that countries are looking for energy wherever they can get it.

So if you’re concerned about climate change, it’s not enough that solar wins; greenhouse gasses must lose.

Why’s everything so sunny for solar?

Solar energy has a lot going for it, particularly photovoltaic panels. They’re modular and they scale up and down easily—there isn’t much difference between a panel that’s one of a dozen on a suburban rooftop and a panel that’s one of thousands in a megawatt-scale power plant spanning acres. They’re mass-produced in factories using well-established processes, namely semiconductor fabrication. That means tiny improvements in cost and performance in individual panels add up to massive advantages in aggregate.

And for solar, gains have been anything but tiny: Solar electricity prices have dropped 89 percent since 2010 while silicon solar panels have surged in efficiency from 15 percent to more than 26 percent over the last 40 years.

Solar’s scalability means that curious developers can try it out with less upfront investment before ramping up. Most solar installations use off-the-shelf components, so when a homeowner or a utility does decide to step into the sunlight, they can start making power quickly. “That development time is absolutely minimal compared to something like building a nuclear power station, but also even just a wind farm, which can take five to seven years or so from the initial permitting to first power coming out,” Graham said.

Even if you don’t care about climate change, solar energy has become one of the cheapest, fastest ways to sate your appetite for electrons. Texas, the biggest oil and gas producer in the country, is also the national leader in adding solar power to its grid, surpassing California.

But what happens when the sun sets?

Solar does have some drawbacks. The sun does sink below the horizon every day, and solar energy’s output varies with weather and the seasons—dipping when it’s cloudy and when the days get shorter. Banking electricity when it’s abundant to use when it’s scarce would resolve this problem, and, well, there’s good news on that front too.

Energy storage technologies like batteries are also getting way better and cheaper. The price of batteries has tanked 97 percent since 1991. Because of better technology, falling costs, and more markets for saving power, the US is on track to double its grid energy storage capacity compared to last year. More than 10 gigawatts of solar and storage came online in 2023 across the country and that’s likely to double this year. “Energy storage is at an earlier stage [than solar] but we are likely to see rapid expansion in that segment, especially in regions where solar and wind penetration are high already such as California and Texas,” said Steve Piper, director of energy research at S&P Global Commodity Insights, in an email.

​Combined solar-plus-storage energy projects are already cheaper than new fossil fuel power plants in many parts of the world, and costs are poised to fall further.
Even knowing all this, energy experts keep underestimating the potential of solar. “Forecasters recognize that with regard to solar PV we are in a phase of rapid expansion and adoption,” Piper said. “In a period like this, being off about the rate of expansion by even a little bit will still result in a large forecast error.”

The details of solar’s expansion are even more surprising

Not every country is riding the solar power rocket to the sun just yet. Individual countries have seen peaks and dips in solar installations based on how well their economies are doing and how strong their policy incentives are, like feed-in tariffs, net metering, and tax credits.

In the past couple of years, the global story has really been about China. Add up every solar panel installed in the US in history and you get how much China installed last year alone, almost 60 percent of all new solar installed in the world. The sheer scale of this deployment broke a lot of forecasters’ models.

“No research shop necessarily predicted the pace at which China was going to grow their solar capacity over the last year or so,” said Michelle Davis, head of global solar at Wood Mackenzie, an energy market analysis firm. “Everyone’s been revising them upward in order to correct for the data that’s been coming out of China.”

Photovoltaics are also a key part of China’s export strategy, and last year, China cut wholesale panel prices in half. That in turn has led to a huge surge in exports and knock-on solar power booms in other countries. Pakistan, the fifth-most populous country in the world, imported 13 gigawatts of Chinese solar modules in the first half of this year alone. That’s almost one-third of Pakistan’s total installed electricity to date.

Davis cautioned that imports of solar panels don’t necessarily mean they’ll all be installed, but it’s definitely a sign that solar is growing and its impact may be greater there than in larger or wealthier countries. While the solar energy additions in developing countries may be smaller in absolute numbers, they’re proportionately a larger share of the grid.

“Those developing parts of the world are growing at a more rapid rate on a smaller base,” Davis said. “The big Kahunas in the solar world are China, Europe, and the United States. Those markets are maturing, though, and they’re not growing as fast.”

There are some clouds in the sky

This can’t keep going on forever, right? Well, again, solar is still in the single digits in the global electricity supply, and it’s often the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to generate power. That momentum isn’t going to dissipate anytime soon. In the US, the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate cut means it will likely be even cheaper to get a loan to finance solar power, giving it another boost.

Some challenges have also emerged. If you want to add more solar to the US power grid right now, you need to take a number and get in line. There are hardware limits to how much intermittent power you can add to the aging electricity network, and making the necessary upgrades to accommodate it costs money and takes time. Delays are getting longer: In 2015, a typical energy project waited about three years in an interconnection queue. In 2023, that wait time was almost five years. Getting the permits to build more large-scale solar is also a tedious process. Many countries are facing similar hurdles.

In addition, the US is bolstering its domestic clean energy sector with trade barriers, including tariffs on Chinese solar panels. That may give an advantage to US producers but it raises overall costs and imposes supply chain constraints. The US is also investing $40 million to bring more of the solar energy supply chain within its borders.

And solar power didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree; it exists in the context of a global economy that’s still 80 percent powered by coal, oil, and natural gas. Overall global energy consumption is growing, and not everyone is discerning about where they get their heat and electricity. As a result, fossil fuel demand is also rising, though it may peak before the end of the decade. To meet international climate change targets of limiting warming to less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit this century, greenhouse gas emissions have to fall at a much faster clip and effectively zero out by 2050.

Analysts are anticipating that solar energy will help bend that curve. According to Wood Mackenzie, total global solar capacity is going to almost quadruple in the next decade. It’s not certain whether the world will reach its climate goals, but solar will continue to spread as sure as the sun will rise.

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.”