After 50 days, Gaza European Hospital, one of the few trauma centers serving the Gaza strip, reopened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The hospital has been a vital part of the crumbling medical infrastructure in the region. It reopened earlier this month.

In August, I told the story of two medical students who worked at Gaza European Hospital before it was shuttered and forcibly evacuated on July 1st. The medical center remained closed amid bombardment in the area for over a month. Each student told me harrowing stories of their time suddenly propelled to the job of full-time doctors amid the devastation of the medical system in Gaza.  

You can read the full piece, here:

Now, the students are back to work. Hasan Ali Abu Ghalyoon, a dental student I interviewed via WhatsApp in August, returned to European Hospital on September 9th. He said things are different there now. 

Before the July evacuation, he slept at the hospital. Now, he commutes back and forth from his family’s tent in Deir al-Balah, a trip that takes him three or four hours a day. It is only about a seven-mile journey. But in Gaza, it can be treacherous.

Normally, he takes a hospital-provided bus to work. Last Friday, though, “I was a little late for the bus and I was forced to go by car,” he said. On his journey, he passed a destroyed World Health Organization warehouse, a torched mosque, and innumerable teetering husks of buildings and dust-covered tents. “I took three cars on my way to get from my tent to the hospital and I walked through many destroyed streets on foot.” 

In some areas of eastern Gaza, there are no cars at all. The trip, he said, cost him 25 shekels, or about eight dollars, thanks to the lack of fuel entering Gaza. Before the war, transportation wouldn’t cost a thing. 

Nermeen Ziyad Abo Mostafa, another student volunteer, hears the zanana—Gazan slang for the incessant buzzing of drones overhead—on her way to the hospital. “It was not easy to reopen it, because all the hospital’s property was stolen,” she said. The hospital is still not fully equipped, she explained, but medical teams are doing their best to work with what they have. 

Once the students arrive, they see “mostly burns and fractures,” Abu Ghalyoon said. Every day, there are patients requiring skin grafts. 

Another change: there are now fewer international delegations than before. The flow of international medics into the Gaza strip has slowed to a trickle. The Israeli military has hit international aid workers like those from World Central Kitchen, after a vehicle from the group was bombed in April, and UN workers, like those from the World Food Program, whose vehicles were struck in August. Supply shortages are ongoing. As Abu Ghalyoon put it: “There is a very, very severe shortage of all medicines. The medical equipment is old and sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.”

On September 12th, the World Health Organization released a report estimating that over 22,500 people in Gaza have suffered “life-changing injuries” since Israel’s offensive in Gaza began. Most of these injuries—about 13,000 to 17,000—are what the WHO report calls “severe limb injuries,” and at least 3,000 are amputations.

“The huge surge in rehabilitation needs occurs in parallel with the ongoing decimation of the health system,” said Dr. Richard Peeperkorn, WHO Representative in the occupied Palestinian territory. “Patients can’t get the care they need. Acute rehabilitation services are severely disrupted and specialized care for complex injuries is not available, placing patients’ lives at risk. Immediate and long-term support is urgently needed to address the enormous rehabilitation needs.” 

Prime Video and All3Media International are set to launch an Indian adaptation of the hit reality show “The Traitors,” with media personality Karan Johar tapped to host. The unscripted series, based on the BAFTA and Emmy-winning format created by IDTV and RTL Netherlands, will be produced by BBC Studios India Productions. The show will stream […]

Animation oriented sales outfit Gebeka International has boarded Xilam Films’ upcoming family feature “Lucy Lost,” while France’s Le Pacte and Canal+ have picked up French domestic distribution and pay-tv rights. Together the three new partners will help launch this seaside adventure tale, co-written and directed by animation vet Olivier Clert and adapted from “War Horse” […]

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

The forest was unnaturally still when Soňa Chovanová Supeková first picked up the bear’s scent. It was roe deer rutting season in southern Slovakia, and the hills below the Carpathian mountains were busy with tourists biking and foraging for mushrooms. Fellow hunters who had come face to face with bears had told Supeková the fear had been so great they could not lift their rifles. Sitting with her father, a hunter in his 80s who had killed a few bears, she found herself in a similar state of dread—she was out on that trip expecting to kill deer, and did not want to come on a bear unexpectedly.

“Fear permeated me…the smell penetrated to the tip of my bones,” says Supeková, the founder of the Club of Slovak Lady Hunters. But the bear never appeared. The next morning, the daughter and father hunting duo saw its droppings. “We breathed a sigh of relief only in the car.”

Europe’s brown bears are a protected species. But they—alongside wolves and lynxes—are increasingly crossing paths with farmers, forestry officials, and hunters such as Supeková. The appetite for killing big carnivores has shot up as wolf and bear populations have grown, several bear attacks have made headlines, and politicians have taken aim at laws that brought back them back from the brink of extinction.

Sweden has issued permits to kill 486 of its brown bears, about 20 percent, this hunting season, which runs until mid-October. In 2023, the country conducted record-breaking culls of lynxes and wolves. Romania’s MPs voted in July to double its hunting quota from 220 brown bears to 481. In Slovakia, where a bear was recently filmed rampaging through a village, lawmakers voted in June to allow hunting near villages under certain conditions. In July, the European court of justice ruled that recent wolf culls in Austria and Spain were unlawful. Earlier in the year, Switzerland also faced legal challenges for its proposal to kill 70 percent of its wolf population.

The debate around shooting protected species has provoked such fury among farmers, hunters, and conservationists that it has bubbled up to the highest levels of bureaucrats in Brussels. The European Commission, whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, had a pony killed by a wolf two years ago, is seeking to downgrade the animal’s protection status.

“The wolf is no longer an animal with two ears, four legs and one tail; it is a political subject,” says Luigi Boitani, a zoologist at the Sapienza University of Rome and chairman of the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe, a conservation group. “There’s a lot of polarization. When you speak about wolves and bears, the world is not a variety of greys, it’s black or white.”

Wolves were killed off across much of Europe in the 19th and 20th century, but began to bounce back in the 1970s as people moved from villages to cities, and governments later protected the animals and their habitats. A similar shift happened with brown bears and lynxes, with conservationists resettling them in regions from which they had been wiped out.

“This issue is an incendiary force in the hands of populists.”

The continent is now home to six species of large carnivore, and the EU bans killing them, with some exceptions—for example if they pose a danger to the public. Perched at the top of their food chain, the animals help ecosystems thrive by regulating prey populations. There is also some evidence they can limit the spread of disease.

But the scale and speed of their return—there are thought to be more than 20,000 wolves and 17,000 bears in Europe—has increasingly led to conflicts with humans. Farmer and hunting lobbies have pushed to reduce the number of hurdles needed to kill them as the animals have expanded their territory and attacked people and livestock.

A week after Supeková found the bear’s tracks in the forest, she says: “A farmer’s son met a bear on a forest road when he was mushroom picking in a place only about 2 kilometers away. Luckily, the bear ran away.”

Footage of a bear barreling down the streets of a small Slovakian town captured international attention in March, with five injured in the attack. So too did the death of a Belarusian hiker who died when fleeing from a bear the day before. The attacks prompted a change in law to let Slovak security services shoot brown bears that come within half a kilometer of a human settlement. A few months later in Romania, the death of a 19-year-old hiker at the hands of a bear led to the prime minister calling lawmakers back from their summer break for an emergency session in which they voted to cull more bears.

People from villages and the countryside want to reduce the numbers of bears because attacks are increasing, says Supeková. “What’s very tragic is that one bear in the town of Liptovský Mikuláš injured five people, running across the town where children were outside playing games.”

The issue has become fodder for populist parties courting rural votes, with politicians blasting Brussels for putting their children at risk and abandoning villages out of elitist environmental concerns.

Critics say the deaths are tragic but have been blown out of proportion. In Romania, which is home to the most brown bears in Europe, the animals killed 26 people and injured 276 over 20 years, according to the environment ministry. Data from Eurostat shows that motorized vehicles killed 45,000 people in the country in that time.

Cultural associations are a problem for the wolf, which has long been portrayed as the villain of fairytales. Helmut Dammann-Tamke, president of the German hunting association and politician with the center-right Christian Democrats, says the threat of wolf attacks on sheep is “like something on a serving platter” for the far right because it reaches people on an emotional level. “This issue is an incendiary force in the hands of populists.”

A 2022 study of German municipalities found that wolf attacks on livestock predict far-right support. After controlling for factors such as immigration and jobs, the researchers found wolf attacks were associated with far-right gains in municipal elections of between 1 and 2 percentage points. “The evidence points to wolf attacks as one potential driver of electoral radicalisation,” the authors wrote.

Environmental activists question whether blanket policies to cull animals will do much to avoid conflicts with humans and have called for measures to promote peaceful coexistence that range from fences and guard dogs to awareness campaigns for visitors.

Scientists are not yet troubled by the wolf’s population across the continent, but have warned that killing wolves in countries with small populations could prove catastrophic. Large-scale culls could put populations of these predators below local survival levels, they warn. Culls can even increase predation of livestock, as packs are disrupted, sending lone, vulnerable wolves venturing on to farms to hunt. The same “backfire” effect has also been documented with cougars and coyotes.

Ciprian Gal from the Romanian branch of Greenpeace said the Europe-wide trend of weakening protection for big carnivores was “a step backwards” that echoed times when humans felt a strong sense of competition with wildlife.

“European governments, influenced by dominant populist rhetoric and powerful hunting and agricultural lobbies, seem to be choosing solutions based on fear and rapid economic return,” he says. “In a way, this is a backlash against the ambitious green policies of recent years and a valve for those still struggling to cope with the climate reality we’re facing.”

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

The forest was unnaturally still when Soňa Chovanová Supeková first picked up the bear’s scent. It was roe deer rutting season in southern Slovakia, and the hills below the Carpathian mountains were busy with tourists biking and foraging for mushrooms. Fellow hunters who had come face to face with bears had told Supeková the fear had been so great they could not lift their rifles. Sitting with her father, a hunter in his 80s who had killed a few bears, she found herself in a similar state of dread—she was out on that trip expecting to kill deer, and did not want to come on a bear unexpectedly.

“Fear permeated me…the smell penetrated to the tip of my bones,” says Supeková, the founder of the Club of Slovak Lady Hunters. But the bear never appeared. The next morning, the daughter and father hunting duo saw its droppings. “We breathed a sigh of relief only in the car.”

Europe’s brown bears are a protected species. But they—alongside wolves and lynxes—are increasingly crossing paths with farmers, forestry officials, and hunters such as Supeková. The appetite for killing big carnivores has shot up as wolf and bear populations have grown, several bear attacks have made headlines, and politicians have taken aim at laws that brought back them back from the brink of extinction.

Sweden has issued permits to kill 486 of its brown bears, about 20 percent, this hunting season, which runs until mid-October. In 2023, the country conducted record-breaking culls of lynxes and wolves. Romania’s MPs voted in July to double its hunting quota from 220 brown bears to 481. In Slovakia, where a bear was recently filmed rampaging through a village, lawmakers voted in June to allow hunting near villages under certain conditions. In July, the European court of justice ruled that recent wolf culls in Austria and Spain were unlawful. Earlier in the year, Switzerland also faced legal challenges for its proposal to kill 70 percent of its wolf population.

The debate around shooting protected species has provoked such fury among farmers, hunters, and conservationists that it has bubbled up to the highest levels of bureaucrats in Brussels. The European Commission, whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, had a pony killed by a wolf two years ago, is seeking to downgrade the animal’s protection status.

“The wolf is no longer an animal with two ears, four legs and one tail; it is a political subject,” says Luigi Boitani, a zoologist at the Sapienza University of Rome and chairman of the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe, a conservation group. “There’s a lot of polarization. When you speak about wolves and bears, the world is not a variety of greys, it’s black or white.”

Wolves were killed off across much of Europe in the 19th and 20th century, but began to bounce back in the 1970s as people moved from villages to cities, and governments later protected the animals and their habitats. A similar shift happened with brown bears and lynxes, with conservationists resettling them in regions from which they had been wiped out.

“This issue is an incendiary force in the hands of populists.”

The continent is now home to six species of large carnivore, and the EU bans killing them, with some exceptions—for example if they pose a danger to the public. Perched at the top of their food chain, the animals help ecosystems thrive by regulating prey populations. There is also some evidence they can limit the spread of disease.

But the scale and speed of their return—there are thought to be more than 20,000 wolves and 17,000 bears in Europe—has increasingly led to conflicts with humans. Farmer and hunting lobbies have pushed to reduce the number of hurdles needed to kill them as the animals have expanded their territory and attacked people and livestock.

A week after Supeková found the bear’s tracks in the forest, she says: “A farmer’s son met a bear on a forest road when he was mushroom picking in a place only about 2 kilometers away. Luckily, the bear ran away.”

Footage of a bear barreling down the streets of a small Slovakian town captured international attention in March, with five injured in the attack. So too did the death of a Belarusian hiker who died when fleeing from a bear the day before. The attacks prompted a change in law to let Slovak security services shoot brown bears that come within half a kilometer of a human settlement. A few months later in Romania, the death of a 19-year-old hiker at the hands of a bear led to the prime minister calling lawmakers back from their summer break for an emergency session in which they voted to cull more bears.

People from villages and the countryside want to reduce the numbers of bears because attacks are increasing, says Supeková. “What’s very tragic is that one bear in the town of Liptovský Mikuláš injured five people, running across the town where children were outside playing games.”

The issue has become fodder for populist parties courting rural votes, with politicians blasting Brussels for putting their children at risk and abandoning villages out of elitist environmental concerns.

Critics say the deaths are tragic but have been blown out of proportion. In Romania, which is home to the most brown bears in Europe, the animals killed 26 people and injured 276 over 20 years, according to the environment ministry. Data from Eurostat shows that motorized vehicles killed 45,000 people in the country in that time.

Cultural associations are a problem for the wolf, which has long been portrayed as the villain of fairytales. Helmut Dammann-Tamke, president of the German hunting association and politician with the center-right Christian Democrats, says the threat of wolf attacks on sheep is “like something on a serving platter” for the far right because it reaches people on an emotional level. “This issue is an incendiary force in the hands of populists.”

A 2022 study of German municipalities found that wolf attacks on livestock predict far-right support. After controlling for factors such as immigration and jobs, the researchers found wolf attacks were associated with far-right gains in municipal elections of between 1 and 2 percentage points. “The evidence points to wolf attacks as one potential driver of electoral radicalisation,” the authors wrote.

Environmental activists question whether blanket policies to cull animals will do much to avoid conflicts with humans and have called for measures to promote peaceful coexistence that range from fences and guard dogs to awareness campaigns for visitors.

Scientists are not yet troubled by the wolf’s population across the continent, but have warned that killing wolves in countries with small populations could prove catastrophic. Large-scale culls could put populations of these predators below local survival levels, they warn. Culls can even increase predation of livestock, as packs are disrupted, sending lone, vulnerable wolves venturing on to farms to hunt. The same “backfire” effect has also been documented with cougars and coyotes.

Ciprian Gal from the Romanian branch of Greenpeace said the Europe-wide trend of weakening protection for big carnivores was “a step backwards” that echoed times when humans felt a strong sense of competition with wildlife.

“European governments, influenced by dominant populist rhetoric and powerful hunting and agricultural lobbies, seem to be choosing solutions based on fear and rapid economic return,” he says. “In a way, this is a backlash against the ambitious green policies of recent years and a valve for those still struggling to cope with the climate reality we’re facing.”

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

Wealthy, democratic countries in the global north are using harsh, vague, and punitive measures to crack down on climate protests at the same time as criticizing similar draconian tactics by authorities in the global south, according to a report.

A Climate Rights International report exposes the increasingly heavy-handed treatment of climate activists in Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, and the US.

It found the crackdown in these countries—including lengthy prison sentences, preventive detention and harassment—was a violation of governments’ legal responsibility to protect basic rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association. It also highlights how these same governments frequently criticize regimes in developing countries for not respecting the right to protest peacefully.

“Governments too often take such a strong and principled view about the right to peaceful protest in other countries—but when they don’t like certain kinds of protests at home they pass laws and deploy the police to stop them,” said Brad Adams, director at Climate Rights International.

Across Europe, the US, and the UK, authorities have responded to nonviolent climate protests with mass arrests and draconian new laws that have resulted in long prison sentences. In some instances people who have taken part have been labeled as hooligans, saboteurs, or ecoterrorists by politicians and the media.

Senior human rights advocates and environmental campaigners have raised concerns about the crackdown and called on governments to protect the right to nonviolent protest.

“These defenders are basically trying to save the planet, and in doing so save humanity,” Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, told the Guardian last year. “These are people we should be protecting, but are seen by governments and corporations as a threat to be neutralized. In the end it’s about power and economics.”

The escalating climate crisis has resulted in record-breaking temperatures around the world in 2024, driving food shortages, mass movements of people and economic hardship – as well as deadly fires and floods.

But the report found that rather than taking urgent measures to rapidly reduce the use of fossil fuels and halt ecological collapse, many relatively wealthy countries have instead focused on those trying to stop those raising the alarm by taking part in protests and civil disobedience.

“You don’t have to agree with the tactics of climate activists to understand the importance of defending their rights to protest and to free speech,” said Adams. “Instead of jailing climate protesters and undermining civil liberties, governments should heed their call to take urgent action to address the climate crisis.”

The report’s authors highlighted several examples of developed countries lauding the importance of the right to protest on the international stage at the same time as undertaking harsh and punitive crackdowns at home.

Welcoming a UN report in July this year, the UK government said: “These rights [to peaceful assembly and protest] are essential to the functioning of society, providing a platform for citizens to advocate for positive change. Nonetheless, civic space is increasingly contested as authoritarian governments and actors, who feel vulnerable to scrutiny and accountability, seek to silence dissent.”

Tuesday’s report also found:

• Record prison sentences for nonviolent protest in several countries including the UK, Germany and the US.
• Preemptive arrests and detention for those suspected of planning peaceful protests.
• Draconian new laws passed to make the vast majority of peaceful protest illegal.
• Measures to stop juries hearing about people’s motivation for taking part in protests during court cases, which critics say fundamentally undermines the right to a fair trial.

Climate Rights International called on democratic governments around the world to halt the authoritarian crackdown and protect people’s rights to protest.

“Governments should see climate protesters and activists as allies in the fight against climate change, not criminals,” said Adams. “The crackdown on peaceful protests is not only a violation of their basic rights, it can also be used by repressive governments as a green light to go after climate, environmental, and human rights defenders in their countries.”

Screen Masters International, founded by Kelly Warnell, has expanded its operations to become a global ultra-agency, aiming to make an impact across the film, television, games, music, and arts industries. The agency has launched in 11 territories worldwide, partnering with local allies. Screen Masters International now represents talent across 19 creative production departments, including award-winning […]

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

In the skies over Al Ain, in the United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few silver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE.

A slender canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the mountains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory at least, attract water molecules, forming small droplets that will collide and coalesce with other droplets until they grow big enough for gravity to pull them out of the sky as rain.

This is cloud seeding. It’s one of hundreds of missions that Newman and his fellow pilots will fly this year as part of the UAE’s ambitious, decade-long attempt to increase rainfall in its desert lands. Sitting next to him in the copilot’s seat, I can see red earth stretching to the horizon. The only water in sight is the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, perched on the side of a mountain below a sheikh’s palace, shimmering like a jewel.

There’s a long history of people—tribal chiefs, traveling con artists, military scientists, and most recently VC-backed techies—claiming to be able to make it rain on demand.

More than 50 countries have dabbled in cloud seeding since the 1940s—to slake droughts, refill hydroelectric reservoirs, keep ski slopes snowy, or even use as a weapon of war. In recent years there’s been a new surge of interest, partly due to scientific breakthroughs, but also because arid countries are facing down the early impacts of climate change.

Like other technologies designed to treat the symptoms of a warming planet (say, pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight into space), seeding was once controversial but now looks attractive, perhaps even imperative. Dry spells are getting longer and more severe: In Spain and southern Africa, crops are withering in the fields, and cities from Bogotá to Cape Town have been forced to ration water. In the past nine months alone, seeding has been touted as a solution to air pollution in Pakistan, as a way to prevent forest fires in Indonesia, and as part of an effort to refill the Panama Canal, which is drying up.

Apart from China, which keeps its extensive seeding operations a closely guarded secret, the UAE has been more ambitious than any other country about advancing the science of making rain. The nation gets around 5 to 7 inches of rain a year—roughly half the amount that falls on Nevada, America’s driest state. The UAE started its cloud-seeding program in the early 2000s, and since 2015 it has invested millions of dollars in the Rain Enhancement Program, which is funding global research into new technologies.

This past April, when a storm dumped a year’s worth of rain on the UAE in 24 hours, the widespread flooding in Dubai was quickly blamed on cloud seeding. But the truth is more nebulous. There’s a long history of people—tribal chiefs, traveling con artists, military scientists, and most recently VC-backed techies—claiming to be able to make it rain on demand. But cloud seeding can’t make clouds appear out of thin air; it can only squeeze more rain out of what’s already in the sky. Scientists still aren’t sure they can make it work reliably on a mass scale. The Dubai flood was more likely the result of a region-wide storm system, exacerbated by climate change and the lack of suitable drainage systems in the city.

The Rain Enhancement Program’s stated goal is to ensure that future generations, not only in the UAE but in arid regions around the globe, have the water they need to survive. The architects of the program argue that “water security is an essential element of national security” and that their country is “leading the way” in “new technologies” and “resource conservation.” But the UAE—synonymous with luxury living and conspicuous consumption—has one of the highest per capita rates of water use on earth. So is it really on a mission to make the hotter, drier future that’s coming more livable for everyone? Or is this tiny petro-state, whose outsize wealth and political power came from helping to feed the industrialized world’s fossil-fuel addiction, looking to accrue yet more wealth and power by selling the dream of a cure?

I’ve come here on a mission of my own: to find out whether this new wave of cloud seeding is the first step toward a world where we really can control the weather, or another round of literal vaporware.

The first systematic attempts at rainmaking date back to August 5, 1891, when a train pulled into Midland, Texas, carrying 8 tons of sulfuric acid, 7 tons of cast iron, half a ton of manganese oxide, half a dozen scientists, and several veterans of the US Civil War, including General Edward Powers, a civil engineer from Chicago, and Major Robert George Dyrenforth, a former patent lawyer.

Powers had noticed that it seemed to rain more in the days after battles, and had come to believe that the “concussions” of artillery fire during combat caused air currents in the upper atmosphere to mix together and release moisture. He figured he could make his own rain on demand with loud noises, either by arranging hundreds of cannons in a circle and pointing them at the sky or by sending up balloons loaded with explosives. His ideas, which he laid out in a book called War and the Weather and lobbied for for years, eventually prompted the US federal government to bankroll the experiment in Midland.

Powers and Dyrenforth’s team assembled at a local cattle ranch and prepared for an all-out assault on the sky. They made mortars from lengths of pipe, stuffed dynamite into prairie dog holes, and draped bushes in rackarock, an explosive used in the coal-mining industry. They built kites charged with electricity and filled balloons with a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, which Dyrenforth thought would fuse into water when it exploded. (Skeptics pointed out that it would have been easier and cheaper to just tie a jug of water to the balloon.)

The atmosphere is full of pockets of supercooled liquid water that’s below freezing but hasn’t actually turned into ice.

The group was beset by technical difficulties; at one point, a furnace caught fire and had to be lassoed by a cowboy and dragged to a water tank to be extinguished. By the time they finished setting up their experiment, it had already started raining naturally. Still, they pressed on, unleashing a barrage of explosions on the night of August 17 and claiming victory when rain again fell 12 hours later.

It was questionable how much credit they could take. They had arrived in Texas right at the start of the rainy season, and the precipitation that fell before the experiment had been forecast by the US Weather Bureau. As for Powers’ notion that rain came after battles—well, battles tended to start in dry weather, so it was only the natural cycle of things that wet weather often followed.

Despite skepticism from serious scientists and ridicule in parts of the press, the Midland experiments lit the fuse on half a century of rainmaking pseudoscience. The Weather Bureau soon found itself in a running media battle to debunk the efforts of the self-styled rainmakers who started operating across the country.

The most famous of these was Charles Hatfield, nicknamed either the Moisture Accelerator or the Ponzi of the Skies, depending on whom you asked. Originally a sewing machine salesman from California, he reinvented himself as a weather guru and struck dozens of deals with desperate towns. When he arrived in a new place, he’d build a series of wooden towers, mix up a secret blend of 23 cask-aged chemicals, and pour it into vats on top of the towers to evaporate into the sky. Hatfield’s methods had the air of witchcraft, but he had a knack for playing the odds. In Los Angeles, he promised 18 inches of rain between mid-December and late April, when historical rainfall records suggested a 50 percent chance of that happening anyway.

While these showmen and charlatans were filling their pocketbooks, scientists were slowly figuring out what actually made it rain—something called cloud condensation nuclei. Even on a clear day, the skies are packed with particles, some no bigger than a grain of pollen or a viral strand. “Every cloud droplet in Earth’s atmosphere formed on a preexisting aerosol particle,” one cloud physicist told me. The types of particles vary by place. In the UAE, they include a complex mix of sulfate-rich sands from the desert of the Empty Quarter, salt spray from the Persian Gulf, chemicals from the oil refineries that dot the region, and organic materials from as far afield as India. Without them there would be no clouds at all—no rain, no snow, no hail.

A lot of raindrops start as airborne ice crystals, which melt as they fall to earth. But without cloud condensation nuclei, even ice crystals won’t form until the temperature dips below -40 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, the atmosphere is full of pockets of supercooled liquid water that’s below freezing but hasn’t actually turned into ice.

In 1938, a meteorologist in Germany suggested that seeding these areas of frigid water with artificial cloud condensation nuclei might encourage the formation of ice crystals, which would quickly grow large enough to fall, first as snowflakes, then as rain. After the Second World War, American scientists at General Electric seized on the idea. One group, led by chemists Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir, found that solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, would do the trick. When Schaefer dropped grains of dry ice into the home freezer he’d been using as a makeshift cloud chamber, he discovered that water readily freezes around the particles’ crystalline structure. When he witnessed the effect a week later, Langmuir jotted down three words in his notebook: “Control of Weather.” Within a few months, they were dropping dry-ice pellets from planes over Mount Greylock in Western Massachusetts, creating a 3-mile-long streak of ice and snow.

Another GE scientist, Bernard Vonnegut, had settled on a different seeding material: silver iodide. It has a structure remarkably similar to an ice crystal and can be used for seeding at a wider range of temperatures. (Vonnegut’s brother, Kurt, who was working as a publicist at GE at the time, would go on to write Cat’s Cradle, a book about a seeding material called ice-nine that causes all the water on earth to freeze at once.)

How could you tell whether a cloud dropped snow because of seeding, or if it would have snowed anyway?

In the wake of these successes, GE was bombarded with requests: Winter carnivals and movie studios wanted artificial snow; others wanted clear skies for search and rescue. Then, in February 1947, everything went quiet. The company’s scientists were ordered to stop talking about cloud seeding publicly and direct their efforts toward a classified US military program called Project Cirrus.

Over the next five years, Project Cirrus conducted more than 250 cloud-seeding experiments as the United States and other countries explored ways to weaponize the weather. Schaefer was part of a team that dropped 80 pounds of dry ice into the heart of Hurricane King, which had torn through Miami in the fall of 1947 and was heading out to sea. Following the operation, the storm made a sharp turn back toward land and smashed into the coast of Georgia, where it caused one death and millions of dollars in damages. In 1963, Fidel Castro reportedly accused the Americans of seeding Hurricane Flora, which hung over Cuba for four days, resulting in thousands of deaths. During the Vietnam War, the US Army used cloud seeding to try to soften the ground and make it impassable for enemy soldiers.

A couple of years after that war ended, more than 30 countries, including the US and the USSR, signed the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. By then, interest in cloud seeding had started to melt away anyway, first among militaries, then in the civilian sector. “We didn’t really have the tools—the numerical models and also the observations—to really prove it,” says Katja Friedrich, who researches cloud physics at the University of Colorado. (This didn’t stop the USSR from seeding clouds near the site of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in hopes that they would dump their radioactive contents over Belarus rather than Moscow.)

To really put seeding on a sound scientific footing, they needed to get a better understanding of rain at all scales, from the microphysical science of nucleation right up to the global movement of air currents. At the time, scientists couldn’t do the three things that were required to make the technology viable: identify target areas of supercooled liquid in clouds, deliver the seeding material into those clouds, and verify that it was actually doing what they thought. How could you tell whether a cloud dropped snow because of seeding, or if it would have snowed anyway?

By 2017, armed with new, more powerful computers running the latest generation of simulation software, researchers in the US were finally ready to answer that question, via the Snowie project. Like the GE chemists years earlier, these experimenters dropped silver iodide from planes. The experiments took place in the Rocky Mountains, where prevailing winter winds blow moisture up the slopes, leading to clouds reliably forming at the same time each day.

The results were impressive: The researchers could draw an extra 100 to 300 acre-feet of snow from each storm they seeded. But the most compelling evidence was anecdotal. As the plane flew back and forth at an angle to the prevailing wind, it sprayed a zigzag pattern of seeding material across the sky. That was echoed by a zigzag pattern of snow on the weather radar. “Mother Nature does not produce zigzag patterns,” says one scientist who worked on Snowie.

In almost a century of cloud seeding, it was the first time anyone had actually shown the full chain of events from seeding through to precipitation reaching the ground.

The UAE’s national Center of Meteorology is a glass cube rising out of featureless scrubland, ringed by a tangle of dusty highways on the edge of Abu Dhabi. Inside, I meet Ahmad Al Kamali, the facility’s rain operations executor—a trim young man with a neat beard and dark-framed glasses. He studied at the University of Reading in the UK and worked as a forecaster before specializing in cloud-seeding operations. Like all the Emirati men I meet on this trip, he’s wearing a kandura—a loose white robe with a headpiece secured by a loop of thick black cord.

We take the elevator to the third floor, where I find cloud-seeding mission control. With gold detailing and a marble floor, it feels like a luxury hotel lobby, except for the giant radar map of the Gulf that fills one wall. Forecasters—men in white, women in black—sit at banks of desks and scour satellite images and radar data looking for clouds to seed. Near the entrance there’s a small glass pyramid on a pedestal, about a foot wide at its base. It’s a holographic projector. When Al Kamali switches it on, a tiny animated cloud appears inside. A plane circles it, and rain begins to fall. I start to wonder: How much of this is theater?

The impetus for cloud seeding in the UAE came in the early 2000s, when the country was in the middle of a construction boom. Dubai and Abu Dhabi were a sea of cranes; the population had more than doubled in the previous decade as expats flocked there to take advantage of the good weather and low income taxes. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family—currently both vice president and deputy prime minister of the UAE—thought cloud seeding, along with desalination of seawater, could help replenish the country’s groundwater and refill its reservoirs. (Globally, Mansour is perhaps best known as the owner of the soccer club Manchester City.) As the Emiratis were setting up their program, they called in some experts from another arid country for help.

Back in 1989, a team of researchers in South Africa were studying how to enhance the formation of raindrops. They were taking cloud measurements in the east of the country when they spotted a cumulus cloud that was raining when all the other clouds in the area were dry. When they sent a plane into the cloud to get samples, they found a much wider range of droplet sizes than in the other clouds—some as big as half a centimeter in diameter.

The finding underscored that it’s not only the number of droplets in a cloud that matters but also the size. A cloud of droplets that are all the same size won’t mix together because they’re all falling at the same speed. But if you can introduce larger drops, they’ll plummet to earth faster, colliding and coalescing with other droplets, forming even bigger drops that have enough mass to leave the cloud and become rain. The South African researchers discovered that although clouds in semiarid areas of the country contain hundreds of water droplets in every cubic centimeter of air, they’re less efficient at creating rain than maritime clouds, which have about a sixth as many droplets but more variation in droplet size.

So why did this one cloud have bigger droplets? It turned out that the chimney of a nearby paper mill was pumping out particles of debris that attracted water. Over the next few years, the South African researchers ran long-term studies looking for the best way to re-create the effect of the paper mill on demand. They settled on ordinary salt—the most hygroscopic substance they could find. Then they developed flares that would release a steady stream of salt crystals when ignited.

Those flares were the progenitors of what the Emiratis use today, made locally at the Weather Modification Technology Factory. Al Kamali shows me a couple: They’re foot-long tubes a couple of inches in diameter, each holding a kilogram of seeding material. One type of flare holds a mixture of salts. The other type holds salts coated in a nano layer of titanium dioxide, which attracts more water in drier climates. The Emiratis call them Ghaith 1 and Ghaith 2, ghaith being one of the Arabic words for “rain.” Although the language has another near synonym, matar, it has negative connotations—rain as punishment, torment, the rain that breaks the banks and floods the fields. Ghaith, on the other hand, is rain as mercy and prosperity, the deluge that ends the drought.

The morning after my visit to the National Center of Meteorology, I take a taxi to Al Ain to go on that cloud-seeding flight. But there’s a problem. When I leave Abu Dhabi that morning there’s a low fog settled across the country, but by the time I arrive at Al Ain’s small airport—about 100 miles inland from the cities on the coast—it has burned away, leaving clear blue skies. There are no clouds to seed.

Once I’ve cleared the tight security cordon and reached the gold-painted hangar (the airport is also used for military training flights), I meet Newman, who agrees to take me up anyway so he can demonstrate what would happen on a real mission. He’s wearing a blue cap with the UAE Rain Enhancement Program logo on it. Before moving to the UAE with his family 11 years ago, Newman worked as a commercial airline pilot on passenger jets and split his time between the UK and his native South Africa. He has exactly the kind of firmly reassuring presence you want from someone you’re about to climb into a small plane with.

There’s an evangelical zeal to the way some of the pilots and seeding operators talk about this stuff—the rush of hitting a button on an instrument panel and seeing the clouds burst before their eyes. Like gods.

Every cloud-seeding mission starts with a weather forecast. A team of six operators at the meteorology center scour satellite images and data from the UAE’s network of radars and weather stations and identify areas where clouds are likely to form. Often, that’s in the area around Al Ain, where the mountains on the border with Oman act as a natural barrier to moisture coming in from the sea.

If it’s looking like rain, the cloud-seeding operators radio the hangar and put some of the nine pilots on standby mode—either at home, on what Newman calls “villa standby,” or at the airport or in a holding pattern in the air. As clouds start to form, they begin to appear on the weather radar, changing color from green through blue to yellow and then red as the droplets get bigger and the reflectivity of the clouds increases.

Once a mission is approved, the pilot scribbles out a flight plan while the ground crew preps one of the four modified Beechcraft King Air C90 planes. There are 24 flares attached to each wing—half Ghaith 1, half Ghaith 2—for a total of 48 kilograms of seeding material on each flight. Timing is important, Newman tells me as we taxi toward the runway. The pilots need to reach the cloud at the optimal moment.

Once we’re airborne, Newman climbs to 6,000 feet. Then, like a falcon riding the thermals, he goes hunting for updrafts. Cloud seeding is a mentally challenging and sometimes dangerous job, he says through the headset, over the roar of the engines. Real missions last up to three hours and can get pretty bumpy as the plane moves between clouds. Pilots generally try to avoid turbulence. Seeding missions seek it out.

When we get to the right altitude, Newman radios the ground for permission to set off the flares. There are no hard rules for how many flares to put into each cloud, one seeding operator told me. It depends on the strength of the updraft reported by the pilots, how things look on the radar. It sounds more like art than science.

Newman triggers one of the salt flares, and I twist in my seat to watch: It burns with a white-gray smoke. He lets me set off one of the nano-flares. It’s slightly anticlimactic: The green lid of the tube pops open and the material spills out. I’m reminded of someone sprinkling grated cheese on spaghetti.

There’s an evangelical zeal to the way some of the pilots and seeding operators talk about this stuff—the rush of hitting a button on an instrument panel and seeing the clouds burst before their eyes. Like gods. Newman shows me a video on his phone of a cloud that he’d just seeded hurling fat drops of rain onto the plane’s front windows. Operators swear they can see clouds changing on the radar.

One researcher cited a tendency for “white lies” to proliferate; officials tell their superiors what they want to hear, despite the lack of evidence.

But the jury is out on how effective hygroscopic seeding actually is. The UAE has invested millions in developing new technologies for enhancing rainfall—and surprisingly little in actually verifying the impact of the seeding it’s doing right now. After initial feasibility work in the early 2000s, the next long-term analysis of the program’s effectiveness didn’t come until 2021. It found a 23 percent increase in annual rainfall in seeded areas, as compared with historical averages, but cautioned that “anomalies associated with climate variability” might affect this figure in unforeseen ways. As Friedrich notes, you can’t necessarily assume that rainfall measurements from, say, 1989 are directly comparable with those from 2019, given that climatic conditions can vary widely from year to year or decade to decade.

The best evidence for hygroscopic seeding, experts say, comes from India, where for the past 15 years the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology has been conducting a slow, patient study. Unlike the UAE, India uses one plane to seed and another to take measurements of the effect that has on the cloud. In hundreds of seeding missions, researchers found an 18 percent uptick in raindrop formation inside the cloud. But the thing is, every time you want to try to make it rain in a new place, you need to prove that it works in that area, in those particular conditions, with whatever unique mix of aerosol particles might be present. What succeeds in, say, the Western Ghats mountain range is not even applicable to other areas of India, the lead researcher tells me, let alone other parts of the world.

If the UAE wanted to reliably increase the amount of fresh water in the country, committing to more desalination would be the safer bet. In theory, cloud seeding is cheaper: According to a 2023 paper by researchers at the National Center of Meteorology, the average cost of harvestable rainfall generated by cloud seeding is between 1 and 4 cents per cubic meter, compared with around 31 cents per cubic meter of water from desalination at the Hassyan Seawater Reverse Osmosis plant. But each mission costs as much as $8,000, and there’s no guarantee that the water that falls as rain will actually end up where it’s needed.

One researcher I spoke to, who has worked on cloud-seeding research in the UAE and asked to speak on background because they still work in the industry, was critical of the quality of the UAE’s science. There was, they said, a tendency for “white lies” to proliferate; officials tell their superiors what they want to hear despite the lack of evidence. The country’s rulers already think that cloud seeding is working, this person argued, so for an official to admit otherwise now would be problematic. (The National Center of Meteorology did not comment on these claims.)

By the time I leave Al Ain, I’m starting to suspect that what goes on there is as much about optics as it is about actually enhancing rainfall. The UAE has a history of making flashy announcements about cutting-edge technology—from flying cars to 3D-printed buildings to robotic police officers—with little end product.

Now, as the world transitions away from the fossil fuels that have been the country’s lifeblood for the past 50 years, the UAE is trying to position itself as a leader on climate. Last year it hosted the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, and the head of its National Center of Meteorology was chosen to lead the World Meteorological Organization, where he’ll help shape the global consensus that forms around cloud seeding and other forms of mass-scale climate modification. (He could not be reached for an interview.)

The UAE has even started exporting its cloud-seeding expertise. One of the pilots I spoke to had just returned from a trip to Lahore, where the Pakistani government had asked the UAE’s cloud seeders to bring rain to clear the polluted skies. It rained—but they couldn’t really take credit. “We knew it was going to rain, and we just went and seeded the rain that was going to come anyway,” he said.

From the steps of the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental in Abu Dhabi, the UAE certainly doesn’t seem like a country that’s running out of water. As I roll up the hotel’s long driveway on my second day in town, I can see water features and lush green grass. The sprinklers are running. I’m here for a ceremony for the fifth round of research grants being awarded by the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science. Since 2015, the program has awarded $21 million to 14 projects developing and testing ways of enhancing rainfall, and it’s about to announce the next set of recipients.

In the ornate ballroom, local officials have loosely segregated themselves by gender. I sip watermelon juice and work the room, speaking to previous award winners. There’s Linda Zou, a Chinese researcher based at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi who developed the nano-coated seeding particles in the Ghaith 2 flares. There’s Ali Abshaev, who comes from a cloud-seeding dynasty (his father directs Russia’s Hail Suppression Research Center) and who has built a machine to spray hygroscopic material into the sky from the ground. It’s like “an upside-down jet engine,” one researcher explains.

Other projects have been looking at “terrain modification”—whether planting trees or building earthen barriers in certain locations could encourage clouds to form. Giles Harrison, from the University of Reading, is exploring whether electrical currents released into clouds can encourage raindrops to stick together. There’s also a lot of work on computer simulation. Youssef Wehbe, a UAE program officer, gives me a cagey interview about the future vision: pairs of drones, powered by artificial intelligence, one taking cloud measurements and the other printing seeding material specifically tailored for that particular cloud—on the fly, as it were.

I’m particularly taken by one of this year’s grant winners. Guillaume Matras, who worked at the French defense contractor Thales before moving to the UAE, is hoping to make it rain by shooting a giant laser into the sky. Wehbe describes this approach as “high risk.” I think he means “it may not work,” not “it could set the whole atmosphere on fire.” Either way, I’m sold.

So after my cloud-seeding flight, I get a lift to Zayed Military City, an army base between Al Ain and Abu Dhabi, to visit the secretive government-funded research lab where Matras works. They take my passport at the gate to the compound, and before I can go into the lab itself I’m asked to secure my phone in a locker that’s also a Faraday cage—completely sealed to signals going in and out.

I’m suddenly very aware that I’m on a military base. Couldn’t this giant movable laser be used as a weapon?

After I put on a hairnet, a lab coat, and tinted safety goggles, Matras shows me into a lab, where I watch a remarkable thing. Inside a broad, black box the size of a small television sits an immensely powerful laser. A tech switches it on. Nothing happens. Then Matras leans forward and opens a lens, focusing the laser beam.

There’s a high-pitched but very loud buzz, like the whine of an electric motor. It is the sound of the air being ripped apart. A very fine filament, maybe half a centimeter across, appears in midair. It looks like a strand of spider’s silk, but it’s bright blue. It’s plasma—the fourth state of matter. Scale up the size of the laser and the power, and you can actually set a small part of the atmosphere on fire. Man-made lightning. Obviously my first question is to ask what would happen if I put my hand in it. “Your hand would turn into plasma,” another researcher says, entirely deadpan. I put my hand back in my pocket.

Matras says these laser beams will be able to enhance rainfall in three ways. First, acoustically—like the concussion theory of old, it’s thought that the sound of atoms in the air being ripped apart might shake adjacent raindrops so that they coalesce, get bigger, and fall to earth. Second: convection—the beam will create heat, generating updrafts that will force droplets to mix. (I’m reminded of a never-realized 1840s plan to create rain by setting fire to large chunks of the Appalachian Mountains.) Finally: ionization. When the beam is switched off, the plasma will reform—the nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules inside will clump back together into random configurations, creating new particles for water to settle around.

The plan is to scale this technology up to something the size of a shipping container that can be put on the back of a truck and driven to where it’s needed. It seems insane—I’m suddenly very aware that I’m on a military base. Couldn’t this giant movable laser be used as a weapon? “Yes,” Matras says. He picks up a pencil, the nib honed to a sharp point. “But anything could be a weapon.”

These words hang over me as I ride back into the city, past lush golf courses and hotel fountains and workmen swigging from plastic bottles. Once again, there’s not a cloud in the sky. But maybe that doesn’t matter. For the UAE, so keen to project its technological prowess around the region and the world, it’s almost irrelevant whether cloud seeding works. There’s soft power in being seen to be able to bend the weather to your will—in 2018, an Iranian general accused the UAE and Israel of stealing his country’s rain.

Anything could be a weapon, Matras had said. But there are military weapons, and economic weapons, and cultural and political weapons too. Anything could be a weapon—even the idea of one.

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

In the skies over Al Ain, in the United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few silver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE.

A slender canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the mountains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory at least, attract water molecules, forming small droplets that will collide and coalesce with other droplets until they grow big enough for gravity to pull them out of the sky as rain.

This is cloud seeding. It’s one of hundreds of missions that Newman and his fellow pilots will fly this year as part of the UAE’s ambitious, decade-long attempt to increase rainfall in its desert lands. Sitting next to him in the copilot’s seat, I can see red earth stretching to the horizon. The only water in sight is the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, perched on the side of a mountain below a sheikh’s palace, shimmering like a jewel.

There’s a long history of people—tribal chiefs, traveling con artists, military scientists, and most recently VC-backed techies—claiming to be able to make it rain on demand.

More than 50 countries have dabbled in cloud seeding since the 1940s—to slake droughts, refill hydroelectric reservoirs, keep ski slopes snowy, or even use as a weapon of war. In recent years there’s been a new surge of interest, partly due to scientific breakthroughs, but also because arid countries are facing down the early impacts of climate change.

Like other technologies designed to treat the symptoms of a warming planet (say, pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight into space), seeding was once controversial but now looks attractive, perhaps even imperative. Dry spells are getting longer and more severe: In Spain and southern Africa, crops are withering in the fields, and cities from Bogotá to Cape Town have been forced to ration water. In the past nine months alone, seeding has been touted as a solution to air pollution in Pakistan, as a way to prevent forest fires in Indonesia, and as part of an effort to refill the Panama Canal, which is drying up.

Apart from China, which keeps its extensive seeding operations a closely guarded secret, the UAE has been more ambitious than any other country about advancing the science of making rain. The nation gets around 5 to 7 inches of rain a year—roughly half the amount that falls on Nevada, America’s driest state. The UAE started its cloud-seeding program in the early 2000s, and since 2015 it has invested millions of dollars in the Rain Enhancement Program, which is funding global research into new technologies.

This past April, when a storm dumped a year’s worth of rain on the UAE in 24 hours, the widespread flooding in Dubai was quickly blamed on cloud seeding. But the truth is more nebulous. There’s a long history of people—tribal chiefs, traveling con artists, military scientists, and most recently VC-backed techies—claiming to be able to make it rain on demand. But cloud seeding can’t make clouds appear out of thin air; it can only squeeze more rain out of what’s already in the sky. Scientists still aren’t sure they can make it work reliably on a mass scale. The Dubai flood was more likely the result of a region-wide storm system, exacerbated by climate change and the lack of suitable drainage systems in the city.

The Rain Enhancement Program’s stated goal is to ensure that future generations, not only in the UAE but in arid regions around the globe, have the water they need to survive. The architects of the program argue that “water security is an essential element of national security” and that their country is “leading the way” in “new technologies” and “resource conservation.” But the UAE—synonymous with luxury living and conspicuous consumption—has one of the highest per capita rates of water use on earth. So is it really on a mission to make the hotter, drier future that’s coming more livable for everyone? Or is this tiny petro-state, whose outsize wealth and political power came from helping to feed the industrialized world’s fossil-fuel addiction, looking to accrue yet more wealth and power by selling the dream of a cure?

I’ve come here on a mission of my own: to find out whether this new wave of cloud seeding is the first step toward a world where we really can control the weather, or another round of literal vaporware.

The first systematic attempts at rainmaking date back to August 5, 1891, when a train pulled into Midland, Texas, carrying 8 tons of sulfuric acid, 7 tons of cast iron, half a ton of manganese oxide, half a dozen scientists, and several veterans of the US Civil War, including General Edward Powers, a civil engineer from Chicago, and Major Robert George Dyrenforth, a former patent lawyer.

Powers had noticed that it seemed to rain more in the days after battles, and had come to believe that the “concussions” of artillery fire during combat caused air currents in the upper atmosphere to mix together and release moisture. He figured he could make his own rain on demand with loud noises, either by arranging hundreds of cannons in a circle and pointing them at the sky or by sending up balloons loaded with explosives. His ideas, which he laid out in a book called War and the Weather and lobbied for for years, eventually prompted the US federal government to bankroll the experiment in Midland.

Powers and Dyrenforth’s team assembled at a local cattle ranch and prepared for an all-out assault on the sky. They made mortars from lengths of pipe, stuffed dynamite into prairie dog holes, and draped bushes in rackarock, an explosive used in the coal-mining industry. They built kites charged with electricity and filled balloons with a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, which Dyrenforth thought would fuse into water when it exploded. (Skeptics pointed out that it would have been easier and cheaper to just tie a jug of water to the balloon.)

The atmosphere is full of pockets of supercooled liquid water that’s below freezing but hasn’t actually turned into ice.

The group was beset by technical difficulties; at one point, a furnace caught fire and had to be lassoed by a cowboy and dragged to a water tank to be extinguished. By the time they finished setting up their experiment, it had already started raining naturally. Still, they pressed on, unleashing a barrage of explosions on the night of August 17 and claiming victory when rain again fell 12 hours later.

It was questionable how much credit they could take. They had arrived in Texas right at the start of the rainy season, and the precipitation that fell before the experiment had been forecast by the US Weather Bureau. As for Powers’ notion that rain came after battles—well, battles tended to start in dry weather, so it was only the natural cycle of things that wet weather often followed.

Despite skepticism from serious scientists and ridicule in parts of the press, the Midland experiments lit the fuse on half a century of rainmaking pseudoscience. The Weather Bureau soon found itself in a running media battle to debunk the efforts of the self-styled rainmakers who started operating across the country.

The most famous of these was Charles Hatfield, nicknamed either the Moisture Accelerator or the Ponzi of the Skies, depending on whom you asked. Originally a sewing machine salesman from California, he reinvented himself as a weather guru and struck dozens of deals with desperate towns. When he arrived in a new place, he’d build a series of wooden towers, mix up a secret blend of 23 cask-aged chemicals, and pour it into vats on top of the towers to evaporate into the sky. Hatfield’s methods had the air of witchcraft, but he had a knack for playing the odds. In Los Angeles, he promised 18 inches of rain between mid-December and late April, when historical rainfall records suggested a 50 percent chance of that happening anyway.

While these showmen and charlatans were filling their pocketbooks, scientists were slowly figuring out what actually made it rain—something called cloud condensation nuclei. Even on a clear day, the skies are packed with particles, some no bigger than a grain of pollen or a viral strand. “Every cloud droplet in Earth’s atmosphere formed on a preexisting aerosol particle,” one cloud physicist told me. The types of particles vary by place. In the UAE, they include a complex mix of sulfate-rich sands from the desert of the Empty Quarter, salt spray from the Persian Gulf, chemicals from the oil refineries that dot the region, and organic materials from as far afield as India. Without them there would be no clouds at all—no rain, no snow, no hail.

A lot of raindrops start as airborne ice crystals, which melt as they fall to earth. But without cloud condensation nuclei, even ice crystals won’t form until the temperature dips below -40 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, the atmosphere is full of pockets of supercooled liquid water that’s below freezing but hasn’t actually turned into ice.

In 1938, a meteorologist in Germany suggested that seeding these areas of frigid water with artificial cloud condensation nuclei might encourage the formation of ice crystals, which would quickly grow large enough to fall, first as snowflakes, then as rain. After the Second World War, American scientists at General Electric seized on the idea. One group, led by chemists Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir, found that solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, would do the trick. When Schaefer dropped grains of dry ice into the home freezer he’d been using as a makeshift cloud chamber, he discovered that water readily freezes around the particles’ crystalline structure. When he witnessed the effect a week later, Langmuir jotted down three words in his notebook: “Control of Weather.” Within a few months, they were dropping dry-ice pellets from planes over Mount Greylock in Western Massachusetts, creating a 3-mile-long streak of ice and snow.

Another GE scientist, Bernard Vonnegut, had settled on a different seeding material: silver iodide. It has a structure remarkably similar to an ice crystal and can be used for seeding at a wider range of temperatures. (Vonnegut’s brother, Kurt, who was working as a publicist at GE at the time, would go on to write Cat’s Cradle, a book about a seeding material called ice-nine that causes all the water on earth to freeze at once.)

How could you tell whether a cloud dropped snow because of seeding, or if it would have snowed anyway?

In the wake of these successes, GE was bombarded with requests: Winter carnivals and movie studios wanted artificial snow; others wanted clear skies for search and rescue. Then, in February 1947, everything went quiet. The company’s scientists were ordered to stop talking about cloud seeding publicly and direct their efforts toward a classified US military program called Project Cirrus.

Over the next five years, Project Cirrus conducted more than 250 cloud-seeding experiments as the United States and other countries explored ways to weaponize the weather. Schaefer was part of a team that dropped 80 pounds of dry ice into the heart of Hurricane King, which had torn through Miami in the fall of 1947 and was heading out to sea. Following the operation, the storm made a sharp turn back toward land and smashed into the coast of Georgia, where it caused one death and millions of dollars in damages. In 1963, Fidel Castro reportedly accused the Americans of seeding Hurricane Flora, which hung over Cuba for four days, resulting in thousands of deaths. During the Vietnam War, the US Army used cloud seeding to try to soften the ground and make it impassable for enemy soldiers.

A couple of years after that war ended, more than 30 countries, including the US and the USSR, signed the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. By then, interest in cloud seeding had started to melt away anyway, first among militaries, then in the civilian sector. “We didn’t really have the tools—the numerical models and also the observations—to really prove it,” says Katja Friedrich, who researches cloud physics at the University of Colorado. (This didn’t stop the USSR from seeding clouds near the site of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in hopes that they would dump their radioactive contents over Belarus rather than Moscow.)

To really put seeding on a sound scientific footing, they needed to get a better understanding of rain at all scales, from the microphysical science of nucleation right up to the global movement of air currents. At the time, scientists couldn’t do the three things that were required to make the technology viable: identify target areas of supercooled liquid in clouds, deliver the seeding material into those clouds, and verify that it was actually doing what they thought. How could you tell whether a cloud dropped snow because of seeding, or if it would have snowed anyway?

By 2017, armed with new, more powerful computers running the latest generation of simulation software, researchers in the US were finally ready to answer that question, via the Snowie project. Like the GE chemists years earlier, these experimenters dropped silver iodide from planes. The experiments took place in the Rocky Mountains, where prevailing winter winds blow moisture up the slopes, leading to clouds reliably forming at the same time each day.

The results were impressive: The researchers could draw an extra 100 to 300 acre-feet of snow from each storm they seeded. But the most compelling evidence was anecdotal. As the plane flew back and forth at an angle to the prevailing wind, it sprayed a zigzag pattern of seeding material across the sky. That was echoed by a zigzag pattern of snow on the weather radar. “Mother Nature does not produce zigzag patterns,” says one scientist who worked on Snowie.

In almost a century of cloud seeding, it was the first time anyone had actually shown the full chain of events from seeding through to precipitation reaching the ground.

The UAE’s national Center of Meteorology is a glass cube rising out of featureless scrubland, ringed by a tangle of dusty highways on the edge of Abu Dhabi. Inside, I meet Ahmad Al Kamali, the facility’s rain operations executor—a trim young man with a neat beard and dark-framed glasses. He studied at the University of Reading in the UK and worked as a forecaster before specializing in cloud-seeding operations. Like all the Emirati men I meet on this trip, he’s wearing a kandura—a loose white robe with a headpiece secured by a loop of thick black cord.

We take the elevator to the third floor, where I find cloud-seeding mission control. With gold detailing and a marble floor, it feels like a luxury hotel lobby, except for the giant radar map of the Gulf that fills one wall. Forecasters—men in white, women in black—sit at banks of desks and scour satellite images and radar data looking for clouds to seed. Near the entrance there’s a small glass pyramid on a pedestal, about a foot wide at its base. It’s a holographic projector. When Al Kamali switches it on, a tiny animated cloud appears inside. A plane circles it, and rain begins to fall. I start to wonder: How much of this is theater?

The impetus for cloud seeding in the UAE came in the early 2000s, when the country was in the middle of a construction boom. Dubai and Abu Dhabi were a sea of cranes; the population had more than doubled in the previous decade as expats flocked there to take advantage of the good weather and low income taxes. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family—currently both vice president and deputy prime minister of the UAE—thought cloud seeding, along with desalination of seawater, could help replenish the country’s groundwater and refill its reservoirs. (Globally, Mansour is perhaps best known as the owner of the soccer club Manchester City.) As the Emiratis were setting up their program, they called in some experts from another arid country for help.

Back in 1989, a team of researchers in South Africa were studying how to enhance the formation of raindrops. They were taking cloud measurements in the east of the country when they spotted a cumulus cloud that was raining when all the other clouds in the area were dry. When they sent a plane into the cloud to get samples, they found a much wider range of droplet sizes than in the other clouds—some as big as half a centimeter in diameter.

The finding underscored that it’s not only the number of droplets in a cloud that matters but also the size. A cloud of droplets that are all the same size won’t mix together because they’re all falling at the same speed. But if you can introduce larger drops, they’ll plummet to earth faster, colliding and coalescing with other droplets, forming even bigger drops that have enough mass to leave the cloud and become rain. The South African researchers discovered that although clouds in semiarid areas of the country contain hundreds of water droplets in every cubic centimeter of air, they’re less efficient at creating rain than maritime clouds, which have about a sixth as many droplets but more variation in droplet size.

So why did this one cloud have bigger droplets? It turned out that the chimney of a nearby paper mill was pumping out particles of debris that attracted water. Over the next few years, the South African researchers ran long-term studies looking for the best way to re-create the effect of the paper mill on demand. They settled on ordinary salt—the most hygroscopic substance they could find. Then they developed flares that would release a steady stream of salt crystals when ignited.

Those flares were the progenitors of what the Emiratis use today, made locally at the Weather Modification Technology Factory. Al Kamali shows me a couple: They’re foot-long tubes a couple of inches in diameter, each holding a kilogram of seeding material. One type of flare holds a mixture of salts. The other type holds salts coated in a nano layer of titanium dioxide, which attracts more water in drier climates. The Emiratis call them Ghaith 1 and Ghaith 2, ghaith being one of the Arabic words for “rain.” Although the language has another near synonym, matar, it has negative connotations—rain as punishment, torment, the rain that breaks the banks and floods the fields. Ghaith, on the other hand, is rain as mercy and prosperity, the deluge that ends the drought.

The morning after my visit to the National Center of Meteorology, I take a taxi to Al Ain to go on that cloud-seeding flight. But there’s a problem. When I leave Abu Dhabi that morning there’s a low fog settled across the country, but by the time I arrive at Al Ain’s small airport—about 100 miles inland from the cities on the coast—it has burned away, leaving clear blue skies. There are no clouds to seed.

Once I’ve cleared the tight security cordon and reached the gold-painted hangar (the airport is also used for military training flights), I meet Newman, who agrees to take me up anyway so he can demonstrate what would happen on a real mission. He’s wearing a blue cap with the UAE Rain Enhancement Program logo on it. Before moving to the UAE with his family 11 years ago, Newman worked as a commercial airline pilot on passenger jets and split his time between the UK and his native South Africa. He has exactly the kind of firmly reassuring presence you want from someone you’re about to climb into a small plane with.

There’s an evangelical zeal to the way some of the pilots and seeding operators talk about this stuff—the rush of hitting a button on an instrument panel and seeing the clouds burst before their eyes. Like gods.

Every cloud-seeding mission starts with a weather forecast. A team of six operators at the meteorology center scour satellite images and data from the UAE’s network of radars and weather stations and identify areas where clouds are likely to form. Often, that’s in the area around Al Ain, where the mountains on the border with Oman act as a natural barrier to moisture coming in from the sea.

If it’s looking like rain, the cloud-seeding operators radio the hangar and put some of the nine pilots on standby mode—either at home, on what Newman calls “villa standby,” or at the airport or in a holding pattern in the air. As clouds start to form, they begin to appear on the weather radar, changing color from green through blue to yellow and then red as the droplets get bigger and the reflectivity of the clouds increases.

Once a mission is approved, the pilot scribbles out a flight plan while the ground crew preps one of the four modified Beechcraft King Air C90 planes. There are 24 flares attached to each wing—half Ghaith 1, half Ghaith 2—for a total of 48 kilograms of seeding material on each flight. Timing is important, Newman tells me as we taxi toward the runway. The pilots need to reach the cloud at the optimal moment.

Once we’re airborne, Newman climbs to 6,000 feet. Then, like a falcon riding the thermals, he goes hunting for updrafts. Cloud seeding is a mentally challenging and sometimes dangerous job, he says through the headset, over the roar of the engines. Real missions last up to three hours and can get pretty bumpy as the plane moves between clouds. Pilots generally try to avoid turbulence. Seeding missions seek it out.

When we get to the right altitude, Newman radios the ground for permission to set off the flares. There are no hard rules for how many flares to put into each cloud, one seeding operator told me. It depends on the strength of the updraft reported by the pilots, how things look on the radar. It sounds more like art than science.

Newman triggers one of the salt flares, and I twist in my seat to watch: It burns with a white-gray smoke. He lets me set off one of the nano-flares. It’s slightly anticlimactic: The green lid of the tube pops open and the material spills out. I’m reminded of someone sprinkling grated cheese on spaghetti.

There’s an evangelical zeal to the way some of the pilots and seeding operators talk about this stuff—the rush of hitting a button on an instrument panel and seeing the clouds burst before their eyes. Like gods. Newman shows me a video on his phone of a cloud that he’d just seeded hurling fat drops of rain onto the plane’s front windows. Operators swear they can see clouds changing on the radar.

One researcher cited a tendency for “white lies” to proliferate; officials tell their superiors what they want to hear, despite the lack of evidence.

But the jury is out on how effective hygroscopic seeding actually is. The UAE has invested millions in developing new technologies for enhancing rainfall—and surprisingly little in actually verifying the impact of the seeding it’s doing right now. After initial feasibility work in the early 2000s, the next long-term analysis of the program’s effectiveness didn’t come until 2021. It found a 23 percent increase in annual rainfall in seeded areas, as compared with historical averages, but cautioned that “anomalies associated with climate variability” might affect this figure in unforeseen ways. As Friedrich notes, you can’t necessarily assume that rainfall measurements from, say, 1989 are directly comparable with those from 2019, given that climatic conditions can vary widely from year to year or decade to decade.

The best evidence for hygroscopic seeding, experts say, comes from India, where for the past 15 years the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology has been conducting a slow, patient study. Unlike the UAE, India uses one plane to seed and another to take measurements of the effect that has on the cloud. In hundreds of seeding missions, researchers found an 18 percent uptick in raindrop formation inside the cloud. But the thing is, every time you want to try to make it rain in a new place, you need to prove that it works in that area, in those particular conditions, with whatever unique mix of aerosol particles might be present. What succeeds in, say, the Western Ghats mountain range is not even applicable to other areas of India, the lead researcher tells me, let alone other parts of the world.

If the UAE wanted to reliably increase the amount of fresh water in the country, committing to more desalination would be the safer bet. In theory, cloud seeding is cheaper: According to a 2023 paper by researchers at the National Center of Meteorology, the average cost of harvestable rainfall generated by cloud seeding is between 1 and 4 cents per cubic meter, compared with around 31 cents per cubic meter of water from desalination at the Hassyan Seawater Reverse Osmosis plant. But each mission costs as much as $8,000, and there’s no guarantee that the water that falls as rain will actually end up where it’s needed.

One researcher I spoke to, who has worked on cloud-seeding research in the UAE and asked to speak on background because they still work in the industry, was critical of the quality of the UAE’s science. There was, they said, a tendency for “white lies” to proliferate; officials tell their superiors what they want to hear despite the lack of evidence. The country’s rulers already think that cloud seeding is working, this person argued, so for an official to admit otherwise now would be problematic. (The National Center of Meteorology did not comment on these claims.)

By the time I leave Al Ain, I’m starting to suspect that what goes on there is as much about optics as it is about actually enhancing rainfall. The UAE has a history of making flashy announcements about cutting-edge technology—from flying cars to 3D-printed buildings to robotic police officers—with little end product.

Now, as the world transitions away from the fossil fuels that have been the country’s lifeblood for the past 50 years, the UAE is trying to position itself as a leader on climate. Last year it hosted the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, and the head of its National Center of Meteorology was chosen to lead the World Meteorological Organization, where he’ll help shape the global consensus that forms around cloud seeding and other forms of mass-scale climate modification. (He could not be reached for an interview.)

The UAE has even started exporting its cloud-seeding expertise. One of the pilots I spoke to had just returned from a trip to Lahore, where the Pakistani government had asked the UAE’s cloud seeders to bring rain to clear the polluted skies. It rained—but they couldn’t really take credit. “We knew it was going to rain, and we just went and seeded the rain that was going to come anyway,” he said.

From the steps of the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental in Abu Dhabi, the UAE certainly doesn’t seem like a country that’s running out of water. As I roll up the hotel’s long driveway on my second day in town, I can see water features and lush green grass. The sprinklers are running. I’m here for a ceremony for the fifth round of research grants being awarded by the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science. Since 2015, the program has awarded $21 million to 14 projects developing and testing ways of enhancing rainfall, and it’s about to announce the next set of recipients.

In the ornate ballroom, local officials have loosely segregated themselves by gender. I sip watermelon juice and work the room, speaking to previous award winners. There’s Linda Zou, a Chinese researcher based at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi who developed the nano-coated seeding particles in the Ghaith 2 flares. There’s Ali Abshaev, who comes from a cloud-seeding dynasty (his father directs Russia’s Hail Suppression Research Center) and who has built a machine to spray hygroscopic material into the sky from the ground. It’s like “an upside-down jet engine,” one researcher explains.

Other projects have been looking at “terrain modification”—whether planting trees or building earthen barriers in certain locations could encourage clouds to form. Giles Harrison, from the University of Reading, is exploring whether electrical currents released into clouds can encourage raindrops to stick together. There’s also a lot of work on computer simulation. Youssef Wehbe, a UAE program officer, gives me a cagey interview about the future vision: pairs of drones, powered by artificial intelligence, one taking cloud measurements and the other printing seeding material specifically tailored for that particular cloud—on the fly, as it were.

I’m particularly taken by one of this year’s grant winners. Guillaume Matras, who worked at the French defense contractor Thales before moving to the UAE, is hoping to make it rain by shooting a giant laser into the sky. Wehbe describes this approach as “high risk.” I think he means “it may not work,” not “it could set the whole atmosphere on fire.” Either way, I’m sold.

So after my cloud-seeding flight, I get a lift to Zayed Military City, an army base between Al Ain and Abu Dhabi, to visit the secretive government-funded research lab where Matras works. They take my passport at the gate to the compound, and before I can go into the lab itself I’m asked to secure my phone in a locker that’s also a Faraday cage—completely sealed to signals going in and out.

I’m suddenly very aware that I’m on a military base. Couldn’t this giant movable laser be used as a weapon?

After I put on a hairnet, a lab coat, and tinted safety goggles, Matras shows me into a lab, where I watch a remarkable thing. Inside a broad, black box the size of a small television sits an immensely powerful laser. A tech switches it on. Nothing happens. Then Matras leans forward and opens a lens, focusing the laser beam.

There’s a high-pitched but very loud buzz, like the whine of an electric motor. It is the sound of the air being ripped apart. A very fine filament, maybe half a centimeter across, appears in midair. It looks like a strand of spider’s silk, but it’s bright blue. It’s plasma—the fourth state of matter. Scale up the size of the laser and the power, and you can actually set a small part of the atmosphere on fire. Man-made lightning. Obviously my first question is to ask what would happen if I put my hand in it. “Your hand would turn into plasma,” another researcher says, entirely deadpan. I put my hand back in my pocket.

Matras says these laser beams will be able to enhance rainfall in three ways. First, acoustically—like the concussion theory of old, it’s thought that the sound of atoms in the air being ripped apart might shake adjacent raindrops so that they coalesce, get bigger, and fall to earth. Second: convection—the beam will create heat, generating updrafts that will force droplets to mix. (I’m reminded of a never-realized 1840s plan to create rain by setting fire to large chunks of the Appalachian Mountains.) Finally: ionization. When the beam is switched off, the plasma will reform—the nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules inside will clump back together into random configurations, creating new particles for water to settle around.

The plan is to scale this technology up to something the size of a shipping container that can be put on the back of a truck and driven to where it’s needed. It seems insane—I’m suddenly very aware that I’m on a military base. Couldn’t this giant movable laser be used as a weapon? “Yes,” Matras says. He picks up a pencil, the nib honed to a sharp point. “But anything could be a weapon.”

These words hang over me as I ride back into the city, past lush golf courses and hotel fountains and workmen swigging from plastic bottles. Once again, there’s not a cloud in the sky. But maybe that doesn’t matter. For the UAE, so keen to project its technological prowess around the region and the world, it’s almost irrelevant whether cloud seeding works. There’s soft power in being seen to be able to bend the weather to your will—in 2018, an Iranian general accused the UAE and Israel of stealing his country’s rain.

Anything could be a weapon, Matras had said. But there are military weapons, and economic weapons, and cultural and political weapons too. Anything could be a weapon—even the idea of one.

The Justice Department on Thursday charged Dimitri Simes, pro-Russian pundit and former head of a Washington think tank, along with his wife, Anastasia Simes, with violating US sanctions by accepting millions of dollars from a Russian state television network and laundering the proceeds.

Reached by phone in Moscow, where he has a home, Dimitri Simes, who was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, declined to comment on the allegations against him. But he denounced the charges against his wife as “lies and half-truths” and argued that the Biden administration is targeting the couple to punish him for expressing pro-Russian views.

“If you think this is a law abiding administration [it] would be shocking, but no, I am not terribly surprised,” Simes said, of the charges against his wife.

“I think that Mr. Garland would have to be ashamed of producing something like that,” Simes added. “It is beneath the dignity of the Department of Justice.”

Simes indicated that he does not plan to return the US to face the charges. He said he believes the Justice Department charged him “to stop me from coming to the US.”

“They want to punish me” for criticizing US support for Ukraine, he claimed.

Simes said he “would most certainly welcome an opportunity to come to a trial in Washington as a witness” to testify against Biden administration officials “who betrayed the US…and are trying to start World War III.”

The indictment against the couple alleges that they received $1 million, a personal car and driver, and a stipend for an apartment in Moscow, in exchange for work they did for Russia’s state-owned Channel One after the US sanctioned the network over Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions that were put in place in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” Matthew Graves, the US Attorney for Washington DC, said in a statement announcing the indictments. “Such violations harm our national security interests—a fact that Dimitri Simes, with the deep experience he gained in national affairs after fleeing the Soviet Union and becoming a US citizen, should have uniquely appreciated.”

Simes is the former longtime head of the Center for National Interest, which was founded by Richard Nixon in 1994 and advocates for “strategic realism” in US foreign policy. Simes’ efforts in 2016 to arrange contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia drew scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller, but Simes was not accused of wrongdoing.

The charges against the Simes couple are part of a Justice Department crackdown on Russian influence efforts. Federal prosecutors yesterday indicted two employees of Russian state-controlled network Russia Today with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by secretly running a right-leaning media company they used to push pro-Kremlin messaging.

The site featured content from pro-Trump pundits including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool. Both Johnson and Pool said they are victims of the scheme.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the defendants in the Tenet case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.” 

DOJ alleges that Anastasia Simes received funds from a Russian businessman named Alexander Udodov, whom the Treasury Department sanctioned last year for his support for the Russian government. Prosecutors allege that Anastasia Simes helped Udodov evade sanctions by “purchasing art and antiques for the benefit of Udodov from galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe, and having the items shipped to her residence in Huntly, Virginia, where they were stored for onward shipment to Russia.”

Anastasia Simes could not be reached, but Dimitri Simes said his those charges against his wife are false. “She started working with [Udodov] before the sanctions and was never aware of any sanctions” against the oligarch, Simes said.

He also said his wife took no steps, such as contacting a shipping company, “to ship goods to Russia.”

“There was no conspiracy, nothing,” Simes said. “She has a legitimate business. I am proud of my wife. I am very supportive of what she is doing.”

Simes’ attorney David Rivkin declined to comment.

The Justice Department on Thursday charged Dimitri Simes, pro-Russian pundit and and former head of a Washington think tank, along with his wife, Anastasia Simes, with violating US sanctions by accepting millions of dollars from a Russian state television network and laundering the proceeds.

Reached by phone in Moscow, where he has a home, Dimitri Simes, who was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, declined to comment on the allegations against him. But he denounced the charges against his wife as “lies and half-truths” and argued that the Biden administration is targeting the couple to punish him for expressing pro-Russian views.

“If you think this is a law abiding administration [it] would be shocking, but no, I am not terribly surprised,” Simes said, of the charges against his wife.

“I think that Mr. Garland would have to be ashamed of producing something like that,” Simes added. “It is beneath the dignity of the Department of Justice.”

Simes indicated that he does not plan to return the US to face the charges. He said he believes the Justice Department charged him “to stop me from coming to the US.”

“They want to punish me” for criticizing US support for Ukraine, he claimed.

Simes said he “would most certainly welcome an opportunity to come to a trial in Washington as a witness to testify against Biden administration officials “who betrayed the US…and are trying to start World War III.”

The indictment against the couple alleges that they received $1 million, a personal car and driver, and a stipend for an apartment in Moscow, in exchange for work they did for Russia’s state-owned Channel One after the US sanctioned the network over Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions that were put in place in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” US Attorney Matthew M. Graves said in a statement announcing the indictments. “Such violations harm our national security interests—a fact that Dimitri Simes, with the deep experience he gained in national affairs after fleeing the Soviet Union and becoming a US citizen, should have uniquely appreciated.”

Simes is the former longtime head of the Center for National Interest, which was founded by Richard Nixon in 1994 and advocates for “strategic realism” in US foreign policy. Simes’ efforts in 2016 to arrange contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia drew scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller, but Simes was not accused of wrongdoing.

The charges against the Simes couple are part of a Justice Department crackdown on Russian influence efforts. Federal prosecutors yesterday indicted two employees of Russian state-controlled network Russia Today with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by secretly running a right-leaning media company they used to push pro-Kremlin messaging.

The site featured content from pro-Trump pundits including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool. Both Johnson and Pool said they are victims of the scheme.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the defendants in the Tenet case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.” 

DOJ alleges that Anastasia Simes received funds from a Russian businessman named Alexander Udodov, whom the Treasury Department sanctioned last year for his support for the Russian government. Prosecutors allege that Anastasia Simes helped Udodov evade sanctions by “purchasing art and antiques for the benefit of Udodov from galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe, and having the items shipped to her residence in Huntly, Virginia, where they were stored for onward shipment to Russia.”

Anastasia Simes could not be reached, but Dimitri Simes said his those charges against his wife are false. “She started working with [Udodov] before the sanctions and was never aware of any sanctions” against the oligarch, Simes said.

He also said his wife took no steps, such as contacting a shipping company, “to ship goods to Russia.”

“There was no conspiracy, nothing,” Simes said. “She has a legitimate business. I am proud of my wife. I am very supportive of what she is doing.”

Simes’ attorney David Rivkin declined to comment.

On June 6, the Rahma Worldwide international medical delegation arrived at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis. The humanitarian volunteers noticed something immediately: Some of the medical staff welcoming them—with the best food available, an assortment of cucumbers, hummus, and french fries—appeared remarkably young to be doctors.

Before the delegation could ask any questions, an airstrike hit the neighborhood. The walls of Gaza European Hospital—then one of the only functioning medical centers in the region—shook.

“Within the first 15 minutes that we were here,” Dr. Mohammed Mustafa, an emergency specialist from Australia, recalled, “nine people came in an ambulance, already dead.”

This, the doctors learned, was typical of the day-to-day life in Gaza. It was only later the international doctors would come to find out that many of the staff were not fully credentialed doctors, but student volunteers. Dr. Bing Li, another member of the Rahma delegation—a team of a dozen doctors from different countries, there to provide support to Gaza’s depleted health system—estimated that half of the people working in European Hospital’s emergency department in June were students or trainees from Gaza’s two medical schools.

“The health care system’s on the verge of collapsing,” Salman Dasti, an anesthesiologist who worked in Gazan hospitals both before and during this war, said. “It’s being propped up because of students.”

“In this war, I lost many of my colleagues and friends from school. I lost four members of my family.”

Mustafa found the students’ ability to keep the hospital functioning remarkable. “We were getting patients moving and getting them treated. It was pretty amazing to see,” he recalled, “especially since you can see how broken they are physically, emotionally.”

On the first day, Li recalled meeting one of the volunteers keeping Gaza’s hospitals running. A patient was brought in and losing blood quickly from a blast injury to his leg. Li worked with a volunteer to stabilize the man; the volunteer then pulled Li aside and introduced herself excitedly in English: Her name was Nermeen Ziyad Abo Mostafa, and she was 20 years old.

“I had this impression she was this very friendly person, and she asked me if I wanted help with translation and seeing other patients,” Li said. The foreign doctor appreciated the aid. Earlier that day, Li, an emergency specialist from Arizona, had already had a heartbreaking experience. “We evaluated one patient that was maybe three or four years old,” she recalled. “Half his head was basically blown off.” (It ended up being “just one of many similar cases,” Li said; other doctors who have returned from Gaza say the Israeli military regularly targets children.)

As Nermeen showed Li around, another doctor noticed who the American was talking to and pulled her aside. Li was told Nermeen had a friend die earlier that same day in the blast that sent a raft of critically injured patients to the hospital.

“She was keeping this brave face despite learning that she lost somebody,” Li remembers.

Nermeen always wanted to be a doctor. As a young child, she said, she “had doctor’s tools in the form of toys.” As she grew older, she watched medical school graduation videos online, transfixed by the celebrations. She imagined herself as a cardiovascular specialist, or perhaps a pediatrician; she was overjoyed when, in 2021, she was finally able to enroll at her dream school: Al-Azhar University-Gaza. (For this article, I interviewed Nermeen using WhatsApp text messages and voice memos. Her internet and data access in Gaza is not good enough for phone calls of length.)

By October 7, 2023, Nermeen had made it through two and a half years of medical school. (In Gaza, students’ medical training starts immediately after high school, when they begin a six-year program of study.) Her tuition was expensive, and the hourlong bus ride to school from her home in Abasan Al-Kabira, a small city east of Khan Younis, made her carsick. But she was happy to be learning.

Then, the war came. In early November, Israeli warplanes destroyed Nermeen’s campus. By mid-January, Israeli bombardment had reduced every university in Gaza to rubble. Nermeen moved constantly. She evacuated from place to place four times in the first six months of the war. Eighty-four percent of Gaza is now under evacuation order. She watched classmates, professors, and friends die nearly every week. “In this war, I lost many of my colleagues and friends from school,” she told me. “I lost four members of my family.”

In April, Nermeen started volunteering at the hospital. It was the “one positive amid all of this,” she said. A third-year student would not ordinarily be actively treating patients. But her clinical phase began early. “I was learning from the doctors and helping them,” she said.

Many of those working and volunteering at the hospital had shifts lasting 24 hours—and no one I spoke with had received payment from the hospital since October. Anything shorter than a 24-hour shift would mean more trips on treacherous roads, made nearly impassable by millions of pounds of debris and sewage overflows from broken sanitation systems.

On a normal day, Nermeen began her shift early in the morning, connecting to the internet and trying to download lectures and readings from the website of her bombed university, before beginning to see the injured, “standing with doctors, talking to patients.”

As a volunteer, she cleaned wounds, translated for foreign doctors, and made treatment plans. “There were days when…the work was a lot, due to the arrival of large numbers of martyrs, and injured,” she said. “But the thing I loved to do most was stitches in the emergency department.” 

This was made difficult by short supplies. The sutures in Gaza hospitals were labeled “not for use on humans,” Mohammed Mustafa, the ER doctor from Australia, recalled. Still, he helped Nermeen with her suture technique; he noticed that she was particularly careful in caring for patients during the process. Nermeen did her best to stitch in a way that would minimize scarring.  

Conditions were hard. There were no beds, only rigid metal frames. Rooms were cramped and hot. Even the chairs in the hospital were occupied by patients, leaving little room for their caregivers to rest. The complex smelled of rot, and flies landed in patients’ wounds just as Nermeen finished disinfecting them. Even the suture needle was less sharp than it should be. 

“It would take you maybe three, four attempts to pierce the skin with the suture,” Mustafa said. “And you can imagine trying to do that with very limited anesthetic, [on] children as well.” 

Beyond the shortage of goods, there was also a shortage of personnel. Students did their best to fill in. One 22-year-old student who spoke to Mother Jones, Hasan Ali Abu Ghalyoon, was in his third year of dental school before the war. He was initially told he’d be working as a porter, then a translator. He spent four months volunteering at European Hospital, unable to see his family in Deir al-Balah after the Israeli army took over the area between the hospital and his family’s tent.

“I slept in the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross at the hospital for four months,” he said. ‘There was a broken bed that does not move from its place,” which was not used except for emergencies. When it was unoccupied by patients—and when he wasn’t being called to translate for a surgeon in the middle of the night—he got that bed.

As he spent more time in the hospital, he learned “there was a severe shortage of dentists specializing in maxillofacial surgery,” so he quickly found himself assisting with those surgeries, too. “It is difficult to talk to patients with burns or fractures,” he said, “some of whom lost a loved one with the same injury minutes before.”

Sometimes, the patients the students cared for were people they recognized. On the mid-June day when Nermeen met Bing Li, she wasn’t supposed to be at work. She was at her family’s tent, taking a rest day, when she felt a bomb detonate nearby. “We saw the smoke of the bombing, and a large number of ambulances,” she recalled. Without internet access, Nermeen worried her own relatives might be among the dead.

Nermeen decided to go to the hospital on her day off. “I put on the uniform and walked to the road.” A man with a car offered her a ride when he saw her medical uniform. His family lived in the area that had just been bombed, Nermeen remembered, and he was headed to the hospital, too. Once there, she opened her phone to scroll through the names of the dead. “My friend’s name was among the names of the martyrs of this massacre.” She rushed to the emergency room in hopes that the news was wrong. “But it was true.”

Most of her friend’s family had been killed. She found her friend’s younger sister, Samar, waiting alone, with wounds all over her body. Nermeen monitored her vital signs, stitched up a deep gash in her left foot, and patched up two wounds on her leg.

Samar was later transferred to a different department, where her head wounds were treated. “She remained in care for several days,” Nermeen remembered. Then, Samar was discharged, but “she was still in a state of shock, and would not speak.” At the end of July, Nermeen received word that Samar had been killed, too: “She joined the rest of her family.”

Gaza’s medical system has been painfully constricted for decades. This is partially due to the longstanding Israeli policy of blocking “dual-use items” at the border—medical devices that could, allegedly, be used as weapons. Those items have included crutches, hearing aid batteries, thermometers, and incubators. This means the doctors of Gaza must make do.

Dasti, the anaesthesiologist from San Francisco, visited Gaza multiple times as part of a medical mission group with the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund before 2023. “I was fairly impressed with the robustness of the health care system,” he said. “I mean, it still lacked resources, but I was pretty impressed with the training that the physicians there had.”

There were 36 fully functioning hospitals in Gaza prior to the war. By mid-August, according to the World Health Organization, only 16 of those 36 hospitals were even partially operational. These 16 hospitals have treated patients far beyond their capacity. Staff is low: The UN Human Rights Office reported that more than 500 medical workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7. And an NBC News investigation recently suggested Israel has targeted doctors for kidnapping and taken them to torture camps. Hanan Balkhy, Eastern Mediterranean regional director for the World Health Organization, said that as of early August, WHO has been able to verify more than 500 attacks on medical personnel in Gaza.

This leaves a staggering hole for those in need of care. The WHO estimates that nearly 93,000 people in Gaza are injured. Among those 16 remaining hospitals, there are fewer than 1,500 hospital beds—about one for every 60 injured people. And those numbers don’t account for those who would ordinarily require hospital beds even in peacetime: diabetic patients requiring dialysis, cancer patients, and pregnant women needing somewhere to give birth.

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

“The remaining students are now basically frontline doctors, because of just the lack of personnel,” Dasti said. Students spent their days at European Hospital “functioning as essentially an attending physician, while not getting paid and working long arduous hours with little sleep.” 

Balkhy, of WHO, said the students are exhibiting “more resilience than anyone should need to have.” Nermeen and her classmates dream of continuing their education—perhaps leaving and studying elsewhere if the borders reopen—but, as Balkhy said, it is “a race against time and circumstance.”

Conditions in Gaza, meanwhile, are only worsening. WHO confirmed the first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years on August 22: “Health workers have been digging graves for patients they know they are not able to save because they don’t have the resources needed.”

Forty-five international doctors who spent time in Gaza published a letter on July 25 addressed to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Bing Li and Salman Dasti were among the signatories. They detailed the injuries they’d seen—preteens deliberately shot in the head, healthy babies dying of preventable diseases—and noted their “acute awareness” that Gaza’s medical professionals have been targeted. The doctors begged the president for an arms embargo, and for “unfettered aid delivery” of antibiotics, painkillers, and sutures.

On August 1, 300 days into the destruction of Gaza, Nermeen turned 21 in a white tent, as temperatures soared above 90 degrees. As she sent me WhatsApp voice notes, warplanes buzzed overhead and her siblings chattered in the background.

She had been away from the hospital for a month. It was evacuated on July 1. Patients left, or were carried out by hand, over a chaotic 24 hours. “There’s really no roads because they’ve all been destroyed,” Dasti remembered. Taking a patient a couple of miles to the nearest hospital took at least an hour. Even in the United States, under the best of conditions, it is hard to move a patient from the ICU down the hall to the operating room safely. “I think some of them died on the way,” Dasti said.

Hasan, the dental student, evacuated too. He has spent the past two months sharing an 8-by-20-foot tent with four families in Deir al-Balah refugee camp, not far from the site of the Al-Tabin School bombing, in which the Israel Defense Forces used US-made bombs to hit a school building and kill nearly 100 people. He spends time making videos about his work in the hospital, which the international doctors he met have been sharing at conferences back home.

Hasan has been trying to return to European Hospital to see if he could help if it reopens—and perhaps find a path to continuing his studies. (World Health Organization officials told Mother Jones that they are partnering with the Gaza Ministry of Health to restore emergency services at the hospital, though the timeline has been postponed amid heavy bombing.) On WhatsApp, Hasan showed me a map outlining the route he planned to take, with red danger zones highlighted. When he tried to make the journey, “the people on the road told me to go back [because] the army is on the road.” He turned around and returned to Deir al-Balah.

When we messaged last week, Hasan said he had heard a system of buses organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross might be able to bring him back to Khan Younis. But a day after we spoke, Israeli forces once again ordered the evacuation of large portions of Khan Younis—and bombed portions of Deir al-Balah, where Hasan now lives. But he hasn’t given up. “I will try again,” he said.

Nermeen faces similar obstacles. “I am impatiently waiting for the hospital to reopen, because I miss helping and learning new things,” she said. While she heard that administrative work on reopening the hospital began in mid-August, she doesn’t know when it will reopen fully. And returning to the hospital might be dangerous: “Sudden bombing could occur on the road.” So, instead, she has returned to her studies, when the intermittent-at-best internet allows, and when the “terrifying” noises of artillery shells pause long enough to let her focus. One day, Nermeen announced proudly that she’d managed to turn in her endocrinology exam online, to a virtual classroom run by professors from a university that, physically, no longer exists.

“All of this losing makes my heart broken,” Nermeen said. “I hope I can be strong, because my dreams wait [for] me, and many people…I want to help them.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry groups reacted less favorably to the news. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry groups reacted less favorably to the news. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The atmosphere is more festival than crime scene. There’s an accordionist, and two men in beanie hats are playing the drums. It’s a clear spring day in the farmlands of western France. But the people gathered in this field are technically trespassing, and there are signs they expect trouble. Someone has a gas mask slung around their neck. There’s a contingent clad in balaclavas. Others disguise their features with dark goggles or masks, and one group holds up a wide fabric canopy to obscure the view of police drones. At the center of the maelstrom stands Léna Lazare, holding a pickaxe.

The then-24-year-old’s long brown hair is untied; her face uncovered. That’s important, she says. It adds a sense of legitimacy to what she’s about to do. She drives the pickaxe into the ground as the crowd around her looks on. Again and again she strikes at the hard, dry earth. When she can’t dig any more, another person emerges from the huddle to take over. Several meters down, they find what they’ve been looking for: pipes. Beneath the field is a network designed to carry water to a new “mega-basin”—a giant reservoir being built near the village of Épannes. The group is here to rip one of those pipes out of the ground.

The soft-spoken former physics student is a spokesperson for sabotage: “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings.”

In other parts of the world, environmentalists target oil giants, airports, and banks to throw sand in the gears of companies they believe are actively warming the globe. For activists in France, mega-basins have become a symbol of how the government is adapting to climate change in precisely the wrong way. In response to intensifying droughts, French authorities have carved giant water storage systems into the countryside for large farms to draw down in dry months. Critics say these mega-basins—which can hold up to about 190 million gallons, the equivalent of nearly 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools—are effectively hoarding water, reserving it for private landowners, leaving rivers parched and local groundwater systems depleted.

That’s why these projects are targets for sabotage, according to Lazare. She talks about “disarming” the reservoirs, as if they, not she and her fellow protesters, were the source of violence. She’s watching from the crowd on this clear day in March 2022 as a man in jeans and a white T-shirt strains to lever a piece of pipe out of the ground with rope. Someone produces an angle grinder. When a section is cut free, the crowd breaks into applause before a man in blue overalls brandishes the severed pipe above his head like a trophy. “At that moment,” Lazare recalls later, “the water gushed out and returned to the Earth.”

Lazare is one of the 200 founding members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or Earth Uprisings, a French organization that is the most extreme of a new wave of radical European climate groups formed in the past five years. In France, this soft-spoken former physics student has become a spokesperson for sabotage. “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings,” she says.

Now 26, Lazare makes more sense as a scientist than as an activist—mostly quiet and serious and economical with her words. She has a mane of unkempt hair and a soft, flat voice that sometimes gives way to a high-pitched giggle and flashes of steely defiance. “We refuse to be labeled as criminals,” she says. After French interior minister Gérald Darmanin compared some members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre to ecoterrorists and the government outlawed the organization in June 2023, it was Lazare who went on TV to defend the group’s activities.

In the past few years, activists have smashed bank windows, attacked gas stations, broken into oil-pipeline control stations, deflated hundreds of SUV tires, and, just this summer, doused Stonehenge with temporary orange paint. They do this for different aims—to attract media coverage, to argue their case in front of a jury, or to make business untenable for companies they see as responsible for loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, driving calamitous weather events, and courting mass extinction.

If Greta Thunberg was emblematic of an earlier stage of the global climate movement, Léna Lazare signals what comes next. Today’s activists are wrestling with deep disappointment that 2019’s mass climate demonstrations didn’t portend big changes, and a certainty that they are running out of time to prevent climate catastrophe. A combination of urgency and despair is pushing them to actions previously seized by only the most radical fringe of the environmental movement.

Sabotage has been a strand of the modern environmental movement for half a century. In 1975, two homemade bombs exploded in a yet-to-be opened French nuclear power station, delaying its construction by several months. In 1986, activists sank two roughly 430-ton Icelandic whaling ships and used sledge hammers and acid to destroy processing equipment in the country’s only whale oil plant.

In 1998, the year Lazare was born, a group associated with the Earth Liberation Front caused more than $12 million in damage when it torched a mile-long strip of a Colorado ski resort that had been planning to expand into an area considered a potential habitat for a threatened lynx.

Growing up, Lazare’s family—her father was the director of an art house movie theater, and her mother worked in film communications—had friends in Japan, and she felt a strong connection with the country. In 2011, when she was 12, a tsunami triggered a major disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Lazare spent days afterward obsessively reading about leaking radiation and the 15,000 people forced to evacuate their homes. She also read reports claiming those in charge of the plant had cut corners with safety measures in part to save money. And that introduced her to a tension—between what is best for business and what is best for the local environment—that she now finds ubiquitous. “Everything was done to prioritize economic interests before the well-being of the population,” she says.

Seven years after Fukushima, Lazare moved to Paris to study physics at the prestigious Sorbonne University. There she met, and began protesting alongside, fellow student activists. Then, one day in the spring of 2018, she watched police fire tear gas at environmentalists squatting on an abandoned airport in western France, and she began to feel that protests alone were not enough.

“Sabotage is a French term,” says the Swedish activist Andreas Malm. “I think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the climate movement in Europe right now.”

That year, Thunberg started the peaceful school strike that made her famous, and Lazare launched her own group. Paris Environmental Disobedience, or Désobéissance Ecolo Paris, was about figuring out ways to be strategically disruptive. The group tried out a few small, risk-averse actions like daubing banks in a type of easy-to-remove black paint, says Lazare, but they ended up talking about breaking the law a lot more than actually breaking it.

At around the same time, the mainstream climate movement was starting to gain momentum with peaceful tactics. Millions of young people began marching in capital cities across the world, making it clear they did not want to inherit a ruined planet. When the protests arrived in Paris in early 2019, Lazare joined them. She became a national coordinator for Youth for Climate, the French equivalent of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, appearing on TV and in newspapers talking about the climate crisis and her decision to stop traveling by plane.

All the while, she was restless. “It wasn’t moving fast enough,” she remembers. By the end of that year, Lazare had dropped out of university. “We must reinvent ourselves, lead people toward civil disobedience, mount more radical actions,” she told the French magazine Politis. She was trying to get her comrades to take the leap toward sabotage. “It was about daring to damage material stuff,” she explains. Until then, she says, that was a line the mainstream climate movement had not been ready to cross.

Then the pandemic distracted the world from the climate. France went into lockdown. Lazare was in Japan, taking a break from protesting, and couldn’t get home for six months. When she finally made it back she got her hands on a book about environmental protests that had just been released, called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

A few years earlier, its author, the Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm, had been working on a book about ancient Egypt when his country experienced its worst wildfires in modern history. Upwards of 60 fires were burning, from the Arctic north to the southern island of Gotland. And it wasn’t just Sweden: Parts of Greece, California, and the UK were all burning too.

Malm could no longer justify “geeking out on this moldy old historical stuff while the world was literally on fire,” so he forgot the book on ancient Egypt and instead wrote a treatise arguing that sabotage is necessary for the climate movement to make real progress. “The situation is so dire, we need to go beyond absolutely peaceful civil disobedience and start experimenting,” Malm says. The peaceful marches shouldn’t stop, he argues. Rather, the climate movement needs to develop a radical flank—one that will also apply pressure on policymakers and politicians to work more closely with moderate activists.

In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, he compared this dynamic to the US Civil Rights Movement. In his telling, it was the threat of Malcolm X’s growing popularity that had spurred successive presidents, first John F. Kennedy then Lyndon Johnson, to work with Martin Luther King Jr.

This kind of flank, he wrote, was about harming property and not people—something he considers a red line, morally and strategically. “The one point where it becomes complicated,” he says, “is when you have cops protecting the things you want to destroy.” Police, in other words, may be an exception to the rule.

Lazare isn’t fully aligned with Malm, who has advocated an “ecological Leninism” of top-down state intervention in the economy. “We don’t agree at all politically,” she says. But his book had a profound impact on her—in an Instagram post from 2021, she poses for the camera with the words “Let’s Blow Up Pipelines” across her shoulders. Malm, for his part, has been to Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s protests and expresses an ideological affinity. “Sabotage is a French term,” he says. “I think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the climate movement in Europe right now.”

Sabotage might be a French term, but it is a tactic that is spreading across Europe. Around the same time Lazare was digging up pipes, in early 2022, the 30-year-old psychologist Lars Werner was trekking through the German countryside, a portable ladder stashed in his bag. It was the culmination of months of poring over maps, looking for places where oil pipelines were likely to jut out of the ground in his home country.

Werner was part of Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a climate-activist group best known for its road blockades, where members sit and refuse to let traffic pass until they are arrested. A veteran of those protests, Werner and his colleagues were “ready to go to prison,” he says, to grab the public’s attention. Now, he wanted to apply that idea to sabotage. The plan wasn’t to damage the pipeline permanently; he just wanted to break into a control station and stop the flow of oil.

A photo from that day, posted on Instagram, shows Werner grasping a black emergency valve and looking solemnly into the camera through small round glasses. That spring, he says, the group broke into a total of 35 pipeline control stations around the country. (Response to the pipeline protests was tepid, Werner says. Media coverage was sparse—not helped by the fact that the company that owned the pipelines, refinery PCK Raffinerie, refused to say whether the oil supply had been disrupted.)

“People are desperate,” says British doctor and activist Patrick Hart. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

Not long after Werner’s first pipeline protest, a British doctor named Patrick Hart joined a new UK group called Just Stop Oil, which called for “bold action” until the government pledged to stop licensing new fossil fuel projects. Before sunrise one day in August 2022, Hart arrived at a gas station on the outskirts of London and started smashing the price screens on each pump using a hammer and chisel. Then he sat down and waited for the police to arrive.

Hart chose the fuel pump’s screens, he says, because they were the only part of the gas station he believed he could damage without risking a spill or harming another living being. In addition to gas stations, Just Stop Oil members have attacked famous paintings, stormed sports venues, and sprayed powdered paint on Stonehenge to send the public a message: You might want to forget that climate change is happening, but its most dramatic consequences are yet to come.

As he talks, Hart returns to variations of the same refrain: The world is on course for catastrophe, and if we continue to rely on fossil fuels, billions of people will die. “I don’t know how many times I need to say this, but like, we are so fucked.” Getting more opportunities to convey this message is, to him, the whole point. His actions generate a lot of press interest, which in turn gets him a lot of interviews—like this one. “Every time I get an interview, I say humanity is headed for annihilation,” he says. “If we don’t change now, then we have absolutely no hope.”

When I meet Hart in London, he’s wearing a smart blue suit. He’s on his way to court for releasing plumes of orange powder onto the pitch at a rugby game at Twickenham Stadium. At the time, this is just one of four cases he’s fighting—it’s unclear whether any will end in jail time, but if they do, he says he’s prepared. “People are desperate,” he says. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

This cast of climate saboteurs live in different countries and speak different languages, but they have so many similarities. They want to show their faces, to explain that what they’re doing is a rational response to the current crisis. We’re not the violent ones, they say. Real violence is committed by companies that are wrecking our planet for profit. Sabotage must target property, never people. The environment must not be permanently harmed.

Of course, the bombs placed in the French power station in the 1970s didn’t stop the country from growing into Europe’s biggest generator of nuclear power. Whaling continues in Iceland. The Colorado ski resort burned by the Earth Liberation Front was rebuilt. Oil still flows through the German pipelines shut off by Werner, and gas through the English pumps smashed by Hart.

But Lazare claims her actions are causing real disruption. By last spring, she had taken part in three acts of sabotage against the mega-basins: in Cram-Chaban, in Épannes, and in Sainte-Soline. Les Soulèvements de la Terre is doing more than just attracting media attention, she argues. The group has inspired copycat attacks that have vandalized mega-basins throughout western France. She claims this has pushed up the cost of building mega-basins; construction companies now have to pay for security guards and motion detectors to guard against people like her. And it’s not just the owners of the mega-basin that are keeping an eye on Les Soulèvements de la Terre.

““Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” Lazare tells me.

In March 2023, Lazare helped organize a second protest at the mega-basin under construction near Sainte-Soline in western France. At least 6,000 protesters were met by some 3,000 French gendarmes in full riot gear, creating a barrier between the crowd and the half-built reservoir. Some demonstrators turned back; others attempted to push through the cordon, trying to reach and sabotage the site.

The ensuing violence shocked France. Police fired 5,000 tear gas canisters in just under two hours. Soon protesters were covered in blood; according to Les Soulèvements de la Terre, more than 200 people were injured. Two people were left in a coma. Organizers claim someone lost an eye. Police say 47 officers were hurt and four vehicles burned. “A lot of us felt completely traumatized about what happened,” says Lazare, who says she stayed behind the front line helping to look after the injured. A friend of a friend had been hit in the leg by a tear gas stun grenade. The open wound was streaming with blood. It took the ambulance hours to arrive; Lazare felt totally overwhelmed.

Andreas Malm was in the crowd that day too—watching a real-world exploration of the limits of violence cited in his book as demonstrators clashed with police. “I think this was the right thing to do,” he says of the activists’ decision to try to push through police lines. “It would have been a surrender to the armed forces of the state to just say, ‘OK, you are protecting this piece of property with overwhelming military force, so we’re just giving up and going home.’”

The day became known as the Battle of Sainte-Soline. Media coverage brought Les Soulèvements de la Terre a new level of notoriety. And surveys showed that the public blamed both the protesters and the police for the violence. (Lazare says a small minority of protesters threw Molotov cocktails.)

Then, in June 2023, the French government used the violent event as justification to ban Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Two months later, a court intervened, giving the group permission to continue operating until its case could be properly reviewed.

In August 2023, exactly one week after the court intervention, I cycle for two hours through the sweltering countryside of western France to meet Lazare. Activists are gathering in the village of Lezay, a few miles from Sainte-Soline, for a 10-day bicycle convoy to Paris, partly to protest the mega-basins and partly to express their support for Les Soulèvements de la Terre after its brief ban. This corner of rural France is bracing for a new heat wave; the geological research office is warning of another summer of record-breaking drought. Villagers stare as I pass, perhaps assuming I’m one of the people the government calls ecoterrorists.

By the time I arrive in Lezay my clothes are damp with sweat, my head foggy. I find hundreds of Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s supporters in a field on the outskirts of town in a victorious, yet cautious, mood. People carry flags that read: “We are all Les Soulèvements de la Terre.” The police are there but keeping their distance. A helicopter circles above.

Lazare emerges from the crowd, clutching a half-eaten sandwich and wearing bright silver shoes. When we finally find a patch of field that is not carpeted in sheep droppings, she kneels in the grass and in her soft, methodical way explains why it’s time for the climate movement to take more radical action.

Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass.

Part of Lazare’s job is to soften Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s image. For years she appeared in French magazines as the new face of radical eco-activism, but she became Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s official spokesperson only when the group faced the prospect of being shut down. Now Lazare is among a small band of people who deliver speeches at protests or explain their motives to the press.

“The government tries to say Les Soulèvements de la Terre is one of these dangerous ultraleft groups,” she says, twisting blades of grass between her fingers as she talks. They want the public to picture violent men, she explains. Lazare knows she does not conform to that image. And neither do her supporters, lying in the grass with their bikes, behind us. There are children, gray-haired hippies, a contingent of tractors, dogs, and even a donkey. A big white horse pulls a cart in circles, a speaker inside vibrating with music.

Later that day, I join around 700 Les Soulèvements de la Terre supporters cycling along quiet country roads, weaving our way past sunflower fields, wind turbines, and rivers that have run dry. Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass. Owners of small farms open their gates, welcoming us in to refill our water bottles and use the facilities. There is a DJ on wheels who blasts The Prodigy as we roll toward the next town. Three months later, in November 2023, that same top court in France overturns the government’s decision to ban the group, ruling it disproportionate.

That is a brief respite in the legal onslaught facing the movement, as European authorities formulate their response to the wave of sabotage sweeping the continent. In November, Lazare and a fellow Les Soulèvements de la Terre spokesperson are due in court for refusing to attend a parliamentary inquiry into the 2023 protests, including the Battle of Saint-Soline. They face two years in jail. The same month, Patrick Hart comes before a tribunal to decide whether he should lose his medical license as a result of his activism.

Last year in Germany, Letzte Generation’s members were subjected to police raids, and in May 2024, the public prosecutor’s office in the German town of Neuruppin charged five of the group’s members with forming a criminal organization, citing in part the 2022 pipeline protests. Werner hasn’t been charged, surprisingly, but he hopes a public trial of his fellow activists will spark a countrywide reckoning over Germany’s use of fossil fuels and finally give his sabotage of pipelines the impact he wanted all along.

As their members are dragged through the courts, it seems more important than ever for these groups to have public support. That’s why the people lining the small country roads are so important to Lazare. She needs their blessing. “Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” she tells me. Sabotage needs to inspire copycats, which means it needs to shake off its reputation as a sinister, criminal act.

After the first long day of cycling, we pull into a field. Activists have set up a campsite with a bar, a pay-what-you-can canteen, a stage for climate lectures, and live music. There is the accordion again, that festival atmosphere. “I think it’s important for activists to go sometimes by night, masked, and commit sabotage,” says Lazare. “But in Les Soulèvements de la Terre, we want to do this in the middle of the day, not anonymously, but collectively, with joy and music.” Joyfulness, she says, is key to the whole idea.

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

The atmosphere is more festival than crime scene. There’s an accordionist, and two men in beanie hats are playing the drums. It’s a clear spring day in the farmlands of western France. But the people gathered in this field are technically trespassing, and there are signs they expect trouble. Someone has a gas mask slung around their neck. There’s a contingent clad in balaclavas. Others disguise their features with dark goggles or masks, and one group holds up a wide fabric canopy to obscure the view of police drones. At the center of the maelstrom stands Léna Lazare, holding a pickaxe.

The then-24-year-old’s long brown hair is untied; her face uncovered. That’s important, she says. It adds a sense of legitimacy to what she’s about to do. She drives the pickaxe into the ground as the crowd around her looks on. Again and again she strikes at the hard, dry earth. When she can’t dig any more, another person emerges from the huddle to take over. Several meters down, they find what they’ve been looking for: pipes. Beneath the field is a network designed to carry water to a new “mega-basin”—a giant reservoir being built near the village of Épannes. The group is here to rip one of those pipes out of the ground.

The soft-spoken former physics student is a spokesperson for sabotage: “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings.”

In other parts of the world, environmentalists target oil giants, airports, and banks to throw sand in the gears of companies they believe are actively warming the globe. For activists in France, mega-basins have become a symbol of how the government is adapting to climate change in precisely the wrong way. In response to intensifying droughts, French authorities have carved giant water storage systems into the countryside for large farms to draw down in dry months. Critics say these mega-basins—which can hold up to about 190 million gallons, the equivalent of nearly 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools—are effectively hoarding water, reserving it for private landowners, leaving rivers parched and local groundwater systems depleted.

That’s why these projects are targets for sabotage, according to Lazare. She talks about “disarming” the reservoirs, as if they, not she and her fellow protesters, were the source of violence. She’s watching from the crowd on this clear day in March 2022 as a man in jeans and a white T-shirt strains to lever a piece of pipe out of the ground with rope. Someone produces an angle grinder. When a section is cut free, the crowd breaks into applause before a man in blue overalls brandishes the severed pipe above his head like a trophy. “At that moment,” Lazare recalls later, “the water gushed out and returned to the Earth.”

Lazare is one of the 200 founding members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or Earth Uprisings, a French organization that is the most extreme of a new wave of radical European climate groups formed in the past five years. In France, this soft-spoken former physics student has become a spokesperson for sabotage. “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings,” she says.

Now 26, Lazare makes more sense as a scientist than as an activist—mostly quiet and serious and economical with her words. She has a mane of unkempt hair and a soft, flat voice that sometimes gives way to a high-pitched giggle and flashes of steely defiance. “We refuse to be labeled as criminals,” she says. After French interior minister Gérald Darmanin compared some members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre to ecoterrorists and the government outlawed the organization in June 2023, it was Lazare who went on TV to defend the group’s activities.

In the past few years, activists have smashed bank windows, attacked gas stations, broken into oil-pipeline control stations, deflated hundreds of SUV tires, and, just this summer, doused Stonehenge with temporary orange paint. They do this for different aims—to attract media coverage, to argue their case in front of a jury, or to make business untenable for companies they see as responsible for loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, driving calamitous weather events, and courting mass extinction.

If Greta Thunberg was emblematic of an earlier stage of the global climate movement, Léna Lazare signals what comes next. Today’s activists are wrestling with deep disappointment that 2019’s mass climate demonstrations didn’t portend big changes, and a certainty that they are running out of time to prevent climate catastrophe. A combination of urgency and despair is pushing them to actions previously seized by only the most radical fringe of the environmental movement.

Sabotage has been a strand of the modern environmental movement for half a century. In 1975, two homemade bombs exploded in a yet-to-be opened French nuclear power station, delaying its construction by several months. In 1986, activists sank two roughly 430-ton Icelandic whaling ships and used sledge hammers and acid to destroy processing equipment in the country’s only whale oil plant.

In 1998, the year Lazare was born, a group associated with the Earth Liberation Front caused more than $12 million in damage when it torched a mile-long strip of a Colorado ski resort that had been planning to expand into an area considered a potential habitat for a threatened lynx.

Growing up, Lazare’s family—her father was the director of an art house movie theater, and her mother worked in film communications—had friends in Japan, and she felt a strong connection with the country. In 2011, when she was 12, a tsunami triggered a major disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Lazare spent days afterward obsessively reading about leaking radiation and the 15,000 people forced to evacuate their homes. She also read reports claiming those in charge of the plant had cut corners with safety measures in part to save money. And that introduced her to a tension—between what is best for business and what is best for the local environment—that she now finds ubiquitous. “Everything was done to prioritize economic interests before the well-being of the population,” she says.

Seven years after Fukushima, Lazare moved to Paris to study physics at the prestigious Sorbonne University. There she met, and began protesting alongside, fellow student activists. Then, one day in the spring of 2018, she watched police fire tear gas at environmentalists squatting on an abandoned airport in western France, and she began to feel that protests alone were not enough.

“Sabotage is a French term,” says the Swedish activist Andreas Malm. “I think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the climate movement in Europe right now.”

That year, Thunberg started the peaceful school strike that made her famous, and Lazare launched her own group. Paris Environmental Disobedience, or Désobéissance Ecolo Paris, was about figuring out ways to be strategically disruptive. The group tried out a few small, risk-averse actions like daubing banks in a type of easy-to-remove black paint, says Lazare, but they ended up talking about breaking the law a lot more than actually breaking it.

At around the same time, the mainstream climate movement was starting to gain momentum with peaceful tactics. Millions of young people began marching in capital cities across the world, making it clear they did not want to inherit a ruined planet. When the protests arrived in Paris in early 2019, Lazare joined them. She became a national coordinator for Youth for Climate, the French equivalent of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, appearing on TV and in newspapers talking about the climate crisis and her decision to stop traveling by plane.

All the while, she was restless. “It wasn’t moving fast enough,” she remembers. By the end of that year, Lazare had dropped out of university. “We must reinvent ourselves, lead people toward civil disobedience, mount more radical actions,” she told the French magazine Politis. She was trying to get her comrades to take the leap toward sabotage. “It was about daring to damage material stuff,” she explains. Until then, she says, that was a line the mainstream climate movement had not been ready to cross.

Then the pandemic distracted the world from the climate. France went into lockdown. Lazare was in Japan, taking a break from protesting, and couldn’t get home for six months. When she finally made it back she got her hands on a book about environmental protests that had just been released, called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

A few years earlier, its author, the Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm, had been working on a book about ancient Egypt when his country experienced its worst wildfires in modern history. Upwards of 60 fires were burning, from the Arctic north to the southern island of Gotland. And it wasn’t just Sweden: Parts of Greece, California, and the UK were all burning too.

Malm could no longer justify “geeking out on this moldy old historical stuff while the world was literally on fire,” so he forgot the book on ancient Egypt and instead wrote a treatise arguing that sabotage is necessary for the climate movement to make real progress. “The situation is so dire, we need to go beyond absolutely peaceful civil disobedience and start experimenting,” Malm says. The peaceful marches shouldn’t stop, he argues. Rather, the climate movement needs to develop a radical flank—one that will also apply pressure on policymakers and politicians to work more closely with moderate activists.

In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, he compared this dynamic to the US Civil Rights Movement. In his telling, it was the threat of Malcolm X’s growing popularity that had spurred successive presidents, first John F. Kennedy then Lyndon Johnson, to work with Martin Luther King Jr.

This kind of flank, he wrote, was about harming property and not people—something he considers a red line, morally and strategically. “The one point where it becomes complicated,” he says, “is when you have cops protecting the things you want to destroy.” Police, in other words, may be an exception to the rule.

Lazare isn’t fully aligned with Malm, who has advocated an “ecological Leninism” of top-down state intervention in the economy. “We don’t agree at all politically,” she says. But his book had a profound impact on her—in an Instagram post from 2021, she poses for the camera with the words “Let’s Blow Up Pipelines” across her shoulders. Malm, for his part, has been to Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s protests and expresses an ideological affinity. “Sabotage is a French term,” he says. “I think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the climate movement in Europe right now.”

Sabotage might be a French term, but it is a tactic that is spreading across Europe. Around the same time Lazare was digging up pipes, in early 2022, the 30-year-old psychologist Lars Werner was trekking through the German countryside, a portable ladder stashed in his bag. It was the culmination of months of poring over maps, looking for places where oil pipelines were likely to jut out of the ground in his home country.

Werner was part of Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a climate-activist group best known for its road blockades, where members sit and refuse to let traffic pass until they are arrested. A veteran of those protests, Werner and his colleagues were “ready to go to prison,” he says, to grab the public’s attention. Now, he wanted to apply that idea to sabotage. The plan wasn’t to damage the pipeline permanently; he just wanted to break into a control station and stop the flow of oil.

A photo from that day, posted on Instagram, shows Werner grasping a black emergency valve and looking solemnly into the camera through small round glasses. That spring, he says, the group broke into a total of 35 pipeline control stations around the country. (Response to the pipeline protests was tepid, Werner says. Media coverage was sparse—not helped by the fact that the company that owned the pipelines, refinery PCK Raffinerie, refused to say whether the oil supply had been disrupted.)

“People are desperate,” says British doctor and activist Patrick Hart. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

Not long after Werner’s first pipeline protest, a British doctor named Patrick Hart joined a new UK group called Just Stop Oil, which called for “bold action” until the government pledged to stop licensing new fossil fuel projects. Before sunrise one day in August 2022, Hart arrived at a gas station on the outskirts of London and started smashing the price screens on each pump using a hammer and chisel. Then he sat down and waited for the police to arrive.

Hart chose the fuel pump’s screens, he says, because they were the only part of the gas station he believed he could damage without risking a spill or harming another living being. In addition to gas stations, Just Stop Oil members have attacked famous paintings, stormed sports venues, and sprayed powdered paint on Stonehenge to send the public a message: You might want to forget that climate change is happening, but its most dramatic consequences are yet to come.

As he talks, Hart returns to variations of the same refrain: The world is on course for catastrophe, and if we continue to rely on fossil fuels, billions of people will die. “I don’t know how many times I need to say this, but like, we are so fucked.” Getting more opportunities to convey this message is, to him, the whole point. His actions generate a lot of press interest, which in turn gets him a lot of interviews—like this one. “Every time I get an interview, I say humanity is headed for annihilation,” he says. “If we don’t change now, then we have absolutely no hope.”

When I meet Hart in London, he’s wearing a smart blue suit. He’s on his way to court for releasing plumes of orange powder onto the pitch at a rugby game at Twickenham Stadium. At the time, this is just one of four cases he’s fighting—it’s unclear whether any will end in jail time, but if they do, he says he’s prepared. “People are desperate,” he says. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

This cast of climate saboteurs live in different countries and speak different languages, but they have so many similarities. They want to show their faces, to explain that what they’re doing is a rational response to the current crisis. We’re not the violent ones, they say. Real violence is committed by companies that are wrecking our planet for profit. Sabotage must target property, never people. The environment must not be permanently harmed.

Of course, the bombs placed in the French power station in the 1970s didn’t stop the country from growing into Europe’s biggest generator of nuclear power. Whaling continues in Iceland. The Colorado ski resort burned by the Earth Liberation Front was rebuilt. Oil still flows through the German pipelines shut off by Werner, and gas through the English pumps smashed by Hart.

But Lazare claims her actions are causing real disruption. By last spring, she had taken part in three acts of sabotage against the mega-basins: in Cram-Chaban, in Épannes, and in Sainte-Soline. Les Soulèvements de la Terre is doing more than just attracting media attention, she argues. The group has inspired copycat attacks that have vandalized mega-basins throughout western France. She claims this has pushed up the cost of building mega-basins; construction companies now have to pay for security guards and motion detectors to guard against people like her. And it’s not just the owners of the mega-basin that are keeping an eye on Les Soulèvements de la Terre.

““Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” Lazare tells me.

In March 2023, Lazare helped organize a second protest at the mega-basin under construction near Sainte-Soline in western France. At least 6,000 protesters were met by some 3,000 French gendarmes in full riot gear, creating a barrier between the crowd and the half-built reservoir. Some demonstrators turned back; others attempted to push through the cordon, trying to reach and sabotage the site.

The ensuing violence shocked France. Police fired 5,000 tear gas canisters in just under two hours. Soon protesters were covered in blood; according to Les Soulèvements de la Terre, more than 200 people were injured. Two people were left in a coma. Organizers claim someone lost an eye. Police say 47 officers were hurt and four vehicles burned. “A lot of us felt completely traumatized about what happened,” says Lazare, who says she stayed behind the front line helping to look after the injured. A friend of a friend had been hit in the leg by a tear gas stun grenade. The open wound was streaming with blood. It took the ambulance hours to arrive; Lazare felt totally overwhelmed.

Andreas Malm was in the crowd that day too—watching a real-world exploration of the limits of violence cited in his book as demonstrators clashed with police. “I think this was the right thing to do,” he says of the activists’ decision to try to push through police lines. “It would have been a surrender to the armed forces of the state to just say, ‘OK, you are protecting this piece of property with overwhelming military force, so we’re just giving up and going home.’”

The day became known as the Battle of Sainte-Soline. Media coverage brought Les Soulèvements de la Terre a new level of notoriety. And surveys showed that the public blamed both the protesters and the police for the violence. (Lazare says a small minority of protesters threw Molotov cocktails.)

Then, in June 2023, the French government used the violent event as justification to ban Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Two months later, a court intervened, giving the group permission to continue operating until its case could be properly reviewed.

In August 2023, exactly one week after the court intervention, I cycle for two hours through the sweltering countryside of western France to meet Lazare. Activists are gathering in the village of Lezay, a few miles from Sainte-Soline, for a 10-day bicycle convoy to Paris, partly to protest the mega-basins and partly to express their support for Les Soulèvements de la Terre after its brief ban. This corner of rural France is bracing for a new heat wave; the geological research office is warning of another summer of record-breaking drought. Villagers stare as I pass, perhaps assuming I’m one of the people the government calls ecoterrorists.

By the time I arrive in Lezay my clothes are damp with sweat, my head foggy. I find hundreds of Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s supporters in a field on the outskirts of town in a victorious, yet cautious, mood. People carry flags that read: “We are all Les Soulèvements de la Terre.” The police are there but keeping their distance. A helicopter circles above.

Lazare emerges from the crowd, clutching a half-eaten sandwich and wearing bright silver shoes. When we finally find a patch of field that is not carpeted in sheep droppings, she kneels in the grass and in her soft, methodical way explains why it’s time for the climate movement to take more radical action.

Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass.

Part of Lazare’s job is to soften Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s image. For years she appeared in French magazines as the new face of radical eco-activism, but she became Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s official spokesperson only when the group faced the prospect of being shut down. Now Lazare is among a small band of people who deliver speeches at protests or explain their motives to the press.

“The government tries to say Les Soulèvements de la Terre is one of these dangerous ultraleft groups,” she says, twisting blades of grass between her fingers as she talks. They want the public to picture violent men, she explains. Lazare knows she does not conform to that image. And neither do her supporters, lying in the grass with their bikes, behind us. There are children, gray-haired hippies, a contingent of tractors, dogs, and even a donkey. A big white horse pulls a cart in circles, a speaker inside vibrating with music.

Later that day, I join around 700 Les Soulèvements de la Terre supporters cycling along quiet country roads, weaving our way past sunflower fields, wind turbines, and rivers that have run dry. Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass. Owners of small farms open their gates, welcoming us in to refill our water bottles and use the facilities. There is a DJ on wheels who blasts The Prodigy as we roll toward the next town. Three months later, in November 2023, that same top court in France overturns the government’s decision to ban the group, ruling it disproportionate.

That is a brief respite in the legal onslaught facing the movement, as European authorities formulate their response to the wave of sabotage sweeping the continent. In November, Lazare and a fellow Les Soulèvements de la Terre spokesperson are due in court for refusing to attend a parliamentary inquiry into the 2023 protests, including the Battle of Saint-Soline. They face two years in jail. The same month, Patrick Hart comes before a tribunal to decide whether he should lose his medical license as a result of his activism.

Last year in Germany, Letzte Generation’s members were subjected to police raids, and in May 2024, the public prosecutor’s office in the German town of Neuruppin charged five of the group’s members with forming a criminal organization, citing in part the 2022 pipeline protests. Werner hasn’t been charged, surprisingly, but he hopes a public trial of his fellow activists will spark a countrywide reckoning over Germany’s use of fossil fuels and finally give his sabotage of pipelines the impact he wanted all along.

As their members are dragged through the courts, it seems more important than ever for these groups to have public support. That’s why the people lining the small country roads are so important to Lazare. She needs their blessing. “Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” she tells me. Sabotage needs to inspire copycats, which means it needs to shake off its reputation as a sinister, criminal act.

After the first long day of cycling, we pull into a field. Activists have set up a campsite with a bar, a pay-what-you-can canteen, a stage for climate lectures, and live music. There is the accordion again, that festival atmosphere. “I think it’s important for activists to go sometimes by night, masked, and commit sabotage,” says Lazare. “But in Les Soulèvements de la Terre, we want to do this in the middle of the day, not anonymously, but collectively, with joy and music.” Joyfulness, she says, is key to the whole idea.

When Veronica Fraley posted on X last week that she couldn’t afford her rent, the American discus star got help from a notable source. “I gotchu,” replied Flavor Flav, a founding member of the hip-hop group Public Enemy. “DM me and I’ll send payment TODAY so you don’t have to worry bout it TOMORROW,,, and imma be rooting for ya tomorrow LETZ GO,!!!”

Ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Flavor Flav signed a five-year sponsorship deal with the US women’s and men’s water polo teams. And when it came to supporting Fraley as she competed for her country, he was joined by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Meanwhile, other athletes have turned to fundraising platforms like GoFundMe to make it to Paris and beyond. 

Many viewers tune in to the Olympics for these wholesome stories—an individual fighting through adversity to pull themself up onto the medal podium. But should we consider why these arduous journeys are needed in the first place? 

There are some athlete groups that have been questioning this idea. Global Athlete, which describes itself as “an international athlete-led movement,” is among them. According to the organization’s website, its members are “collectively addressing the imbalance of power between athletes and administrators” by pushing for better pay and working conditions, as well as rights like freedom of expression. 

Rob Koehler, the director general at Global Athlete, said in an interview that most of the problems the group is confronting come from the “outdated model” used by the International Olympic Committee, the non-governmental sports organization in charge of organizing the Summer, Winter, and Youth Olympic Games. 

“The majority of athletes can barely pay rent. The facade of when you become an Olympian, you’re set for life is so far from the truth,” he said. “They’ve invested 15, sometimes 20 years of their lives, putting school aside, putting jobs aside, and committing to the goal of going to the Olympics. And when they’ve finished, they sit in their bed lying awake at night, wondering, ‘What am I going to do next?’ There’s no career path for them afterward. That’s the reality.”

“It’s time to put the most important stakeholder first, which are the athletes, and start distributing to everyone.”

When asked about athlete pay, the IOC’s media relations team pointed to a news release in which its executive board “expressed its full support for fair financial reward for athletes.” 

According to public financial information posted on the IOC’s website, the committee—a privately funded non-profit association—earned $7.6 billion from 2017 to 2021. The IOC says that 90 percent of that revenue goes toward the Olympic Games, athlete development, and the Olympic Movement, which encompasses the IOC, the International Sports Federations, and the National Olympic Committees.

The same IOC release explains that the purpose of the national committees is “to develop the athletes, give them the best possible training and competition conditions, and support them in education and their daily life with regard to their profession.” Each of the 206 national committees choose the athletes to represent their country through a qualification process. 

The document referred to a statement from IOC Athletes’ Commission Chair Emma Terho: “Rewarding athletes financially for their achievements at the Games is commonplace for many National Olympic Committees and governments, while International Federations help to develop their sport worldwide and close the development gap between the haves and the have-nots. Each role is important for the athletes, and for sport overall, because without this work, the disparities between athletes around the world would be much wider than they are today.”

But Global Athlete sees the situation differently. “They use rhetoric to say that the National Olympic Committees pay for gold medals. Not every country does, but that’s not the point here,” Koehler said. “Every single athlete attending the Games should be able to earn from the revenues.” 

Koehler highlighted a study his group published in April 2020 in partnership with Ryerson University and the Ted Rogers School of Management that found that athletes only receive 4.1 percent of the Olympic Movement’s revenues via scholarships, grants, and achievement awards. In addition, just 0.5 percent of IOC funds go directly toward athletes, according to the study. Athletes are not allowed to negotiate these numbers. 

Meanwhile, the five largest professional sports leagues in the world—the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and English Premier League—distribute between 40 and 60 percent of their revenue to athletes. 

In the lead-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, the IOC updated the Olympic Charter’s Rule 40, which, according to the Global Athlete study, had previously prohibited competitors from profiting from their association with the Olympic Games through unapproved, non-Olympic corporate sponsors. But the April 2020 study suggested that the relaxation of the international by-law had been largely ineffective, since less than 10 national committees had actually implemented the change. 

The IOC did not respond to a question about the study’s findings.

Koehler emphasized that athlete pay is not the only issue. He cited incidents at the Tokyo Games, specifically, where athletes were not permitted to breastfeed their babies while competing due to rules restricting bringing family and friends during the Covid pandemic. 

“We worked with leading breastfeeding organizations, the athletes spoke up, and they were forced to change the rules,” Koehler recounted. 

He also recalled the organization’s work with other athlete organizing groups to pressure the IOC to weaken Rule 50, which had stated, “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

Groups like Global Athlete and the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency that sets international labor standards, stress that collective bargaining is essential to improve athlete rights. 

While progress has been made, Koehler says that the IOC has blocked various pathways for athletes to engage in this bargaining. “The IOC Athletes Commission is required to sign the Olympic oath, which is a condition where you have to support all decisions of the IOC. You’ve lost your independence right away,” he stated. Because of this, athletes “sign away all their rights” when they attend the Games. 

Koehler noted that the athlete agreement required for Paris competitors mandates that they waive rights like the ability to “bring any claim, arbitration or litigation, or seek any other form of relief, including request for provisional measures, in any…court or tribunal [other than the Court of Arbitration of Sport], unless otherwise agreed in writing by the IOC.” 

Koehler argues that the IOC would actually benefit from negotiations with athletes, saying that in most cases, sports leagues with organized work forces have thrived due to increased buy-in from athletes. “If you look at the NCAA and what happened there, I think that’s the future for the IOC,” he said. 

In May 2024, the NCAA, its five major Division I conferences, and legal representatives for athletes arranged to settle three lawsuits about the ways schools compensate their athletes. The deal determines how former athletes will share the $2.78 billion in damages that the NCAA will pay and builds a new system for revenue sharing.  

That’s the future Koehler wants for the Olympics. “It’s time to put the most important stakeholder first, which are the athletes, and start distributing to everyone,” he said.

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Field biologists tend to be a patient lot, often resigned to long days and weeks in the field and committed to experiments that take years to yield results. But even among that dogged crowd, Martin Wikelski stands out.

Back in 2001, sitting on a porch one evening in Panama, the German ornithologist had the germ of an idea for an “internet of animals,” a global system of sensor-wearing wildlife that would reveal the planet’s elusive, nonhuman worlds. He figured he could get it up and running by 2005. Nearly 20 years later, Wikelski may have finally succeeded—after surmounting roadblocks that range from bureaucratic mishaps to technical glitches to a geopolitical crisis. His space-based system, known as ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space), is now scheduled to launch, in its latest, satellite-based incarnation, on a private rocket sometime in 2025.

The underlying idea of the internet of animals is to tune into the planet’s hidden phenomena—the flight paths followed by sharp-shinned hawks, the precise fates befalling Arctic terns that die young, the exact landscape requirements of critically endangered saiga antelope—by attaching tiny, solar-powered tracking devices, some weighing less than a paperclip, to all kinds of organisms and even some inanimate objects (glaciers, ocean plastic debris). The inexpensive, globe-spanning system of animal tagging is meant to help scientists understand the precise drivers of global change, and much more, by tracking thousands of tagged animals from space and tying their experiences to the broader impacts facing whole populations or even species.

Wikelski, the director of the Department of Migration at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, in Germany, said the prospect of having that data, and of “making people aware of the incredible beauty and richness of what’s happening out there,” has made the effort worthwhile, even urgent.

It’s also true, as he wrote in his recent book The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth, that he “had no clue how many pitfalls there would be…how many times when we desperately wanted to give up, because the whole process had become so exquisitely frustrating that we just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

In 2018, after years of working with designers, engineers, and government officials from multiple countries and continents, Wikelski’s team saw its ICARUS receiver launch aboard a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan to the International Space Station, where Russian cosmonauts attached it to their side of the orbiting lab. “We danced, cried, and hugged one another,” Wikelski wrote of the launch. “All the stress of nearly 20 years fell away.”

The internet of animals went live in March 2020, but before the year was out, mechanical issues on the Russian ISS module took the system down. Nearly a year passed before it was up and running again. By the spring of 2021, the system was finally humming along, receiving data from roughly 3,500 tagged animals around the world. But then, in the winter of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the West cut ties with Russia. ICARUS’s transmission of data abruptly halted.

Our nonhuman neighbors “can take a pulse of the planet and be detectors of change and help us understand the health of the environment.”

After the ISS failure, Wikelski’s team set out to redesign the system to use satellite-based receivers, which had always been its long-term aim. In 2022, plans seemed almost set for an ICARUS receiver to orbit on the next GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite, a joint venture between NASA and the German space agency, scheduled to launch in 2028. But last-minute political haggling siphoned more than a third of the project’s German funding, leaving no money to include ICARUS. “We were totally devastated,” Wikelski recalled. He gave his project three months to find a solution or finally give up. “That’s when we scaled down and said, we need a CubeSat.”

And so beginning sometime next year, the project plans to launch ICARUS receivers on five relatively low-cost CubeSats—miniature satellites roughly the size of a Rubik’s cube and weighing only a couple of pounds—using private launch companies. Funded by the Max Planck Society, the system will cost roughly $1.6 million to launch and have annual operating expenses of around $160,000.

“The geopolitical aspect of this is pretty huge,” said Michael Wunder, a quantitative ecologist at the University of Colorado Denver who used the ISS tags to study the migration patterns of mountain plovers before the war in Ukraine cut off the research. Instead of involving government space agencies, the project’s new iteration keeps the scientists in control.

The new system allows for greater global coverage—the ISS receiver couldn’t communicate with tags at the planet’s highest latitudes—and Wikelski’s team has used the intervening years to shrink the tags by several grams and design new ways for animals to “wear” them, vastly expanding the number of species scientists can study. The team is currently upgrading 4,000 older tags to work with the new system. The tags provide hourly accounts of the animal’s energy expenditure; measure environmental factors like air pressure, altitude, temperature, and humidity; and even use AI to help interpret the animal’s behavior.

The trove of data “will open a lot of doors for researchers,” said Ashley Lohr, who coordinates North American projects for ICARUS through the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “How stressed was the animal? What were the environmental conditions when the animal was at this place at this time?”

Wunder’s lab group tagged 17 mountain plovers in Colorado in 2021. Native to the plains of the north-central United Staes, the species has declined by 80 percent in the past six decades. But the birds are hard to study because of their habitat and behavior. “They’re singing and vociferous but not in your face,” Wunder said, and in breeding season they like their space, living in densities of only about three birds per square kilometer. The plovers often occupy private ranchlands, which makes them hard to find without trespassing. And they breed in late March and April, while bird surveys, timed to count migratory songbirds, happen in May.

Wunder has long sought to understand whether mountain plovers follow distinct, structured migration patterns or whether birds from different areas mix together in winter flocks. He also wants to learn what drives the birds to migrate. “Are they moving away from something or toward something else?” he asks. He also hopes to determine exactly where the birds are running into trouble.

Before the ISS receiver went dark in 2022, the ICARUS tags revealed that the plovers didn’t follow fixed migration routes and that birds from around the country were mingling in the winter. When several transmitting birds died, Wunder was able to dispatch researchers to their locations and discover the cause of death—predation. The birds started returning to Colorado in February, and Wunder was eager to see which ones would come back—but then the war in Ukraine began. “We were cut off, there was no more information,” he said.

Ellen Aikens, a biologist at the University of Wyoming who did her postdoctoral research on animal migration at the Max Planck Institute, believes that ICARUS could serve as a “democratizing force” in ecology and biology. It’s a way to level the playing field, she says, so that “folks that have a smaller budget or are working on species that are a bit more obscure and there’s not as much funding behind can start to get the same kind of information, baseline info, about where those [animals] are going.”

In her lab, Aikens is studying golden eagles using a tag made by the German company e-obs. “It’s the gold standard of biologging in bird research, if you can afford it and your bird is big enough to carry the transformer”—like geese, storks, and eagles. A single e-obs tag costs more than $1,500 and works over a cellular network, meaning researchers must also pay the cost of data transmission for as long as the animal lives. “If you want to get a good sample size that will allow you to publish your research, that adds up really quickly,” Aikens said. “ICARUS tags are cheaper by an order of magnitude.”

Aikens believes that ICARUS will help transform the way scientists study animals. Our nonhuman neighbors “can take a pulse of the planet and be detectors of change and help us understand the health of the environment,” she said. “As [animals] move these vast distances, they can collect detailed environmental information that can better inform climate models and collect information in places that are difficult to monitor,” whether high in the sky, deep in the ocean, or under a thick layer of ice.

ICARUS tags are solar-powered, whereas some existing tagging systems run on batteries, which can die—ending the research on that individual or requiring recapture to change them out. Other tagging systems rely on animals passing by a signal tower. It works for certain animals, like birds and bats, but not for others. “Because ICARUS is satellite-powered, you don’t have to wait for your animal to go back on the grid and pass by a tower,” said Lohr. Instead, each time a satellite passes over an area, data from nearby tagged animals will be uploaded to Movebank, an open-access database.

Ultimately, researchers hope that ICARUS data can “help us pinpoint effective conservation strategies,” Aikens said. “It can help us identify pinch points on the landscape.” While this is already happening for some species, including North American ungulates like elk and pronghorn antelope, whose migrations researchers have tracked for years, for most of the planet’s species “we lack this data and this wide coverage of information, which makes these fine-scale interventions a lot harder to achieve. That’s a place that ICARUS can help fill in a lot of gaps.”

And if the internet of animals can zero in on specific issues—for instance, a bird species dying out because a particular insect it eats is being killed by a particular chemical being sprayed in an area—Wikelski believes such information could drive people to act. “People are willing to do something about it if they know that what they do is really helpful,” he said.

For now, Wikelski continues to practice patience. When I spoke to him in early July, he was dealing with the latest hurdle: satellite launch delays, including one caused by a payload issue and another caused by an ill-timed summer holiday that delayed authorization of the $30,000 payment needed to secure a launch reservation. “Our project is now too small to really be on everybody’s horizon,” he said. “Before, it was too large.”

Nevertheless, Wikelski was hopeful. His team was studying and perfecting the lowest-stress methods of tagging animals and even testing automatic tagging systems, like one for deer involving a salt lick and a tiny elastic band. He remained confident of ICARUS’s potential.

“One really important aspect we think is transformative in biology is the scaling up of tagging,” he said. “So you don’t have one animal but 50 or 100, or you do it across a continent.”

Over the next two years he plans to tag 9,000 animals in Europe, including blackbirds, storm thrushes, swifts, and sparrows in a study already underway. Roughly 7,000 of those 9,000 would die in the first year, he said, based on general patterns. “That means we are finally understanding where they disappear. Where are the death traps? These tags are so smart, they can tell us if a female is nesting and if the clutch disappears. So we can not only get information on where the adults are living and dying, but have the adults been successful in hatching or clutching? Is there a massive problem in a certain area? Then we can link individuals to populations and understand the drivers of change.”

Early on the morning of July 31, a group of about 70 people arrived at the anodyne office of the cargo company Atlas Air, in White Plains, New York. 

They were members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)—an activist group that focuses on equity issues in New York City—there to stage a fake “press conference” to highlight the Department of Defense’s contracts with Atlas Air.

A man in a gray pinstripe suit played the CEO of the company, which is the single largest operator of 747 freighter jets in the world. “Atlas Air is so proud to do its part to support the US military,” the actor enthused. “I am especially proud that, through our DoD contracts, Atlas Air has made multiple deliveries to Israel in the last 10 months.” He added with gusto: “As the bombs keep raining on Gaza, the dividends keep raining on our shareholders!” 

Those behind him, dressed as pilots complete with sewn-on epaulets, cheered as he held up a graph with a line going up—“more bombs equals higher profits!”

In the following hours, JFREJ launched a spoof website for Atlas, and sent out press releases claiming Atlas “is proud to have been responsible for transporting millions of dollars worth of material to the Israeli military as it bombs Gaza” to trade outlets like AirlineGeeks, Cargo Connect, Transport and Logistics Middle East, and American Military News. 

The action is part of a broader push. Protest groups are turning toward a new strategy: beyond focusing on the government, they are targeting the companies that profit off Israel’s war in Gaza. 

“We’ve called out, we’ve called in, I mean, we’ve done all that work to reach the decision-makers,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of JFREJ. “We’ve talked about our Jewish community’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, and we’ve taken action to protest the US government’s culpability, but we haven’t heard enough about the war profiteers—the private companies profiting off of these atrocities.” 

As first reported by Haaretz, records show that more than 30 chartered cargo flights were operated by the US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) to Nevatim Airbase in Beersheba between October 31, 2023, and March 31, 2024. At least three of those were cargo flights on planes owned by Atlas and leased by the USTRANSCOM, according to a Mother Jones analysis of publicly available flight data. The 747-400 heavy cargo planes flew to the Israeli air base from Cyprus and Germany. An Atlas Air representative said, “I have no information,” when asked if the company supplies weapons to fuel Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

Without private cargo airlines and private companies, the United States Department of Defense would not be able to send Israel weapons at the rate it currently does. The DoD has sent more than 100 shipments to its ally over the past 10 months, containing weapons such as 2,000 pound bombs, Hellfire missiles, and 500-pound bombs. 

Bradley Martin, a researcher at RAND and a former Navy captain, said the airplanes likely carried supplies or weapon parts for the Israel Defense Forces. But it is unlikely that Atlas Air would transport the bombs that get the most publicity. “Preferably, sensitive munitions are not going not going to be moved by commercial air,” he said. “They put them on a military flight because it takes special handling.” 

Still, private companies, Martin said, play a key role. “The amount of material that’s required to sustain the force fighting this war is huge,” he said. “The military needs a [shipping] provider more than a provider needs the military.” 

A report by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, titled “How to Ensure Israel has the Weapons it Needs,” points out why the US government needs these contracts: “According to one senior Pentagon official, the quantity of weapons sent [to Israel] was so significant that the Department of Defense sometimes [has] struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver the systems.” 

Though relatively unknown, Atlas Air is the third-largest cargo airline in the United States by fleet size. The company received an “indefinite delivery contract” from the military in April 2023 for $20 million. It also received nearly $19 million from New York state in subsidies and property tax abatements, plus more than $600 million in federal loans and guarantees.

JFREJ is not the only activist group setting their sights on Defense Department contractors. Last month, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched a campaign  targeting the Danish shipping multinational Maersk, which sends weapons components as a subcontractor to manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and also contracts directly with USTRANSCOM. A PYM representative said she’s seen enthusiasm for the campaign: “I think people really are hungry to have a set target and something that they can fuel their energy into.”  

Maersk, she said, has a robust shipping portfolio outside of military shipments—after all, it’s the second-largest container shipping company in the world. “Economically, they can still sustain themselves if they don’t maintain these contracts,” the PYM organizer added.

Martin said that companies like Maersk and Atlas could “absolutely” remain economically viable without military contracts: They could “survive, and thrive,” he said. That, however, is not true the other way around. The governments need private aid to help with massive war efforts.

Janet Abou-Elias, co-founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, said that the military has strong economic reasons to rely on companies like Atlas. “Outsourcing certain functions to private contractors can be more economical than maintaining large in-house capabilities.” Martin, of RAND, said that this trend goes back to the end of the Cold War. “It really started happening about 1990,” he explained. “DOD cut back on commitments, cut back on infrastructure—and for transportation [it] has started to look more and more to commercial types of sources.” 

Maersk and Atlas aren’t the only companies catching heat: Protesters in the US and Australia have demonstrated outside ports by the Israeli shipping company ZIM, which has been sued by a group of Belgian NGOs for violating Belgian arms transport law. Last month, protesters brought the St. Louis Missouri pride parade to a standstill because it was sponsored by the airliner Boeing, which was the top manufacturer of missiles delivered to Israel in 2023, according to an analysis of arms transfer data conducted by NPR station KUOW. This past spring, students at protest encampments across the country demanded that their universities sever ties with Boeing. At least one university, Portland State, agreed to temporarily stop accepting Boeing money. 

Atlas has contracted with the DoD, among other government entities, for decades. In the earliest years of the 21st century, Atlas Air’s name was listed among the airlines leasing planes for transit to and from CIA black sites; their aircrafts have flown to and from Guantanamo Bay as recently as 2022.  

It is also owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. (Per National Defense Magazine, private equity–owned companies accounted for 47 percent of defense transactions in 2022.) Apollo’s CEO, Marc Rowan, was so vehemently against antiwar campus protesters that he pushed for the removal of the University of Pennsylvania’s president for allowing a festival of Palestinian literature on her campus, which he described as “hate-filled.” He has railed against antiwar protesters, declaring them “anti-American” and “violent.” 

“I think those executives going into their office jobs daily can pretend to sort of turn a blind eye to what’s happening in Gaza,” said Sasson of JFREJ. “We will not stand for them making money, millions of dollars off of this genocide.”