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

A month ago, it seemed unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris would ever reach a goal she set out to achieve as a presidential hopeful in 2019. But at 9 p.m. on Tuesday night at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia—five-odd years after she dropped out of her first presidential race—Harris finally faced off against Donald Trump in what will likely be the only debate between the two candidates before Election Day.

Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed to each other on issues ranging from national security to the economy to foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere are the candidates more at odds than on the matter of climate change: One thinks rising temperatures pose an existential threat, the other thinks climate science is nonsense. 

That gulf in views was put on full display in the last minutes of the hour-and-a-half-long debate, when ABC News Live Prime host and debate co-moderator Linsey Davis asked the pair what they would do to fight climate change.

Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has implied on many an occasion that climate change is a hoax propagated by China. “What we know is that it is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who is living in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who is now being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up.” In the past couple of years, private insurance companies have begun dropping policies in fire-and-flood-prone states like California and Florida.

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future.”

While Harris pointed out the existence of these worsening problems, she did not say what she plans to do about them, choosing instead to cite investments in climate change made by the current president. “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” She got that $1 trillion sum by adding up all of the administration’s major investments over the past four years, some of which are only vaguely connected to climate change. 

Trump didn’t answer the question at all, instead making a convoluted point about domestic vehicle manufacturing. He then falsely claimed that President Biden is getting millions of dollars from China and Ukraine. “They’re selling our country down the tubes,” he said.

Trump slashed scores of environmental rules and climate regulations during his four years in office and appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who have since made it harder for the federal government to clamp down on pollution. He also withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a global pact to slow planetary warming, though President Biden later reentered it. 

Before Tuesday’s debate, it seemed likely that Harris would cite her record as district attorney for the city of San Francisco, where she formed the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed at penalizing companies for polluting. Or her tenure as California attorney general, when she investigated oil companies and secured a multibillion-dollar joint settlement from Volkswagen over the company’s attempts to cheat smog emissions standards. But she didn’t bring those receipts to the podium.

Instead, Harris doubled down on her recent efforts to make swing state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania forget about the anti-fracking position she took during her 2019 presidential campaign. At the time, Harris said she was “in favor of banning fracking,” but she recently walked that back. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said early in the debate. “In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases on fracking.” The Inflation Reduction Act also happens to be the single largest investment in fighting climate change in American history, something Harris chose not to point out.

Rather, she advocated for an energy strategy that has been proposed by many Republican lawmakers over the years: something resembling an “all of the above” approach in order to boost American energy independence. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy, so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action group, said in a statement. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”

Harris wasn’t the only one eager to talk oil and gas at the debate. Onstage, Trump frequently returned to a familiar set of energy-related talking points. He skewered President Biden, and Harris by association, for high gas prices, which spiked again this year. He claimed that the day after the election, should Harris win, “oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said that they aim to eliminate the country’s vast reliance on fossil fuels in the near future. 

Trump also went after sources of renewable energy, saying that, while he is a “big fan of solar,” Democrats have commandeered “a whole desert to get some energy out of it.” Trump may have been referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has approved 33,500 acres of land, some of it desert, for solar installations since 2021.

As the debate wrapped up, it wasn’t clear whether Harris had succeeded in her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she’s not the anti-fossil fuel crusader Trump has been working to pin her as. But she did leave Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: that of pop icon, and native Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift.

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election.”

Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this article.

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.”

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

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump prepare for their debate on Tuesday night, those who care about US action on climate change are bracing themselves for disappointment.

They know that at candidate forums and interviews—for presidential and down-ballot candidates alike—climate often doesn’t come up at all. Even worse, the few questions that do get asked are stuck on a controversy that science resolved long ago—is climate change real? As a result, debates provide little enlightenment on the difficult choices political leaders face as the costs of severe weather, heat and wildfire mount, and the clean energy future develops in a US economy caught up in a fossil fuel surge. 

Since his first run for president in 2016, Trump has easily deflected the soft climate questions tossed his way. He declares himself an avid environmentalist—”I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear clean water and clean air,” he once said—while minimizing the severity of climate change. Virtually all scrutiny of Harris’ climate policy has focused on her once-stated support for a fracking ban, even though there is no legal authority for a US president to enact such a prohibition, and Harris abandoned the stand when she became President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.

Ahead of the debate, the Inside Climate News staff came up with questions that challenge the candidates’ past statements on energy policy and more accurately reflect the hard decisions the next president will face as the world’s leading oil and gas producer confronts its role in both aiding and addressing a planetary crisis.

Questions for Trump

1. Private companies have announced more than 300 major new clean energy projects and electric vehicle plants across the country based on the support they’re getting under the Inflation Reduction Act. This private investment is expected to create more than 100,000 jobs; Michigan, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina each have 20 projects or more underway. You’ve said you would end the IRA subsidies. What would you do about the projects in these states that would be put at risk?

Context: The nonprofit group Environmental Entrepreneurs has tracked 334 new clean energy and vehicles project announcements in 40 states since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, totaling $125 billion in investment, expected to create 109,000 jobs.

2. You take credit for making the United States energy independent during your presidency. But under the Biden/Harris administration, we are even more energy independent by any measure—our energy imports are lower now and our exports are higher; our energy consumption is lower now and production is higher. Aren’t you just promising more of the same? Would you lift the ban on oil imports from Russia, which rose dramatically during your presidency?

Context:

3. You have often said that wind energy is damaging to land, wildlife, and even human health, while making energy more expensive. But wind electricity now provides 10 percent of US electric power, with Texas far and away the leading state for wind farms. What is your plan for wind power as president and would you act to shut down the wind farms now operating?

Context: Wind energy can have impacts on wildlife and the environment, according to the Department of Energy, and federal authorities require developers of projects on federal land and water to analyze potential impacts and minimize them. Oil, gas, and coal development also have wildlife and environmental impacts, with one 2012 study showing that fossil fuel-generated electricity kills nearly 20 times more birds per gigawatt-hour than electricity generated by wind.

4. You have said rising sea levels would create more oceanfront property. But the changes already underway have meant flooding, erosion and damage to homes and businesses both on the coast and inland. With losses mounting and the federal flood insurance program more than $20 billion in debt to taxpayers, should the U.S. government continue to insure the properties most at risk? And if not, what do you think the federal government should do about homes and businesses that can’t get private flood insurance, especially in your home state of Florida?

Context: In his August 12 interview with Elon Musk, Trump asserted that sea level is expected to rise one inch every 400 years, but a comprehensive 2022 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that sea levels on the US coast are on track to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years. NOAA projects the incidence of flooding in the US will increase tenfold as a result.

5. When you first ran for president, you promised to bring back coal jobs. But eight coal companies went bankrupt during your presidency and the United States lost 12,700 coal jobs—a decline of 25 percent. What is your plan to help coal workers? 

Context: The coal industry has been weakening steadily over more than a decade due to what most economists see as a sectoral decline in the industry due to competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. Eight US coal companies went bankrupt between October 2018 and October 2019. Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—the main vehicle for President Joe Biden’s climate policy—coal states like Wyoming and West Virginia have been given a competitive advantage in attracting clean energy development projects and associated federal funding in order to address displaced workers.

Questions for Harris

1. As California attorney general, you took legal action against oil companies over oil spills and other pollution, and as a presidential candidate in 2019, you talked about the federal and state litigation against tobacco companies as a model of how to address fossil fuel companies’ role in the climate crisis. Do you believe the Justice Department should join with states taking action against oil companies over climate damages?

Context: In 1998, 52 state and territorial attorneys general signed a massive $200 billion agreement with the nation’s four largest tobacco companies to settle dozens of lawsuits they brought to recover their smoking-related health care costs. The next year, the Justice Department also filed suit against Big Tobacco and after years of legal wrangling and a nine-month trial, a federal judge in 2006 ruled that the manufacturers had violated the federal organized crime law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That litigation is ongoing 25 years later, as the industry continues to challenge remedies imposed by the court, which are designed to prohibit it from making false or deceptive claims about tobacco products. 

2. Despite the progress made on clean energy during the Biden administration, the US isn’t on track to hit the Paris climate agreement targets for greenhouse gas reductions. This not only endangers lives and property, it undermines US credibility in persuading other nations, especially China, to reduce their climate pollution. What would you do to change that? 

Context: The Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit international research organization, projects that US greenhouse gas emissions are on track to be about one-third below 2005 levels by 2030, falling short of the Biden administration’s pledge to cut them in half. Another research organization, the Rhodium Group, reached a similar conclusion, calculating that to meet its Paris target, the United States would have to achieve a 6.9 percent emissions reduction every year from 2024 through 2030, more than triple the 1.9 percent drop seen in 2023. 

3. In 2019, you said that we “have to acknowledge the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities.” As president, what would you do to protect the health and safety of communities who are exposed to air pollution and water contamination caused by the fracking process?

Context: Almost 2,500 scientific papers have documented negative health impacts from fracking, according to the Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. They include a 2022 Yale study showing Pennsylvania children who grew up within a mile of a natural gas well were twice as likely as other children to develop the most common form of juvenile leukemia, and a 2023 University of Pittsburgh study showing they were seven times as likely to suffer from lymphoma. The oil and gas industry has maintained high-pressure water fracturing for oil and gas production from underground shale formations is safe, but the industry has had to pay to provide new water supply for residents with contaminated wells. The issue is especially divisive in Pennsylvania, which became the nation’s second-largest natural gas producing state (after Texas) due to fracking, and is a key state in the presidential race.

4. Did you support President Biden’s move to pause further permitting of liquefied natural gas export facilities while the government assesses the potential climate impact? Now that a federal judge has ordered the administration to resume permitting, would you go forward with new LNG projects or seek to overturn the judge’s order?

Conext: Biden’s LNG permitting pause in January put into question the future of at least 17 terminals currently being considered along US coastlines to export natural gas overseas. The move was challenged by a coalition of Republican-led states and in July, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the administration to resume permitting LNG terminals. Although the Biden administration is appealing that order, on September 3, it approved a short-term expansion of one existing terminal’s permit to export from the Gulf of Mexico. 

5. Farm work is among the nation’s most dangerous occupations and has become even deadlier due to more intense and frequent heat waves driven by climate change. Nearly half of farmworkers nationwide are undocumented and face even greater risks because they’re afraid to complain about unsafe working conditions. Will you give these workers some form of legal status and implement a federal heat standard that ensures the health and safety of those exposed to dangerous heat conditions at work?

Context: Rising temperatures have prompted questions about whether employers should be required to provide shade, rest periods, and cool water to workers who face health risks because of extreme heat, particularly those who must work outdoors, like farmworkers and construction workers. After the heat-related death of a 38-year-old farmworker in Oregon during the historic 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, that state put new heat-protection rules in place. But Florida’s legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis approved legislation early this year banning localities from establishing such rules. The Biden administration proposed the first federal worker heat protection standards in July, three years after the president first promised them. It will be up to the next president to decide whether to finalize that plan or abandon it in the face of certain legal challenges from business groups and their political allies.

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

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump prepare for their debate on Tuesday night, those who care about US action on climate change are bracing themselves for disappointment.

They know that at candidate forums and interviews—for presidential and down-ballot candidates alike—climate often doesn’t come up at all. Even worse, the few questions that do get asked are stuck on a controversy that science resolved long ago—is climate change real? As a result, debates provide little enlightenment on the difficult choices political leaders face as the costs of severe weather, heat and wildfire mount, and the clean energy future develops in a US economy caught up in a fossil fuel surge. 

Since his first run for president in 2016, Trump has easily deflected the soft climate questions tossed his way. He declares himself an avid environmentalist—”I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear clean water and clean air,” he once said—while minimizing the severity of climate change. Virtually all scrutiny of Harris’ climate policy has focused on her once-stated support for a fracking ban, even though there is no legal authority for a US president to enact such a prohibition, and Harris abandoned the stand when she became President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.

Ahead of the debate, the Inside Climate News staff came up with questions that challenge the candidates’ past statements on energy policy and more accurately reflect the hard decisions the next president will face as the world’s leading oil and gas producer confronts its role in both aiding and addressing a planetary crisis.

Questions for Trump

1. Private companies have announced more than 300 major new clean energy projects and electric vehicle plants across the country based on the support they’re getting under the Inflation Reduction Act. This private investment is expected to create more than 100,000 jobs; Michigan, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina each have 20 projects or more underway. You’ve said you would end the IRA subsidies. What would you do about the projects in these states that would be put at risk?

Context: The nonprofit group Environmental Entrepreneurs has tracked 334 new clean energy and vehicles project announcements in 40 states since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, totaling $125 billion in investment, expected to create 109,000 jobs.

2. You take credit for making the United States energy independent during your presidency. But under the Biden/Harris administration, we are even more energy independent by any measure—our energy imports are lower now and our exports are higher; our energy consumption is lower now and production is higher. Aren’t you just promising more of the same? Would you lift the ban on oil imports from Russia, which rose dramatically during your presidency?

Context:

3. You have often said that wind energy is damaging to land, wildlife, and even human health, while making energy more expensive. But wind electricity now provides 10 percent of US electric power, with Texas far and away the leading state for wind farms. What is your plan for wind power as president and would you act to shut down the wind farms now operating?

Context: Wind energy can have impacts on wildlife and the environment, according to the Department of Energy, and federal authorities require developers of projects on federal land and water to analyze potential impacts and minimize them. Oil, gas, and coal development also have wildlife and environmental impacts, with one 2012 study showing that fossil fuel-generated electricity kills nearly 20 times more birds per gigawatt-hour than electricity generated by wind.

4. You have said rising sea levels would create more oceanfront property. But the changes already underway have meant flooding, erosion and damage to homes and businesses both on the coast and inland. With losses mounting and the federal flood insurance program more than $20 billion in debt to taxpayers, should the U.S. government continue to insure the properties most at risk? And if not, what do you think the federal government should do about homes and businesses that can’t get private flood insurance, especially in your home state of Florida?

Context: In his August 12 interview with Elon Musk, Trump asserted that sea level is expected to rise one inch every 400 years, but a comprehensive 2022 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that sea levels on the US coast are on track to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years. NOAA projects the incidence of flooding in the US will increase tenfold as a result.

5. When you first ran for president, you promised to bring back coal jobs. But eight coal companies went bankrupt during your presidency and the United States lost 12,700 coal jobs—a decline of 25 percent. What is your plan to help coal workers? 

Context: The coal industry has been weakening steadily over more than a decade due to what most economists see as a sectoral decline in the industry due to competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. Eight US coal companies went bankrupt between October 2018 and October 2019. Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—the main vehicle for President Joe Biden’s climate policy—coal states like Wyoming and West Virginia have been given a competitive advantage in attracting clean energy development projects and associated federal funding in order to address displaced workers.

Questions for Harris

1. As California attorney general, you took legal action against oil companies over oil spills and other pollution, and as a presidential candidate in 2019, you talked about the federal and state litigation against tobacco companies as a model of how to address fossil fuel companies’ role in the climate crisis. Do you believe the Justice Department should join with states taking action against oil companies over climate damages?

Context: In 1998, 52 state and territorial attorneys general signed a massive $200 billion agreement with the nation’s four largest tobacco companies to settle dozens of lawsuits they brought to recover their smoking-related health care costs. The next year, the Justice Department also filed suit against Big Tobacco and after years of legal wrangling and a nine-month trial, a federal judge in 2006 ruled that the manufacturers had violated the federal organized crime law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That litigation is ongoing 25 years later, as the industry continues to challenge remedies imposed by the court, which are designed to prohibit it from making false or deceptive claims about tobacco products. 

2. Despite the progress made on clean energy during the Biden administration, the US isn’t on track to hit the Paris climate agreement targets for greenhouse gas reductions. This not only endangers lives and property, it undermines US credibility in persuading other nations, especially China, to reduce their climate pollution. What would you do to change that? 

Context: The Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit international research organization, projects that US greenhouse gas emissions are on track to be about one-third below 2005 levels by 2030, falling short of the Biden administration’s pledge to cut them in half. Another research organization, the Rhodium Group, reached a similar conclusion, calculating that to meet its Paris target, the United States would have to achieve a 6.9 percent emissions reduction every year from 2024 through 2030, more than triple the 1.9 percent drop seen in 2023. 

3. In 2019, you said that we “have to acknowledge the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities.” As president, what would you do to protect the health and safety of communities who are exposed to air pollution and water contamination caused by the fracking process?

Context: Almost 2,500 scientific papers have documented negative health impacts from fracking, according to the Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. They include a 2022 Yale study showing Pennsylvania children who grew up within a mile of a natural gas well were twice as likely as other children to develop the most common form of juvenile leukemia, and a 2023 University of Pittsburgh study showing they were seven times as likely to suffer from lymphoma. The oil and gas industry has maintained high-pressure water fracturing for oil and gas production from underground shale formations is safe, but the industry has had to pay to provide new water supply for residents with contaminated wells. The issue is especially divisive in Pennsylvania, which became the nation’s second-largest natural gas producing state (after Texas) due to fracking, and is a key state in the presidential race.

4. Did you support President Biden’s move to pause further permitting of liquefied natural gas export facilities while the government assesses the potential climate impact? Now that a federal judge has ordered the administration to resume permitting, would you go forward with new LNG projects or seek to overturn the judge’s order?

Conext: Biden’s LNG permitting pause in January put into question the future of at least 17 terminals currently being considered along US coastlines to export natural gas overseas. The move was challenged by a coalition of Republican-led states and in July, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the administration to resume permitting LNG terminals. Although the Biden administration is appealing that order, on September 3, it approved a short-term expansion of one existing terminal’s permit to export from the Gulf of Mexico. 

5. Farm work is among the nation’s most dangerous occupations and has become even deadlier due to more intense and frequent heat waves driven by climate change. Nearly half of farmworkers nationwide are undocumented and face even greater risks because they’re afraid to complain about unsafe working conditions. Will you give these workers some form of legal status and implement a federal heat standard that ensures the health and safety of those exposed to dangerous heat conditions at work?

Context: Rising temperatures have prompted questions about whether employers should be required to provide shade, rest periods, and cool water to workers who face health risks because of extreme heat, particularly those who must work outdoors, like farmworkers and construction workers. After the heat-related death of a 38-year-old farmworker in Oregon during the historic 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, that state put new heat-protection rules in place. But Florida’s legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis approved legislation early this year banning localities from establishing such rules. The Biden administration proposed the first federal worker heat protection standards in July, three years after the president first promised them. It will be up to the next president to decide whether to finalize that plan or abandon it in the face of certain legal challenges from business groups and their political allies.

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 the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealized as something cold, hard, rational, neutral, and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings. The life and work of James Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he helped us understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia.

Our planet, he argued, behaves like a giant organism—regulating its temperature, discharging waste and cycling chemicals to maintain a healthy balance. Although highly controversial among scientists in the 1970s and 80s, this holistic view of the world had mass appeal, which stretched from New Age spiritual gurus to that stern advocate of free-market orthodoxy, Margaret Thatcher. Its insights into the link between nature and climate have since inspired many of the world’s most influential climate scientists, philosophers, and environmental campaigners. The French philosopher Bruno Latour said the Gaia theory has reshaped humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe as fundamentally as the ideas of Galileo Galilei. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet.

Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness.

While the most prominent academics of the modern age made their names by delving ever deeper into narrow specialisms, Lovelock dismissed this as knowing “more and more about less and less” and worked instead on his own all-encompassing, and thus deeply unfashionable, theory of planetary life.

I first met Lovelock in the summer of 2020, during a break between pandemic lockdowns, when he was 101 years old. In person, he was utterly engrossing and kind. I had long wanted to interview the thinker who somehow managed to be both the inspiration for the green movement, and one of its fiercest critics. The account that follows, of the origins and development of Gaia theory, will probably surprise many of Lovelock’s followers, as it surprised me.

Knowing he did not have long to live, Lovelock told me: “I can tell you things now that I could not say before.” The true nature of the relationships that made the man and the hypothesis were hidden or downplayed for decades. Some were military (he worked for MI5 and MI6 for more than 50 years) or industrial secrets (he warned another employer, Shell, of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1966). Others were too painful to share with the public, his own family and, sometimes, himself. Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness. He preferred to move on. Everything was a problem to be solved.

What I discovered, and what has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.

Lovelock told me his greatest discovery was the biotic link between the Earth’s life and its atmosphere. He envisaged it as a “cool flame” that has been burning off the planet’s excess heat for billions of years. From this emerged the Gaia theory and an obsession with the atmosphere’s relationship with life on Earth. But he could not have seen it alone. Lovelock was guided by a love affair with Hitchcock, an American philosopher and systems analyst, who he met at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Like most brilliant women in the male-dominated world of science in the 1960s, Hitchcock struggled to have her ideas heard, let alone acknowledged. But Lovelock listened. And, as he later acknowledged, without Hitchcock, the world’s understanding of itself may well have been very different.

Lovelock had arrived at JPL in 1961 at the invitation of Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Programs at NASA, who wanted an expert in chromatography to measure the chemical composition of the soil and air on other planets. For the science-fiction junkie Lovelock, it was “like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if at the peak of passion.” He had been given a front-row seat to the reinvention of the modern world.

California felt like the future. Hollywood was in its pomp, Disneyland had opened six years earlier, Venice Beach was about to become a cradle of youth culture and Bell Labs, Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were pioneering the computer-chip technology that was to lead to the creation of Silicon Valley. JPL led the fields of space exploration, robotics and rocket technology.

In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who designed the V-2 rockets that devastated London in the second world war, made JPL the base for the US’s first successful satellite programme. It was his technology that the White House was relying on to provide the thrust for missions to the moon, Mars and Venus. By 1961, the San Gabriel hillside headquarters of JPL had become a meeting place for many of the planet’s finest minds, drawing in Nobel winners, such as Joshua Lederberg, and emerging “pop scientists” like Carl Sagan. There was no more thrilling time to be in the space business.

Lovelock had a relatively minor role as a technical adviser, but he was, he told me, the first Englishman to join the US space programme: the most high-profile, and most lavishly funded, of cold war fronts. Everyone on Earth had a stake in the US-USSR rivalry, but most people felt distant and powerless. Three years earlier, Lovelock had listened on his homemade shortwave radio in Finchley to the “beep, beep, beep” transmission of the USSR’s Sputnik, the first satellite that humanity had put into orbit. Now he was playing with the super powers.

Dian Hitchcock had been hired by NASA to keep tabs on the work being done at JPL to find life on Mars. The two organisations had been at loggerheads since 1958, when JPL had been placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created civilian space agency, Nasa, with day-to-day management carried out by the California Institute of Technology. JPL’s veteran scientists bristled at being told what to do by their counterparts in the younger but more powerful federal organisation. Nasa was determined to regain control. Hitchcock was both their spy and their battering ram. Lovelock became her besotted ally.

They had first met in the JPL canteen, where Hitchcock introduced herself to Lovelock with a joke: “Do you realise your surname is a polite version of mine?” The question delighted Lovelock. As they got to know one another, he also came to respect Hitchcock’s toughness in her dealings with her boss, her colleagues and the scientists. He later saw her yell furiously at a colleague in the street. “They were frightened of her. Nasa was very wise to send her down,” he recalled. They found much in common. Both had struggled to find intellectual peers throughout their lives.

Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life.

Hitchcock had grown used to being overlooked or ignored. She struggled to find anyone who would take her seriously. That and her inability to find people she could talk to on the same intellectual level left her feeling lonely. Lovelock seemed different. He came across as something of an outsider, and was more attentive than other men. “I was initially invisible. I couldn’t find people who would listen to me. But Jim did want to talk to me and I ate it up,” she said. “When I find someone I can talk to in depth it’s a wonderful experience. It happens rarely.”

They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. Vance Oyama, an effusively cheerful biochemist who had joined the JPL programme from the University of Houston the same year as Lovelock, put the prospects of life on Mars at 50 percent. He had a multimillion-dollar reason to be enthusiastic, as he was responsible for designing one of the life-detection experiments on the Mars lander: a small box containing water and a “chicken soup” of nutrients that were to be poured on to Martian soil.

Hitchcock suggested her employer, the NASA contractor Hamilton Standard, hire Lovelock as a consultant, which meant she wrote the checks for all his flights, hotel bills and other expenses during trips to JPL. As his former laboratory assistant Peter Simmonds put it, Lovelock was now “among the suits.”

On March 31, 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data. She accused the biologists of “geocentrism” in their assumption that experiments to find life on Earth would be equally applicable to other planets. She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order—in homeostasis—not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had “initiated” with Lovelock. “I thought it obvious that the best experiment to begin with was composition of the atmosphere,” she recalled. This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point.

At a JPL strategy meeting, Lovelock weighed into the debate with a series of withering comments about using equipment developed in the Mojave Desert to find life on Mars. He instead proposed an analysis of gases to assess whether the planet was in equilibrium (lifelessly flatlining) or disequilibrium (vivaciously erratic) based on the assumption that life discharged waste (excess heat and gases) into space in order to maintain a habitable environment. It would be the basis for his theory of a self-regulating planet, which he would later call Gaia.

Lovelock’s first paper on detecting life on Mars was published in Nature in August 1965, under his name only. Hitchcock later complained that she deserved more credit, but she said nothing at the time.

The pair were not only working together by this stage, they were also having a love affair. “Our trysts were all in hotels in the US,” Lovelock remembered. “We carried on the affair for six months or more.” Sex and science were interwoven. Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life. This was essential for the Gaia hypothesis. Hitchcock said she had posed the key question: what made life possible here and, apparently, nowhere else? This set them thinking about the Earth as a self-regulating system in which the atmosphere was a product of life.

From this revolutionary perspective, the gases surrounding the Earth suddenly began to take on an air of vitality. They were not just life-enabling, they were suffused with life, like the exhalation of a planetary being—or what they called in their private correspondence, the “great animal.” Far more complex and irregular than the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, these gases burned with life.

They sounded out others. Sagan, who shared an office with Lovelock, provided a new dimension to their idea by asking how the Earth had remained relatively cool even though the sun had steadily grown hotter over the previous 8 billion years. Lewis Kaplan at JPL and Peter Fellgett at Reading University were important early allies and listeners. (Later, the pioneering US biologist Lynn Margulis would make an essential contribution, providing an explanation of how Lovelock’s theory might work in practice at a microbial level.) The long-dead physicist Erwin Schrödinger also provided an important key, according to Lovelock: “I knew nothing about finding life or what life was. The first thing I read was Schrödinger’s What is Life? He said life chucked out high-entropy systems into the environment. That was the basis of Gaia; I realized planet Earth excretes heat.”

In the mid-60s, this was all still too new and unformed to be described as a hypothesis. But it was a whole new way of thinking about life on Earth. They were going further than Charles Darwin in arguing that life does not just adapt to the environment, it also shapes it. This meant evolution was far more of a two-way relationship than mainstream science had previously acknowledged. Life was no longer just a passive object of change; it was an agent. The couple were thrilled. They were pioneers making an intellectual journey nobody had made before.

It was to be the high point in their relationship.

The following two years were a bumpy return to Earth. Lovelock was uncomfortable with the management duties he had been given at JPL. The budget was an unwelcome responsibility for a man who had struggled with numbers since childhood, and he was worried he lacked the street smarts to sniff out the charlatans who were pitching bogus multimillion-dollar projects. Meanwhile, the biologists Oyama and Lederberg were going above his head and taking every opportunity to put him down. “Oyama would come up and say: ‘What are you doing there? You are wasting your time, Nasa’s time,’” Lovelock recalled. “He was one of the few unbearable persons I have known in my life.”

In 1966, they had their way, and Lovelock and Hitchcock’s plans for an alternative Mars life-exploration operation using atmospheric analysis were dropped by the US space agency. “I am sorry to hear that politics has interfered with your chances of a subcontract from Nasa,” Fellgett commiserated.

Cracks started to appear in Lovelock’s relationship with Hitchcock. He had tried to keep the affair secret, but lying weighed heavily on him. They could never go to the theater, concerts, or parks in case they were spotted together, but close friends could see what was happening. “They naturally gravitated towards one another. It was obvious,” Simmonds said. When they corresponded, Lovelock insisted Hitchcock never discuss anything but work and science in her letters, which he knew would be opened by his wife, Helen, who also worked as his secretary. But intimacy and passion still came across in discussions of their theories.

Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory.

Lovelock’s family noticed a change in his behaviour. The previous year, his mother had suspected he was unhappy in his marriage and struggling with a big decision. Helen openly ridiculed his newly acquired philosophical pretensions and way of talking—both no doubt influenced by Hitchcock. “Who does he think he is? A second Einstein?” she asked scornfully. Helen would refer to Hitchcock as “Madam” or “Fanny by Gaslight,” forbade her husband from introducing Hitchcock to other acquaintances, and insisted he spend less time in the US. But he could not stay away, and Helen could not help but fret: “Why do you keep asking me what I’m worried about? You know I don’t like (you) all those miles away. I’m only human, dear, and nervous. I can only sincerely hope by now you have been to JPL and found that you do not have to stay anything like a month. I had a night of nightmares…The bed is awfully big and cold without you.”

So, Lovelock visited JPL less frequently and for shorter periods. Hitchcock filled the physical void by throwing her energy into their shared intellectual work. Taking the lead, she began drafting a summary of their life-detection ideas for an ambitious series of journal papers about exobiology (the study of the possibility of life on other planets) that she hoped would persuade either the US Congress or the British parliament to fund a 100-inch infrared telescope to search planetary atmospheres for evidence of life.

But nothing seemed to be going their way. In successive weeks, their jointly authored paper on life detection was rejected by two major journals: the Proceedings of the Royal Society in the UK and then Science in the US. The partners agreed to swallow their pride and submit their work to the little-known journal Icarus. Hitchcock admitted to feeling downhearted in a handwritten note from 11 November 1966: “Enclosed is a copy of our masterpiece, now doubly blessed since it has been rejected by Science. No explanation so I suppose it got turned down by all the reviewers…Feel rather badly about the rejection. Have you ever had trouble like this, publishing anything?…As for going for Icarus, I can’t find anybody who’s even heard of the journal.”

Hitchcock refused to give up. In late 1966 and early 1967, she sent a flurry of long, intellectually vivacious letters to Lovelock about the papers they were working on together. Her correspondence during this period was obsessive, hesitant, acerbic, considerate, critical, encouraging and among the most brilliant in the Lovelock archives. These missives can be read as foundation stones for the Gaia hypothesis or as thinly disguised love letters.

The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists.

In one she lamented that they were unable to meet in person to discuss their work, but she enthused about how far their intellectual journey had taken them. “I’m getting rather impressed with us as I read Biology and the Exploration of Mars—with the fantastic importance of the topic. Wow, if this works and we do find life on Mars we will be in the limelight,” she wrote. Further on, she portrayed the two of them as explorers, whose advanced ideas put them up against the world, or at least against the senior members of the JPL biology team.

The most impressive of these letters is a screed in which Hitchcock wrote to Lovelock with an eloquent summary of “our reasoning” and how this shared approach went beyond mainstream science. “We want to see whether a biota exists—not whether single animals exist,” she said. “It is also the nature of single species to affect their living and nonliving environments—to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment.” Hitchcock then went on to describe how the couple had tried to identify life, in a letter dated December 13, 1966:

“We started our search for the unmistakable physical signature of the terrestrial biota, believing that if we found it, it would—like all other effects of biological entities—be recognizable as such by virtue of the fact that it represents ‘information’ in the pure and simple sense of a state of affairs which is enormously improbable on nonbiological grounds…We picked the atmosphere as the most likely residence of the signature, on the grounds that the chemical interactions with atmospheres are probably characteristic of all biotas. We then tried to find something in our atmosphere which would, for example, tell a good Martian chemist that life exists here. We made false starts because we foolishly looked for one giveaway component. There are none. Came the dawn and we saw that the total atmospheric mixture is a peculiar one, which is in fact so information-full that it is improbable. And so forth. And now we tend to view the atmosphere almost as something itself alive, because it is the product of the biota and an essential channel by which elements of the great living animal communicate—it is indeed the milieu internal which is maintained by the biota as a whole for the wellbeing of its components. This is getting too long. Hope it helps. Will write again soon.”

With hindsight, these words are astonishingly prescient and poignant. Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory. The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists. It was not just the persuasiveness of the science that resonates in this letter, but the intellectual passion with which ideas are developed and given lyrical expression. The poetic conclusion—“came the dawn”—reads as a hopeful burst of illumination and a sad intimation that their night together may be drawing to a close.

Their joint paper, “Life detection by atmospheric analysis,” was submitted to Icarus in December 1966. Lovelock acknowledged it was superior to his earlier piece for Nature: “Anybody who was competent would see the difference, how the ideas had been cleared up and presented in a much more logical way.” He insisted Hitchcock be lead author. Although glad to have him on board because she had never before written a scientific paper and would have struggled to get the piece published if she had put it solely under her name, she told me she had no doubt she deserved most of the credit: “I remember when I wrote that paper, I hardly let him put a word in.”

The year 1967 was to prove horrendous for them both, professionally and personally. In fact, it was a dire moment for the entire US space program. In January, three astronauts died in a flash fire during a test on an Apollo 204 spacecraft, prompting soul-searching and internal investigations. US politicians were no longer willing to write blank cheques for a race to Mars. Public priorities were shifting as the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement gained ground, and Congress slashed the Nasa budget.

“He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something.”

The affair between Hitchcock and Lovelock was approaching an ugly end. Domestic pressures were becoming intense. Helen was increasingly prone to illness and resentment. On March 15, 1967, she wrote to Lovelock at JPL to say: “It seems as if you have been gone for ages,” and scornfully asked about Hitchcock: “Has Madam arrived yet?” Around this time, Lovelock’s colleague at JPL, Peter Simmonds, remembered things coming to a head. “He strayed from the fold. Helen told him to ‘get on a plane or you won’t have a marriage’ or some such ultimatum.”

Lovelock was forced into an agonising decision about Hitchcock. “We were in love with each other. It was very difficult. I think that was one of the worst times in my life. [Helen’s health] was getting much worse. She needed me. It was clear where duty led me and I had four kids. Had Helen been fit and well, despite the size of the family, it would have been easier to go off.” Instead, he decided to ditch Hitchcock. “I determined to break it off. It made me very miserable…I just couldn’t continue.”

The breakup, when it finally came, was brutal. Today, more than 50 years on, Hitchcock is still pained by the way things ended. “I think it was 1967. We were both checking into the Huntington and got rooms that were separated by a conference room. Just after I opened the door, a door on the opposite side was opened by Jim. We looked at each other and I said something like: ‘Look, Jim, this is really handy.’ Whereupon he closed the door and never spoke to me again. I was shattered. Probably ‘heartbroken’ is the appropriate term here. He didn’t give me any explanation. He didn’t say anything about Helen. He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something…He could not possibly have been more miserable than I was.”

Hitchcock was reluctant to let go. That summer, she sent Lovelock a clipping of her interview with a newspaper in Connecticut, below the headline “A Telescopic Look at Life on Other Planets,” an article outlining the bid she and Lovelock were preparing in order to secure financial support for a telescope. In November, she wrote a memo for her company detailing the importance of her continued collaboration with Lovelock and stressing their work “must be published.”

But the flame had been extinguished. The last record of direct correspondence between the couple is an official invoice, dated March 18, 1968, and formally signed “consultant James E Lovelock.” Hitchcock was fired by Hamilton Standard soon after. “They were not pleased that I had anything at all to do with Mars,” she recalled. The same was probably also true for her relationship with Lovelock.

The doomed romance could not have been more symbolic. Hitchcock and Lovelock had transformed humanity’s view of its place in the universe. By revealing the interplay between life and the atmosphere, they had shown how fragile are the conditions for existence on this planet, and how unlikely are the prospects for life elsewhere in the solar system. They had brought romantic dreams of endless expansion back down to Earth with a bump.

This is an edited excerpt from The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory, published by Canongate on September 12 and available at guardianbookshop.com

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 the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealized as something cold, hard, rational, neutral, and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings. The life and work of James Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he helped us understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia.

Our planet, he argued, behaves like a giant organism—regulating its temperature, discharging waste and cycling chemicals to maintain a healthy balance. Although highly controversial among scientists in the 1970s and 80s, this holistic view of the world had mass appeal, which stretched from New Age spiritual gurus to that stern advocate of free-market orthodoxy, Margaret Thatcher. Its insights into the link between nature and climate have since inspired many of the world’s most influential climate scientists, philosophers, and environmental campaigners. The French philosopher Bruno Latour said the Gaia theory has reshaped humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe as fundamentally as the ideas of Galileo Galilei. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet.

Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness.

While the most prominent academics of the modern age made their names by delving ever deeper into narrow specialisms, Lovelock dismissed this as knowing “more and more about less and less” and worked instead on his own all-encompassing, and thus deeply unfashionable, theory of planetary life.

I first met Lovelock in the summer of 2020, during a break between pandemic lockdowns, when he was 101 years old. In person, he was utterly engrossing and kind. I had long wanted to interview the thinker who somehow managed to be both the inspiration for the green movement, and one of its fiercest critics. The account that follows, of the origins and development of Gaia theory, will probably surprise many of Lovelock’s followers, as it surprised me.

Knowing he did not have long to live, Lovelock told me: “I can tell you things now that I could not say before.” The true nature of the relationships that made the man and the hypothesis were hidden or downplayed for decades. Some were military (he worked for MI5 and MI6 for more than 50 years) or industrial secrets (he warned another employer, Shell, of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1966). Others were too painful to share with the public, his own family and, sometimes, himself. Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness. He preferred to move on. Everything was a problem to be solved.

What I discovered, and what has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.

Lovelock told me his greatest discovery was the biotic link between the Earth’s life and its atmosphere. He envisaged it as a “cool flame” that has been burning off the planet’s excess heat for billions of years. From this emerged the Gaia theory and an obsession with the atmosphere’s relationship with life on Earth. But he could not have seen it alone. Lovelock was guided by a love affair with Hitchcock, an American philosopher and systems analyst, who he met at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Like most brilliant women in the male-dominated world of science in the 1960s, Hitchcock struggled to have her ideas heard, let alone acknowledged. But Lovelock listened. And, as he later acknowledged, without Hitchcock, the world’s understanding of itself may well have been very different.

Lovelock had arrived at JPL in 1961 at the invitation of Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Programs at NASA, who wanted an expert in chromatography to measure the chemical composition of the soil and air on other planets. For the science-fiction junkie Lovelock, it was “like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if at the peak of passion.” He had been given a front-row seat to the reinvention of the modern world.

California felt like the future. Hollywood was in its pomp, Disneyland had opened six years earlier, Venice Beach was about to become a cradle of youth culture and Bell Labs, Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were pioneering the computer-chip technology that was to lead to the creation of Silicon Valley. JPL led the fields of space exploration, robotics and rocket technology.

In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who designed the V-2 rockets that devastated London in the second world war, made JPL the base for the US’s first successful satellite programme. It was his technology that the White House was relying on to provide the thrust for missions to the moon, Mars and Venus. By 1961, the San Gabriel hillside headquarters of JPL had become a meeting place for many of the planet’s finest minds, drawing in Nobel winners, such as Joshua Lederberg, and emerging “pop scientists” like Carl Sagan. There was no more thrilling time to be in the space business.

Lovelock had a relatively minor role as a technical adviser, but he was, he told me, the first Englishman to join the US space programme: the most high-profile, and most lavishly funded, of cold war fronts. Everyone on Earth had a stake in the US-USSR rivalry, but most people felt distant and powerless. Three years earlier, Lovelock had listened on his homemade shortwave radio in Finchley to the “beep, beep, beep” transmission of the USSR’s Sputnik, the first satellite that humanity had put into orbit. Now he was playing with the super powers.

Dian Hitchcock had been hired by NASA to keep tabs on the work being done at JPL to find life on Mars. The two organisations had been at loggerheads since 1958, when JPL had been placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created civilian space agency, Nasa, with day-to-day management carried out by the California Institute of Technology. JPL’s veteran scientists bristled at being told what to do by their counterparts in the younger but more powerful federal organisation. Nasa was determined to regain control. Hitchcock was both their spy and their battering ram. Lovelock became her besotted ally.

They had first met in the JPL canteen, where Hitchcock introduced herself to Lovelock with a joke: “Do you realise your surname is a polite version of mine?” The question delighted Lovelock. As they got to know one another, he also came to respect Hitchcock’s toughness in her dealings with her boss, her colleagues and the scientists. He later saw her yell furiously at a colleague in the street. “They were frightened of her. Nasa was very wise to send her down,” he recalled. They found much in common. Both had struggled to find intellectual peers throughout their lives.

Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life.

Hitchcock had grown used to being overlooked or ignored. She struggled to find anyone who would take her seriously. That and her inability to find people she could talk to on the same intellectual level left her feeling lonely. Lovelock seemed different. He came across as something of an outsider, and was more attentive than other men. “I was initially invisible. I couldn’t find people who would listen to me. But Jim did want to talk to me and I ate it up,” she said. “When I find someone I can talk to in depth it’s a wonderful experience. It happens rarely.”

They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. Vance Oyama, an effusively cheerful biochemist who had joined the JPL programme from the University of Houston the same year as Lovelock, put the prospects of life on Mars at 50 percent. He had a multimillion-dollar reason to be enthusiastic, as he was responsible for designing one of the life-detection experiments on the Mars lander: a small box containing water and a “chicken soup” of nutrients that were to be poured on to Martian soil.

Hitchcock suggested her employer, the NASA contractor Hamilton Standard, hire Lovelock as a consultant, which meant she wrote the checks for all his flights, hotel bills and other expenses during trips to JPL. As his former laboratory assistant Peter Simmonds put it, Lovelock was now “among the suits.”

On March 31, 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data. She accused the biologists of “geocentrism” in their assumption that experiments to find life on Earth would be equally applicable to other planets. She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order—in homeostasis—not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had “initiated” with Lovelock. “I thought it obvious that the best experiment to begin with was composition of the atmosphere,” she recalled. This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point.

At a JPL strategy meeting, Lovelock weighed into the debate with a series of withering comments about using equipment developed in the Mojave Desert to find life on Mars. He instead proposed an analysis of gases to assess whether the planet was in equilibrium (lifelessly flatlining) or disequilibrium (vivaciously erratic) based on the assumption that life discharged waste (excess heat and gases) into space in order to maintain a habitable environment. It would be the basis for his theory of a self-regulating planet, which he would later call Gaia.

Lovelock’s first paper on detecting life on Mars was published in Nature in August 1965, under his name only. Hitchcock later complained that she deserved more credit, but she said nothing at the time.

The pair were not only working together by this stage, they were also having a love affair. “Our trysts were all in hotels in the US,” Lovelock remembered. “We carried on the affair for six months or more.” Sex and science were interwoven. Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life. This was essential for the Gaia hypothesis. Hitchcock said she had posed the key question: what made life possible here and, apparently, nowhere else? This set them thinking about the Earth as a self-regulating system in which the atmosphere was a product of life.

From this revolutionary perspective, the gases surrounding the Earth suddenly began to take on an air of vitality. They were not just life-enabling, they were suffused with life, like the exhalation of a planetary being—or what they called in their private correspondence, the “great animal.” Far more complex and irregular than the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, these gases burned with life.

They sounded out others. Sagan, who shared an office with Lovelock, provided a new dimension to their idea by asking how the Earth had remained relatively cool even though the sun had steadily grown hotter over the previous 8 billion years. Lewis Kaplan at JPL and Peter Fellgett at Reading University were important early allies and listeners. (Later, the pioneering US biologist Lynn Margulis would make an essential contribution, providing an explanation of how Lovelock’s theory might work in practice at a microbial level.) The long-dead physicist Erwin Schrödinger also provided an important key, according to Lovelock: “I knew nothing about finding life or what life was. The first thing I read was Schrödinger’s What is Life? He said life chucked out high-entropy systems into the environment. That was the basis of Gaia; I realized planet Earth excretes heat.”

In the mid-60s, this was all still too new and unformed to be described as a hypothesis. But it was a whole new way of thinking about life on Earth. They were going further than Charles Darwin in arguing that life does not just adapt to the environment, it also shapes it. This meant evolution was far more of a two-way relationship than mainstream science had previously acknowledged. Life was no longer just a passive object of change; it was an agent. The couple were thrilled. They were pioneers making an intellectual journey nobody had made before.

It was to be the high point in their relationship.

The following two years were a bumpy return to Earth. Lovelock was uncomfortable with the management duties he had been given at JPL. The budget was an unwelcome responsibility for a man who had struggled with numbers since childhood, and he was worried he lacked the street smarts to sniff out the charlatans who were pitching bogus multimillion-dollar projects. Meanwhile, the biologists Oyama and Lederberg were going above his head and taking every opportunity to put him down. “Oyama would come up and say: ‘What are you doing there? You are wasting your time, Nasa’s time,’” Lovelock recalled. “He was one of the few unbearable persons I have known in my life.”

In 1966, they had their way, and Lovelock and Hitchcock’s plans for an alternative Mars life-exploration operation using atmospheric analysis were dropped by the US space agency. “I am sorry to hear that politics has interfered with your chances of a subcontract from Nasa,” Fellgett commiserated.

Cracks started to appear in Lovelock’s relationship with Hitchcock. He had tried to keep the affair secret, but lying weighed heavily on him. They could never go to the theater, concerts, or parks in case they were spotted together, but close friends could see what was happening. “They naturally gravitated towards one another. It was obvious,” Simmonds said. When they corresponded, Lovelock insisted Hitchcock never discuss anything but work and science in her letters, which he knew would be opened by his wife, Helen, who also worked as his secretary. But intimacy and passion still came across in discussions of their theories.

Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory.

Lovelock’s family noticed a change in his behaviour. The previous year, his mother had suspected he was unhappy in his marriage and struggling with a big decision. Helen openly ridiculed his newly acquired philosophical pretensions and way of talking—both no doubt influenced by Hitchcock. “Who does he think he is? A second Einstein?” she asked scornfully. Helen would refer to Hitchcock as “Madam” or “Fanny by Gaslight,” forbade her husband from introducing Hitchcock to other acquaintances, and insisted he spend less time in the US. But he could not stay away, and Helen could not help but fret: “Why do you keep asking me what I’m worried about? You know I don’t like (you) all those miles away. I’m only human, dear, and nervous. I can only sincerely hope by now you have been to JPL and found that you do not have to stay anything like a month. I had a night of nightmares…The bed is awfully big and cold without you.”

So, Lovelock visited JPL less frequently and for shorter periods. Hitchcock filled the physical void by throwing her energy into their shared intellectual work. Taking the lead, she began drafting a summary of their life-detection ideas for an ambitious series of journal papers about exobiology (the study of the possibility of life on other planets) that she hoped would persuade either the US Congress or the British parliament to fund a 100-inch infrared telescope to search planetary atmospheres for evidence of life.

But nothing seemed to be going their way. In successive weeks, their jointly authored paper on life detection was rejected by two major journals: the Proceedings of the Royal Society in the UK and then Science in the US. The partners agreed to swallow their pride and submit their work to the little-known journal Icarus. Hitchcock admitted to feeling downhearted in a handwritten note from 11 November 1966: “Enclosed is a copy of our masterpiece, now doubly blessed since it has been rejected by Science. No explanation so I suppose it got turned down by all the reviewers…Feel rather badly about the rejection. Have you ever had trouble like this, publishing anything?…As for going for Icarus, I can’t find anybody who’s even heard of the journal.”

Hitchcock refused to give up. In late 1966 and early 1967, she sent a flurry of long, intellectually vivacious letters to Lovelock about the papers they were working on together. Her correspondence during this period was obsessive, hesitant, acerbic, considerate, critical, encouraging and among the most brilliant in the Lovelock archives. These missives can be read as foundation stones for the Gaia hypothesis or as thinly disguised love letters.

The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists.

In one she lamented that they were unable to meet in person to discuss their work, but she enthused about how far their intellectual journey had taken them. “I’m getting rather impressed with us as I read Biology and the Exploration of Mars—with the fantastic importance of the topic. Wow, if this works and we do find life on Mars we will be in the limelight,” she wrote. Further on, she portrayed the two of them as explorers, whose advanced ideas put them up against the world, or at least against the senior members of the JPL biology team.

The most impressive of these letters is a screed in which Hitchcock wrote to Lovelock with an eloquent summary of “our reasoning” and how this shared approach went beyond mainstream science. “We want to see whether a biota exists—not whether single animals exist,” she said. “It is also the nature of single species to affect their living and nonliving environments—to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment.” Hitchcock then went on to describe how the couple had tried to identify life, in a letter dated December 13, 1966:

“We started our search for the unmistakable physical signature of the terrestrial biota, believing that if we found it, it would—like all other effects of biological entities—be recognizable as such by virtue of the fact that it represents ‘information’ in the pure and simple sense of a state of affairs which is enormously improbable on nonbiological grounds…We picked the atmosphere as the most likely residence of the signature, on the grounds that the chemical interactions with atmospheres are probably characteristic of all biotas. We then tried to find something in our atmosphere which would, for example, tell a good Martian chemist that life exists here. We made false starts because we foolishly looked for one giveaway component. There are none. Came the dawn and we saw that the total atmospheric mixture is a peculiar one, which is in fact so information-full that it is improbable. And so forth. And now we tend to view the atmosphere almost as something itself alive, because it is the product of the biota and an essential channel by which elements of the great living animal communicate—it is indeed the milieu internal which is maintained by the biota as a whole for the wellbeing of its components. This is getting too long. Hope it helps. Will write again soon.”

With hindsight, these words are astonishingly prescient and poignant. Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory. The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists. It was not just the persuasiveness of the science that resonates in this letter, but the intellectual passion with which ideas are developed and given lyrical expression. The poetic conclusion—“came the dawn”—reads as a hopeful burst of illumination and a sad intimation that their night together may be drawing to a close.

Their joint paper, “Life detection by atmospheric analysis,” was submitted to Icarus in December 1966. Lovelock acknowledged it was superior to his earlier piece for Nature: “Anybody who was competent would see the difference, how the ideas had been cleared up and presented in a much more logical way.” He insisted Hitchcock be lead author. Although glad to have him on board because she had never before written a scientific paper and would have struggled to get the piece published if she had put it solely under her name, she told me she had no doubt she deserved most of the credit: “I remember when I wrote that paper, I hardly let him put a word in.”

The year 1967 was to prove horrendous for them both, professionally and personally. In fact, it was a dire moment for the entire US space program. In January, three astronauts died in a flash fire during a test on an Apollo 204 spacecraft, prompting soul-searching and internal investigations. US politicians were no longer willing to write blank cheques for a race to Mars. Public priorities were shifting as the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement gained ground, and Congress slashed the Nasa budget.

“He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something.”

The affair between Hitchcock and Lovelock was approaching an ugly end. Domestic pressures were becoming intense. Helen was increasingly prone to illness and resentment. On March 15, 1967, she wrote to Lovelock at JPL to say: “It seems as if you have been gone for ages,” and scornfully asked about Hitchcock: “Has Madam arrived yet?” Around this time, Lovelock’s colleague at JPL, Peter Simmonds, remembered things coming to a head. “He strayed from the fold. Helen told him to ‘get on a plane or you won’t have a marriage’ or some such ultimatum.”

Lovelock was forced into an agonising decision about Hitchcock. “We were in love with each other. It was very difficult. I think that was one of the worst times in my life. [Helen’s health] was getting much worse. She needed me. It was clear where duty led me and I had four kids. Had Helen been fit and well, despite the size of the family, it would have been easier to go off.” Instead, he decided to ditch Hitchcock. “I determined to break it off. It made me very miserable…I just couldn’t continue.”

The breakup, when it finally came, was brutal. Today, more than 50 years on, Hitchcock is still pained by the way things ended. “I think it was 1967. We were both checking into the Huntington and got rooms that were separated by a conference room. Just after I opened the door, a door on the opposite side was opened by Jim. We looked at each other and I said something like: ‘Look, Jim, this is really handy.’ Whereupon he closed the door and never spoke to me again. I was shattered. Probably ‘heartbroken’ is the appropriate term here. He didn’t give me any explanation. He didn’t say anything about Helen. He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something…He could not possibly have been more miserable than I was.”

Hitchcock was reluctant to let go. That summer, she sent Lovelock a clipping of her interview with a newspaper in Connecticut, below the headline “A Telescopic Look at Life on Other Planets,” an article outlining the bid she and Lovelock were preparing in order to secure financial support for a telescope. In November, she wrote a memo for her company detailing the importance of her continued collaboration with Lovelock and stressing their work “must be published.”

But the flame had been extinguished. The last record of direct correspondence between the couple is an official invoice, dated March 18, 1968, and formally signed “consultant James E Lovelock.” Hitchcock was fired by Hamilton Standard soon after. “They were not pleased that I had anything at all to do with Mars,” she recalled. The same was probably also true for her relationship with Lovelock.

The doomed romance could not have been more symbolic. Hitchcock and Lovelock had transformed humanity’s view of its place in the universe. By revealing the interplay between life and the atmosphere, they had shown how fragile are the conditions for existence on this planet, and how unlikely are the prospects for life elsewhere in the solar system. They had brought romantic dreams of endless expansion back down to Earth with a bump.

This is an edited excerpt from The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory, published by Canongate on September 12 and available at guardianbookshop.com

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

Fossil fuel companies’ funding of universities’ climate-focused efforts is delaying the green transition, according to the most extensive peer-reviewed study to date of the industry’s influence on academia.

For the study, published in the journal WIREs Climate Change on Thursday, six researchers pored over thousands of academic articles on industries’ funding of research from the past two decades. Just a handful of them focused on oil and gas companies, showing a “worrying lack of attention” to the issue, the analysis says.

But even that small body of research shows a pattern of industry influence: “The academic integrity of higher education is at risk,” they write.

During the past two decades, non-profits, campus organizers and a small group of scholars have sounded the alarm about oil companies’ influence in academia, drawing parallels to tobacco, pharmaceuticals and food producers who have also funded scholarship.

In the new study, researchers found that out of roughly 14,000 peer-reviewed articles about conflicts of interest, bias and research funding across all industries from 2003 to 2023, only seven mentioned fossil fuels. When the authors broadened their search to look at book chapters, they found only seven more.

An influential 2011 MIT report whose authors had ties to the fossil fuel industry “helped to situate natural gas, or fossil gas, as part of the climate solution.”

But even by combing through the small body of existing scholarship, the authors identified hundreds of instances in the US, UK, Canada and Australia where oil and gas interests had poured funding into climate and energy research while sitting on advisory or governing boards, endowing academic posts, sponsoring scholarships, advising curricula or otherwise influencing universities.

“We find that universities are an established yet under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry,” the authors write.

The analysis found that oil companies have long influenced universities to focus on climate efforts that would enshrine a future for fossil fuels, despite experts’ repeated warnings that the world must stop burning coal, oil, and gas to avert the worst climate impacts.

“The science has been telling us that fossil fuel phase-out is the No. 1 thing that we need to focus on, but within our universities, there’s very little research on how to do fossil fuel phase-out,” said Jennie Stephens, a climate justice professor at Maynooth University in Ireland and study co-author. “This provides some explanation for why society has been so ineffective and inadequate in our responses to the climate crisis.”

Fossil fuel companies’ relationships with universities can create the potential for bias in research and real or perceived conflicts of interest, the authors write.

“Our intention is to protect scientific integrity,” said Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami associate professor who studies fossil fuel industry messaging and co-authored the study. “We want to warn scholars and university leaders that they can be pawns in a propaganda scheme.”

BP, for instance, funneled between $2.1 million and $2.6 million to Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative between 2012 and 2017. The initiative produced research on ways to decarbonize the economy. “It’s noteworthy of that the scenarios for decarbonization that the initiative outlined, only one of them didn’t include a serious role to be played by fossil fuels paired with negative emissions technologies,” said Supran.

The study highlights an internal 2017 campaign-strategy memo presented by a public relations firm to BP that proposed targeting Princeton as a “partner” that could help authenticate “BP’s commitment to low carbon” despite its commitment to expanding planet-heating fossil fuel production.

In another example, an influential 2011 study from the MIT Energy Initiative called gas “a bridge to a low carbon future” even though it is a planet-heating fossil fuel. Several of the study’s authors had financial ties to, and funding from, major oil and gas companies.

“The report helped to situate natural gas, or fossil gas, as part of the climate solution,” said Stephens. “And it seemed to reinforce the Obama administration’s all-of-the-above strategy,” she added, referring to the former president’s commitments to supporting both fossil fuels and renewables.

A spokesperson for the MIT Energy Initiative said funders “have no control” over the institute’s reports: “no approval or rejection, no opportunity to accept or reject any findings.” He added that the study in question was “developed and vigorously debated by a multidisciplinary team.”

In an earlier example, the study notes that in 1997, Exxon paid a Harvard Law School professor to write about “why punitive damages awards are inappropriate in today’s civil justice system” as the company was appealing a $5 billion punitive damages award following a major oil tanker spill in Alaska.

Fossil fuel companies had donated at least $700 million to US universities in the decade prior, a 2023 study found.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the US fossil fuel lobby group American Petroleum Institute said: “America’s oil and natural gas industry will continue to work with experts and organizations committed to advancing solutions that tackle climate change, meet growing demand and ensure continued access to affordable, reliable American energy.” The Guardian also contacted BP, Exxon, Princeton, and Harvard ; none were immediately available for comment.

There is some evidence that funding from oil and gas companies is associated with a more positive view of fossil fuels, the study notes. And relationships with polluting energy companies can also affect internal campus decision-making, the authors argue.

Universities that are dependent on fossil fuel funding, for instance, may be less likely to divest their endowments from the sector, said Supran.

Despite the authors’ efforts, the scope of fossil fuel funding on campus remains unclear because the vast majority of university research centers do not disclose their donors publicly. One 2023 report from the nonprofit Data for Progress found that fossil fuel companies donated at least $700 million to 27 US universities over the past decade, but the authors noted this was almost certainly an undercount.

Universities have sometimes pushed back on calls for transparency. Years ago, one of the new study’s co-authors, Emily Eaton, requested that her university in Canada disclose its fossil fuel funders; when it refused to do so, she took it to court, and in 2021 a judge ruled in her favor.

The report comes amid increasing public scrutiny of the oil sector’s relationship with universities, including in an April report from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Efforts to push academic institutions to “dissociate” from fossil fuel companies are also ramping up on campuses across the country.

“This literature review confirms what students in our movement have known for years,” said Jake Lowe, executive director of Campus Climate Network, which is pressuring schools to sever ties with the industry. “Big oil has infiltrated academia in order to gain undue credibility and obstruct climate action.”

To avert these conflicts in the future, Stephens said governments should provide more public funding to universities. “More public funding could help them act in the public good,” she said.

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

Florida’s department of environmental protection has fired a whistleblower who exposed and sank governor Ron DeSantis’ secretive plan to pave over environmentally sensitive state parks and build lucrative hotels, golf courses, and pickleball courts.

James Gaddis, who worked for the agency for two years as a cartographer, was terminated for “conduct unbecoming a public employee,” according to a letter he received on Saturday.

His leaking of the proposals sparked a furious backlash that united Republicans with Democrats and environmental advocates, and forced DeSantis into a humiliating climbdown last week in which he admitted the plans were “half-baked” and were “going back to the drawing board.”

“I was directed to create nine maps depicting shocking and destructive infrastructure proposals.”

Speaking with the Tampa Bay Times on Monday, Gaddis said preservation of the state parks was more important to him than his position. “It was the absolute flagrant disregard for the critical, globally imperiled habitat in these parks,” he said. “This was going to be a complete bulldozing of all of that habitat. The secrecy was totally confusing and very frustrating. No state agency should be behaving like this.”

News of his firing came as two Democratic state representatives pressed the agency about who was involved in drawing up plans that appeared to include no-bid contracts destined for mysteriously pre-chosen developers outside the requirements of Florida law.

“Firing a cartographer who had clear concerns about the process of this plan and the lack of transparency around it is 100 percent retaliatory,” said Anna Eskamani, who wrote a joint letter to Shawn Hamilton, secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) with fellow state congresswoman Angie Nixon.

“We want to not only hold the department accountable,” she said, “but our motivation is to learn more about how this happened in such a secretive way. Were they using a specific legislative process? Were there conversations that were meant to be public that weren’t?”

“Our intention is to prevent this from ever happening again, and that requires a better understanding of how it happened in the first place.”

The hastily drawn proposals would have paved over thousands of acres of preserved land, Gaddis wrote.

The DEP did not immediately return a request for comment from the Guardian. In a statement to the Tampa Bay Times, a DEP spokesperson, Alex Kuchta, said the agency “would not comment on personnel matters.”

Kuchta was previously one of several DeSantis administration officials publicly defending or promoting the plans before the governor attempted on Wednesday to distance himself from them.

“It was not approved by me, I never saw that. It was intentionally leaked to a left-wing group to try and create a narrative,” DeSantis told reporters. Political analysts, meanwhile, called the episode “a totally self-inflicted political wound.”

In a document he said he created in his own time, and which he sent to the Times, Gaddis explained how the proposals affecting nine state parks, and featuring 350-room hotels and the paving of thousands of acres of preserved land for recreation facilities, were drawn up in barely two weeks at the beginning of the month.

“I was directed to create nine maps depicting shocking and destructive infrastructure proposals, while keeping quiet as they were pushed through an accelerated and under-the-radar public engagement process,” Gaddis wrote on a GoFundMe page he set up following his dismissal.

He said the DEP planned to hold short-notice, hour-long meetings at the nine parks simultaneously to announce the plans and minimize public comment.

Other reasons given in the letter for Gaddis’s termination were “violation of law or department rules, negligence and misconduct,” as well as providing “inaccurate” information. The letter did not specify what information Gaddis gave that was deemed to be inaccurate.

Gaddis spoke with a DEP attorney last week and admitted he was the author of the document that the Times used to break the story. He said he wrote it on his agency-issued laptop at home and worked on it alone. “I’ve taken sole responsibility for this,” said Gaddis, a single father with an 11-year-old daughter.

By Tuesday afternoon, Gaddis’s GoFundMe appeal, entitled “an ethical whistleblower’s new start,” had surpassed $63,000, more than six times its initial target.

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

Florida’s department of environmental protection has fired a whistleblower who exposed and sank governor Ron DeSantis’ secretive plan to pave over environmentally sensitive state parks and build lucrative hotels, golf courses, and pickleball courts.

James Gaddis, who worked for the agency for two years as a cartographer, was terminated for “conduct unbecoming a public employee,” according to a letter he received on Saturday.

His leaking of the proposals sparked a furious backlash that united Republicans with Democrats and environmental advocates, and forced DeSantis into a humiliating climbdown last week in which he admitted the plans were “half-baked” and were “going back to the drawing board.”

“I was directed to create nine maps depicting shocking and destructive infrastructure proposals.”

Speaking with the Tampa Bay Times on Monday, Gaddis said preservation of the state parks was more important to him than his position. “It was the absolute flagrant disregard for the critical, globally imperiled habitat in these parks,” he said. “This was going to be a complete bulldozing of all of that habitat. The secrecy was totally confusing and very frustrating. No state agency should be behaving like this.”

News of his firing came as two Democratic state representatives pressed the agency about who was involved in drawing up plans that appeared to include no-bid contracts destined for mysteriously pre-chosen developers outside the requirements of Florida law.

“Firing a cartographer who had clear concerns about the process of this plan and the lack of transparency around it is 100 percent retaliatory,” said Anna Eskamani, who wrote a joint letter to Shawn Hamilton, secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) with fellow state congresswoman Angie Nixon.

“We want to not only hold the department accountable,” she said, “but our motivation is to learn more about how this happened in such a secretive way. Were they using a specific legislative process? Were there conversations that were meant to be public that weren’t?”

“Our intention is to prevent this from ever happening again, and that requires a better understanding of how it happened in the first place.”

The hastily drawn proposals would have paved over thousands of acres of preserved land, Gaddis wrote.

The DEP did not immediately return a request for comment from the Guardian. In a statement to the Tampa Bay Times, a DEP spokesperson, Alex Kuchta, said the agency “would not comment on personnel matters.”

Kuchta was previously one of several DeSantis administration officials publicly defending or promoting the plans before the governor attempted on Wednesday to distance himself from them.

“It was not approved by me, I never saw that. It was intentionally leaked to a left-wing group to try and create a narrative,” DeSantis told reporters. Political analysts, meanwhile, called the episode “a totally self-inflicted political wound.”

In a document he said he created in his own time, and which he sent to the Times, Gaddis explained how the proposals affecting nine state parks, and featuring 350-room hotels and the paving of thousands of acres of preserved land for recreation facilities, were drawn up in barely two weeks at the beginning of the month.

“I was directed to create nine maps depicting shocking and destructive infrastructure proposals, while keeping quiet as they were pushed through an accelerated and under-the-radar public engagement process,” Gaddis wrote on a GoFundMe page he set up following his dismissal.

He said the DEP planned to hold short-notice, hour-long meetings at the nine parks simultaneously to announce the plans and minimize public comment.

Other reasons given in the letter for Gaddis’s termination were “violation of law or department rules, negligence and misconduct,” as well as providing “inaccurate” information. The letter did not specify what information Gaddis gave that was deemed to be inaccurate.

Gaddis spoke with a DEP attorney last week and admitted he was the author of the document that the Times used to break the story. He said he wrote it on his agency-issued laptop at home and worked on it alone. “I’ve taken sole responsibility for this,” said Gaddis, a single father with an 11-year-old daughter.

By Tuesday afternoon, Gaddis’s GoFundMe appeal, entitled “an ethical whistleblower’s new start,” had surpassed $63,000, more than six times its initial target.

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

Coastal tribal communities in the Lower 48 live on the frontlines of climate adaptation, with some facing the daunting challenge of relocating altogether to safer inland places as sea levels rise. Between November 2022 and August 2023, a researcher from the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI) and one from the University of Washington conducted listening sessions with tribal leaders, citizens and employees from 13 Northwest coastal tribes, posing questions about the status of climate adaptation plans and the greatest obstacles the tribes are facing.

The listening sessions resulted in a report called Climate Adaptation Barriers and Needs Experienced by Northwest Coastal Tribes, which was released this month. The report paints a picture of tribal governments that are perfectly capable and entirely ready to do more for climate adaptation—if they weren’t drowning in all the grant paperwork necessary to make it happen. And funding doesn’t always match tribal needs. “There’s a lot of funding for plans, not a lot of funding for infrastructure, ever,” reads a quote from one participant.

Included in the report, which involved other partners and funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is an addendum calling for Northwest coastal tribes who missed out on the listening sessions to contribute their own comments to further this research.

High Country News spoke with project co-leads Amelia Marchand (Colville), senior tribal climate resilience liaison for ATNI, and Meade Krosby, senior scientist at UW’s climate impacts group, to learn more about their findings.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The report gives a window into how challenging it is to run a tribe in general: Without long-term funding, you can’t make long-term plans. You can only plan projects for the next year, or whatever length of time you know you can staff. But how does it apply specifically to something like climate adaptation?

Meade Krosby: Nothing in this report would be surprising to folks who work in tribal government. None of these are really new problems. What’s perhaps new is this additional challenge of accelerating climate impacts—and the urgency that requires—and how this is presenting barriers to them getting done what needs to get done pretty quickly to reduce risks to tribal communities.

Amelia Marchand: Tribal governments are oftentimes understaffed. That was a theme that did come through, and it’s one of the key findings. And a lot of times those responsibilities for climate planning or climate adaptation, or looking at climate vulnerabilities, are just an additional duty that people have that’s added on to their job description. That’s very challenging in and of itself. And so there’s a lot of different novel approaches that tribes have taken to try to piece together all of their needs. It’s—just as Meade said—because this climate crisis is accelerating every year, temperatures are getting worse. Drought conditions worsen, ocean acidification increases. All of these things are compounding at once.

Would you say that the urgency of the moment is part of the impetus for conducting the study?

MK: Yeah, absolutely. We didn’t want to just assume what the tribes needed or how we could be useful. We wanted to actually ask them, “How is this playing out for you? How is adaptation going?” to figure out where we might be useful where the levers are. It’s also timely, especially because—not just the urgency of seeing climate change right now—but also this really unprecedented state and federal investment in climate action. There’s suddenly so much money moving in Washington state: With the Climate Commitment Act that’s opened up millions of dollars that have been directed to tribal governments, and, at the federal level, with the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, there’s now funds that are becoming available. But how are they being directed? Is that working at this moment? We heard so much about how that model is not working. There are so many barriers to tribes to accessing the money that’s intended for them.

Some tribes on the coast are having to consider relocating as an act of climate adaptation. What’s happening on the ground? Do they have viable paths forward with community relocation?

AM: It’s still very case-by-case, and some of that really comes down to who their neighbors are. They don’t just have to move inland, but they have to move upland, at Shoalwater Bay. The challenge to do that is really rough, because of all the infrastructure that needs to get to the new location. Through the support of their tribal leadership, (they’ve been) going through the community education process of what needs to be done, and then starting to educate, literally educate, the federal government and state government entities about how this endeavor looks. It’s not gonna happen overnight. They’ve been planning this for a very long time, and elements are finally starting to come into place. Relocation as an adaptation measure comes down to survival. Sometimes it is the only choice.

“There’s so many lessons there” for communities that “are going to have to face these same issues in the coming years, and the tribes are doing it first.”

MK: Planning is pretty cheap. Implementation is really expensive. And so what is really extraordinary when you go out to the coast is to see that this is actually happening. That’s a huge sacrifice to have to make. There’s so many lessons there for other kinds of communities who are going to have to face these same issues in the coming years, and the tribes are doing it first. They’re really leading the way. They’ve been leading the way on climate mitigation and adaptation for so many years, but they’re doing it. Supporting that work and learning from that work is going to be really important for everybody in years to come.

AM: There’s so much that other government agencies can learn from this type of coordinated effort.

It’s striking that biologists are having to spend their days working as grant writers instead of biologists. What do your findings tell us about that?

AM: It’s important that people know how common that is. I would say that’s almost a cross-country/Indian Country issue. Passionate, dedicated, experienced staff members oftentimes want to retain their jobs. It is their responsibility to go find the funding to do it. The tribe itself may not be able to fund all the positions that they want to do all the jobs that they want. So it comes to grants and contracts with federal, state, nonprofit, and academic institutions, which makes it even more challenging because sometimes the priorities of those different outside funders are either in conflict [with] or completely disregard tribal priorities. It’s not just that biologists and other types of specialty staff are trying to fund their positions and the work that they’re doing, but they’re also trying to navigate ways to meet the needs and goals and priorities of their tribes.

That can totally change the scope of their work, and it takes away tribal agency, doesn’t it?

AM: Yes, it does.

MK: That came up a lot, this whole external funding model, especially around the different priorities of federal agencies and how narrowly [defined] some of these funding pots are. It just totally undermines self-determination.

Who has the power to dismantle these obstacles, and whose responsibility is it?

AM: By and large, it’s the responsibility of the federal government, which created these conditions in the first place. The bare minimum place to start is by saying, “Okay, this is actually what you, the federal government and all of your federal family are responsible for doing, and here’s how you’ve been derelict in your duties. Now, can you please step up to the plate and help us correct these issues?”

MK: There was another really great report that came out in February on the unmet needs of Alaska Native communities that are facing environmental threats. We tried not to make recommendations, because we didn’t want to speak for the tribes. But we did note that both that report and listening session participants noted the need for a coordinated federal government response—essentially so that the federal government is coordinating itself instead of the tribes having to navigate coordination with the federal government. The very next thing that our project is doing is partnering with legal scholars and policy experts to look at possible solutions.

AM: It’s important that people understand we’re not done with the project yet. This is just one outcome of the project thus far, and there’s still more to come.

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

Several meters underwater off the coast of Bonaire, a small island in the south Caribbean, Danielle de Kool floated in place in front of a large head of boulder brain coral. The pattern across its surface looked like the maze you might find on the back of a cereal box.

From a plastic syringe, de Kool, an ecologist at a local environmental group, squeezed a toothpaste-like substance into her hand. She then pressed the paste onto the surface of the coral around the edge of a large white splotch that had recently appeared.

The coral was sick. And this paste might help heal it.

In the last decade, a mysterious illness called stony coral tissue loss disease has been ravaging coral in reefs across the Caribbean. The disease—which is likely caused by a bacterium or virus—targets a number of hard, reef-forming coral species. It essentially pulverizes the soft coral tissue, killing centuries-old colonies in a matter of weeks.

The outbreak is quite literally threatening Bonaire’s way of life, the primary source of income for its residents.

The plight has now spread to at least 30 countries and territories in the Caribbean, where corals were already suffering from pollution, climate change, and other threats. In regions hit by SCTLD, the disease has reduced the area of coral by anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent.

Researchers say that SCTLD is now likely the worst coral disease outbreak ever recorded.

Last spring, the disease was spotted in Bonaire—one of the few spots in the Caribbean where you can still find an abundance of healthy coral. The island, like many others in the tropics, is deeply dependent on its reef. Tourism is the engine of Bonaire’s economy, and the majority of visitors come to scuba dive and snorkel. Plus, large coral structures dampen waves that hit the shore, lessening flooding during big storms.

SCTLD has already killed off more than 90 percent of some coral species in Bonaire, including boulder brain and maze corals, according to preliminary data from STINAPA, a local organization working to protect the reef. The outbreak is quite literally threatening Bonaire’s way of life, the primary source of income for its residents, and the island’s ability to defend itself from destructive hurricanes.

With the stakes so high, ecologists across the Caribbean are trying desperately to ease the spread of SCTLD. And on that morning in July, de Kool, who works for STINAPA, was doing one of the few things that seems to work: smearing sick corals with antibiotics.

Each bit of coral is a colony of animals, comprising hundreds to thousands of tiny creatures called polyps. Those polyps produce skeletons made of calcium carbonate—the same material found in sea shells—which forms the hard structure of the reef.

And like other animals, corals can get sick. Over the last century, a number of diseases have decimated coral populations worldwide. White band disease, for example, first appeared in the 1970s and has since killed more than 80 percent of staghorn and elkhorn corals in the Caribbean. These iconic species, named for their antler-like appearance, were once so abundant in the shallows that fishermen would have to cut them down in order to clear a path for their boats.

“I’ve never seen a disease like this…” In Bonaire, it’s something close to an “extinction-level event.”

SCTLD, meanwhile, is relatively new. Scientists first observed the disease a decade ago in Florida, and there are still many unknowns, such as where it first came from and even what SCTLD is. It could be a bacterium or a virus, or both working together. Some kinds of bacteria, for example, could be making coral more susceptible to a virus, said Blake Ushijima, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Scientists also aren’t sure how SCTLD has moved around the Caribbean. The spread generally seems to follow ocean currents, but it sometimes jumps between distant places, said Marilyn Brandt, a coral scientist at the University of the Virgin Islands. In some cases, cargo ships are likely responsible for the spread, she said. As ships load and unload cargo, they fill and empty ballast tanks that help stabilize the vessels. These tanks could be inadvertently transporting SCTLD-causing pathogens. (There are now regulations and technologies designed to minimize the spread of disease and invasive species in ballast water, though not all ships adhere to them, Brandt said.)

On that morning in July, I was diving with de Kool on a reef just off the northwest coast of Bonaire. The view underwater was stunning: a messy tapestry of colorful corals and sea sponges home to all kinds of sea creatures. About 20 minutes into our dive, a hammerhead shark swam by.

Yet there were also signs of SCTLD everywhere.

Reefs get their signature bright coloring from a symbiotic algae that lives inside the live coral tissue. The sickened colonies, though, had big white spots where the disease had apparently destroyed the tissue, exposing the coral’s bone-white skeleton. Many of those spots were already turning green from different kinds of algae that grow on dead sections of coral.

“I’ve never seen a disease like this,” Caren Eckrich, an ecologist at STINAPA, told me. In Bonaire, it’s something close to an “extinction-level event,” she said, meaning it’s nearly wiping out some of the island’s coral species.

But scientists are not totally powerless against it. They have a weapon.

For years now, companies and hobbyists who grow coral in aquariums have used various antibiotics to treat sick sea creatures, including coral, Ushijima told me. They essentially dip pieces of coral into antibiotic washes or put medicine directly into the fish tanks.

When SCTLD began spreading several years ago, scientists tried a similar approach—and it worked. They brought sick corals infected with SCTLD into the lab and treated them with antibiotics, including amoxicillin, the same drug humans use for bacterial infections. Most of them recovered.

“It seems very likely that the bacterial component is at least very important in the infection process.”

Treating corals in the wild, however, is a different challenge altogether. That’s where that toothpaste-like substance de Kool was using comes in. Through trial and error, scientists figured out that they could mix powdered amoxicillin with a biodegradable putty, made by the company Ocean Alchemists, that sticks to the surface of coral underwater. When you apply the antibiotic paste around a SCTLD lesion, it can, as studies have shown, stop or slow the disease from spreading through the colony. “It is very effective,” Brandt said.

That amoxicillin works is actually a bit peculiar. While it’s still not clear what pathogen causes SCTLD, there’s some evidence suggesting the disease is viral, Brandt said. How would amoxicillin, which kills bacteria, stop a viral disease? One theory, she said, is that if it is indeed viral, the pathogen may still require bacteria to cause disease. (In humans, bacteria and viruses sometimes cooperate with each other.) Another possible explanation, she said, is that the pathogen targets the symbiotic algae living within coral tissue. Antibiotics often kill those algae without killing the coral, essentially removing the target of infection and stemming the spread. Or perhaps SCTLD is caused by bacteria after all, as other scientists suspect. No one knows for sure.

“It seems very likely that the bacterial component is at least very important in the infection process,” said Karen Neely, a research scientist at Florida’s Nova Southeastern University who first trialed the antibiotic paste in the wild. “But regardless, the amoxicillin does work. It’s keeping corals alive.”

Back on the reef, I watched de Kool and a handful of other divers, including dive instructor and educator Carmen Toanchina, cruise around the reef and treat corals. They’d spot a colony with white lesions, unclip a syringe from their vest, squirt out some paste, and then, somewhat awkwardly, try to apply it to the coral’s surface. It was like watching someone stick strips of Play-Doh on weird-looking rocks but underwater—where masks fog up, sharks swim by, and one deep breath threatens your buoyancy. The work was slow going.

These treatments appear to be working, said Jeannine Toy, who oversees a squadron of STINAPA volunteers like Toanchina who apply the antibiotics. They’ve been treating reefs in Bonaire for more than a year now. “About 70 percent are healed after we treat them,” Toy told me after the dive.

The goal isn’t to treat every coral around the island, Toy said—that’d be nearly impossible. Rather, STINAPA wants to treat enough colonies so that there are plenty of live corals to spawn, or sexually reproduce, and create the next generation of corals in Bonaire.

The bad news is that SCTLD is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. It’s now endemic, or consistently present, in some regions, like Florida and the US Virgin Islands. Scientists also fear that it will soon spread to the Pacific, home to the Great Barrier Reef and, in general, a much higher diversity of corals. It’s not clear how susceptible Pacific corals will be. “The scary part is that we don’t know,” Ushijima said.

Against the enormity of the ongoing outbreak, antibiotics are sorely inadequate. While amoxicillin can stem the growth of lesions, it doesn’t prevent infection. And applying the paste is incredibly labor intensive, Brandt said. “It requires tons of divers,” she said. “I have four people and that’s all they do.”

Some scientists, including Ushijima, are also concerned that the bacteria it kills might eventually develop a resistance to amoxicillin, making the treatment less useful. (So far there are no signs of antibiotic resistance, Neely says.)

Reefs that are already weakened by extreme heat or pollution are more likely to get sick, just as it’s easier to catch a cold when you’re stressed.

For now, Brandt points out, giving sick corals antibiotics is the best option available. “It was the only effective solution that we were able to deploy in a large way,” she said, referring to her conservation work in the US Virgin Islands. Her team, she said, “has saved quite a lot of coral.”

Meanwhile, scientists like Ushijima are also working on other potential treatments, such as coral probiotics. Some corals appear to be naturally resistant to SCTLD; the microbes found in and around them may have something to do with this resistance. Certain kinds of bacteria, for example, help corals fight off disease, Ushijima said. Biologists are trying to identify those defense microbes so they can inoculate wild coral with them.

This approach points to something hopeful: Some corals are doing just fine.

Again, this could have to do with those microbes or with genetics; resistance to disease can be rooted in coral DNA. But it also has to do with the environment, Brandt said, and the other threats corals are exposed to. Reefs that are already weakened by extreme heat or pollution are more likely to get sick, just as it’s easier to catch a cold when you’re stressed. What’s more, Brandt said, is that reducing local sources of stress gives corals a better chance of growing back after they suffer a loss from SCTLD.

If any reef can survive the impacts of SCTLD, it’s Bonaire. The island has protected its reef from threats like overfishing for more than half a century, longer than pretty much any other region worldwide. And the corals here have demonstrated that they can bounce back from major die-offs, as I recently reported.

As de Kool and I cruised around the reef, she wasn’t only treating sick corals but also monitoring colonies that have so far resisted infection. There were a lot of them, including big heads of brain coral and even some pillar corals, which have been hit especially hard by SCTLD in the Caribbean. Perhaps these colonies are resistant to the disease. Perhaps they will seed the next generation of corals around the island, helping this once-vibrant reef recover.

If not, doctors are standing by with medicine.

“I spent a good part of my career monitoring corals to death,” Neely told me. “We can’t do that anymore. We have to be active. We are part of the reason that reefs are dying and to not do something about it is really just unacceptable at this point.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A handful of wealthy polluting countries led by the US are spending billions of dollars of public money on unproven climate solutions technologies that risk further delaying the transition away from fossil fuels, new analysis suggests.

These governments have handed out almost $30 billion in subsidies for carbon capture and fossil hydrogen over the past 40 years, with hundreds of billions potentially up for grabs through new incentives, according to a new report by Oil Change International (OCI), a non-profit tracking the cost of fossil fuels.

To date, the European Union (EU) plus just four countries—the US, Norway, Canada and the Netherlands—account for 95 percent of the public handouts on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen.

“It is instructive that industry itself invests very little in carbon capture. This whole enterprise is dependent on government handouts.”

The US has spent the most taxpayer money, some $12 billion in direct subsidies, according to OCI, with fossil fuel giants like Exxon hoping to secure billions more in future years.

The industry-preferred solutions could play a limited role in curtailing global heating, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and are being increasingly pushed by wealthy nations at the annual UN climate summit.

But CCS projects consistently fail, overspend or underperform, according to previous studies. CCS—and blue hydrogen projects—rely on fossil fuels and can lead to a myriad of environmental harms including a rise in greenhouse gases and air pollution.

“The United States and other governments have little to show for these massive investments in carbon capture—none of the demonstration projects have lived up to their initial hype,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “It is instructive that industry itself invests very little in carbon capture. This whole enterprise is dependent on government handouts.”

With time running out to curtail climate catastrophe, critics of CCS and hydrogen say public money should be focused on proven, less risky solutions such as plugging leaky oil wells, energy efficiency for buildings, transport electrification, and renewables that will speed up the green transition.

The subsidies are a “colossal waste of money,” according to Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. “It is nothing short of a travesty that funds meant to combat climate change are instead bolstering the very industries driving it.”

The US and Canada have spent more than $4 billion to subsidize the capture of CO2 that is then used to extract hard to reach oil reserves, a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR), according to the OCI report shared exclusively with the Guardian.

“The history of CCS is depressing…and no significant innovations have improved CCS’s prospects.”

However, proponents argue that more investment is needed in developing CCS and hydrogen technologies, so they can help achieve global climate goals agreed under the Paris accords. “They are all part of the toolset we need to reach net zero,” Astrid Bergmål, state secretary in Norway’s ministry of petroleum and energy, told the Guardian.

Norway has so far approved $6 billion in subsidies for CCS, an energy-intensive process powered by fossil gas—which the country is also expanding.

The new analysis is based on two OCI databases: one tracking public awards distributed to companies from 1984 to 2024 for carbon capture and fossil-based hydrogen research and development, as well as grants for pilot and commercial projects. The other tracks government policies announced since 2020 in the US, Canada, Australia, the EU and countries in Europe that support grants, loans, tax credits, below market insurance plans and other financial incentives.

“Governments are pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into technologies that have consistently failed to deliver on their promises…allowing fossil fuel companies to continue business,” said Lorne Stockman, research director at OCI.

Subsidies from the US, the world’s biggest oil and gas producer where an estimated three-quarters of the CO2 currently captured is used for EOR, could top $100 billion, according to OCI analysis.

This is thanks to new policies from the Biden administration, particularly the landmark climate and infrastructure legislation—the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—which after intense industry lobbying expanded tax benefits for both CCS and hydrogen with few checks and balances.

Yet, experts warn that CCS technology is challenging and unlikely to deliver. “The history of CCS is depressing…and no significant innovations have improved CCS’s prospects,” said Charles Harvey, professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded the first private CCS startup 15 years ago.

“Nonetheless, we are again wasting money on CCS that could be used instead to effectively cut emissions, distracting ourselves from the necessity of moving away from fossil fuels, and perpetuating a polluting industry whose local harms often fall on minority and economically disadvantaged communities.”

“I don’t think we should be directly subsidizing CCS ever…but we should directly subsidize clean things that are useful to people.”

Hydrogen, which is currently mostly used for refining oil, fertilizers, and processing metals and foods, could be green if companies chose to use water—not gas or coal—as the raw material, and power the process with renewables not fossil fuel. Yet globally, governments have spent $4.2 billion on projects that aim to produce blue hydrogen from fossil fuels using CCS.

The industry claims to have the technology to capture 90 percent to 95 percent of CO₂, but in reality, it’s closer to 12 percent when every stage of the energy-intensive process is evaluated, according to peer-reviewed research by scientists at Cornell University. “The greenhouse gas footprint for this hydrogen is actually greater than if we were to simply burn natural gas for the energy,” said Howarth, a co-author of the groundbreaking study.

Canada is the second largest funder of blue hydrogen after the US with $1.2 billion spent to date, mostly at an oil refinery in Alberta where hydrogen is used for upgrading dirty tar sands crude. The net CO2 capture rate from the plant is less than 70 percent.

The Canadian and US government’s did not respond to requests to comment.

Globally, governments hand over between $500 billion and $1 trillion in direct fossil fuel subsidies annually, though in 2022 the true figure was closer to $7 trillion—when the climate, environmental and health costs were taken into account, according to the IMF. But more than $1 trillion is now also spent supporting clean energy, according to International Energy Agency (IEA) trackers, so the amount allocated to CCS and hydrogen is relatively small.

Still, after the hottest year ever recorded—and as island nations and other developing countries face an existential threat from sea level rise, desertification, drought, extreme heat, wildfires and floods—only $700 million was pledged by governments to the new loss and damage fund at Cop28—far short of the estimated $400 billion needed annually. The financial shortfall for climate adaptation runs into hundreds of billions—and is rising.

“Companies are designed to make profits, they only consider what is priced, so subsidies should come with conditions.”

Singh, director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said: “While investing billions in technologies that further entrench fossil fuel use, developed countries simultaneously neglect their moral and financial responsibilities to fund crucial efforts in vulnerable communities…that’s the grim irony.”

While the decades-long reputation of CCS has largely been one of “underperformance” and “unmet expectations”, according to the IEA in 2023, many experts agree that it could play a role in reducing emissions in polluting industries such as cement, steel and chemicals.

But according to Chris Bataille, an IPCC expert on decarbonizing heavy industry, subsidies must come with conditions and target products, not processes, in order to achieve a just and economically sound green transition.

“I don’t think we should be directly subsidizing CCS ever…but we should directly subsidize clean things that are useful to people. Staggered subsidies for clean iron which is key to making steel, clean ammonia which is key for fertilizers and clean clinker for cement, would channel the market—which is the whole idea of government regulation.

“Companies are designed to make profits, they only consider what is priced, so subsidies should come with conditions, including mandatory net-zero transformation plans,” added Batallie, who is also adjunct research fellow at the Columbia University center for global energy policy.

At Cop28 in Dubai, the Netherlands launched a fossil fuel subsidy phase-out coalition amid growing public pressure to cut its financial support for oil and gas, which is currently estimated to be at least $43 billion a year.

The government has approved $2.6 billion for subsidies requested in 2020, with the vast majority allocated to the Porthos project—that will incentivize some oil majors and chemical companies at the Port of Rotterdam to store captured CO₂ in an empty North Sea offshore gas field. (The figure doesn’t include subsidies approved in 2022 or requested in 2023.)

A spokesperson from the Dutch climate ministry said that the final amount paid out was expected to be substantially lower as it depends on the market price of carbon and project costs, and that these fossil fuel-powered technologies were key to the country’s green transition.

“This money should be used to get away from fossil fuels and making industrial processes green, rather than these false solutions.”

“In the Netherlands, safeguards have been built in for subsidies for CCS, so that these do not come at the cost of alternative, clean energy technologies. Dutch policy aims at minimizing the future role of fossil fuels in the energy system and has set conditions and a time horizon for fossil CCS support.”

Climate advocates say the phase-out is too slow.

“This money should be used to get away from fossil fuels and making industrial processes green, rather than these false solutions that are a cash cow for industry—in part because governments take over the risks from market fluctuations in the price of carbon,” said Maarten de Zeeuw, a climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Netherlands.

Norway’s first full-scale heavily subsidized CCS project was attached to the Mongstad oil refinery and described in 2007 by then prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, as the country’s “moon landing.” The project failed, in part due to rising costs, though it did spawn a CCS test facility the government said is “instrumental in technology development.”

The country’s current flagship CCS project, the Longship, involves capturing CO₂ from waste incineration and cement production that will be shipped and stored offshore. Costs here have also been rising—though, according to state secretary Bergmål, rising inflation and supply chain instabilities are also affecting other climate technologies.

OCI claims that Norway is expanding CCS to justify more oil and gas expansion for use producing blue hydrogen for export to Europe—where it is enjoying renewed interest despite evidence that its viability as an alternative fuel will be limited.

Bergmål said: “Managing CO₂ from hard-to-abate industries has nothing to do with prolonged fossil fuel extraction. On the contrary, it is an urgently needed climate mitigation measure. One of the key goals of Longship is to provide learning and reduce costs for future projects…What matters is to produce enough volumes of hydrogen, with low to zero emissions, and at the lowest possible cost.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wheels on this bus do indeed go round and round. Its wipers swish. And its horn beeps. Hidden in its innards, though, is something special—a motor that doesn’t vroom but pairs with a burgeoning technology that could help the grid proliferate with renewable energy.

These new buses, developed by a company called Zum, ride clean and quiet because they’re fully electric. With them, California’s Oakland Unified School District just became the first major district in the United States to transition to 100 percent electrified buses.

The vehicles are now transporting 1,300 students to and from school, replacing diesel-chugging buses that pollute the kids’ lungs and the neighborhoods with particulate matter. Like in other American cities, Oakland’s underserved areas tend to be closer to freeways and industrial activity, so air quality in those areas is already terrible compared to the city’s richer parts.

Buses, garbage trucks, and other electric vehicles with defined routes can serve as reliable backup batteries during times of peak power demand.

Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism. Since Oakland Unified only provides bus services for its special-need students, the problem of missing school for preventable health issues is particularly acute for them. “We have already seen the data—more kids riding the buses, that means more of our most vulnerable who are not missing school,” said Kyla Johnson-Trammell, superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, during a press conference Tuesday. “That, over time, means they’re having more learning and achievement goes up.”

What’s more, a core challenge of weaning our society off fossil fuels is that utilities will need to produce more electricity, not less of it. “In some places, you’re talking about doubling the amount of energy needed,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. 

Counterintuitively enough, the buses’ massive batteries aren’t straining the grid; they’re benefiting it. Like a growing number of consumer EV models, the buses are equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G. That allows them to charge their batteries by plugging into the grid, but also send energy back to the grid if the electrical utility needs extra power. “School buses play a very important role in the community as a transportation provider, but now also as an energy provider,” said Vivek Garg, co-founder and chief operating officer of Zum.

And provide the buses must. Demand on the grid tends to spike in the late afternoon, when everyone is returning home and switching on appliances like air conditioners. Historically, utilities could just spin up more generation at a fossil fuel power plant to meet that demand. But as the grid is loaded with more renewable energy sources, intermittency becomes a challenge: You can’t crank up power in the system if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

“We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility.”

If every EV has V2G capability, that creates a distributed network of batteries for a utility to draw on when demand spikes. The nature of the school bus suits it perfectly for this, because it’s on a fixed schedule, making it a predictable resource for the utility. In the afternoon, Zum’s buses take kids home, then plug back into the grid. “They have more energy in each bus than they need to do their route, so there’s always an ample amount left over,” said Rudi Halbright, product manager of V2G integration at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the utility that’s partnered with Zum and Oakland Unified for the new system.

As the night goes on and demand wanes, the buses charge again to be ready for their morning routes. Then during the day, they charge again, when there’s plentiful solar power on the grid. On weekends or holidays, the buses would be available all day as backup power for the grid. “Sure, they’re going to take a very large amount of charge,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. “But things like school buses don’t run that often, so they have a great potential to be a resource.”

That resource ain’t free: Utilities pay owners of V2G vehicles to provide power to the grid. (Because V2G is so new, utilities are still experimenting with what this rate structure looks like.) Zum says that that revenue helps bring down the transportation costs of its buses to be on par with cheaper diesel-powered buses. Oakland Unified and other districts can get still more money from the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program, which is handing out $5 billion between 2022 and 2026 to make the switch.

The potential of V2G is that there are so many different kinds of electric vehicles (or vehicle types left to electrify). Garbage trucks run early in the day, while delivery trucks and city vehicles do more of a nine-to-five. Passenger vehicles are kind of all over the place, with some people taking them to work, while others sit in garages all day. Basically, lots of batteries—big and small—parked idle at different times to send power back to the grid.

All the while, fiercer heat waves will require more energy-hungry air conditioning to keep people healthy. (Though ideally, everyone would get a heat pump instead.) “We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility so we can deploy it quicker,” Schneider said. In the near future, you may get home on a sweltering day and still be able to switch on your AC—thanks to an electric school bus sitting in a lot. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wheels on this bus do indeed go round and round. Its wipers swish. And its horn beeps. Hidden in its innards, though, is something special—a motor that doesn’t vroom but pairs with a burgeoning technology that could help the grid proliferate with renewable energy.

These new buses, developed by a company called Zum, ride clean and quiet because they’re fully electric. With them, California’s Oakland Unified School District just became the first major district in the United States to transition to 100 percent electrified buses.

The vehicles are now transporting 1,300 students to and from school, replacing diesel-chugging buses that pollute the kids’ lungs and the neighborhoods with particulate matter. Like in other American cities, Oakland’s underserved areas tend to be closer to freeways and industrial activity, so air quality in those areas is already terrible compared to the city’s richer parts.

Buses, garbage trucks, and other electric vehicles with defined routes can serve as reliable backup batteries during times of peak power demand.

Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism. Since Oakland Unified only provides bus services for its special-need students, the problem of missing school for preventable health issues is particularly acute for them. “We have already seen the data—more kids riding the buses, that means more of our most vulnerable who are not missing school,” said Kyla Johnson-Trammell, superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, during a press conference Tuesday. “That, over time, means they’re having more learning and achievement goes up.”

What’s more, a core challenge of weaning our society off fossil fuels is that utilities will need to produce more electricity, not less of it. “In some places, you’re talking about doubling the amount of energy needed,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. 

Counterintuitively enough, the buses’ massive batteries aren’t straining the grid; they’re benefiting it. Like a growing number of consumer EV models, the buses are equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G. That allows them to charge their batteries by plugging into the grid, but also send energy back to the grid if the electrical utility needs extra power. “School buses play a very important role in the community as a transportation provider, but now also as an energy provider,” said Vivek Garg, co-founder and chief operating officer of Zum.

And provide the buses must. Demand on the grid tends to spike in the late afternoon, when everyone is returning home and switching on appliances like air conditioners. Historically, utilities could just spin up more generation at a fossil fuel power plant to meet that demand. But as the grid is loaded with more renewable energy sources, intermittency becomes a challenge: You can’t crank up power in the system if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

“We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility.”

If every EV has V2G capability, that creates a distributed network of batteries for a utility to draw on when demand spikes. The nature of the school bus suits it perfectly for this, because it’s on a fixed schedule, making it a predictable resource for the utility. In the afternoon, Zum’s buses take kids home, then plug back into the grid. “They have more energy in each bus than they need to do their route, so there’s always an ample amount left over,” said Rudi Halbright, product manager of V2G integration at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the utility that’s partnered with Zum and Oakland Unified for the new system.

As the night goes on and demand wanes, the buses charge again to be ready for their morning routes. Then during the day, they charge again, when there’s plentiful solar power on the grid. On weekends or holidays, the buses would be available all day as backup power for the grid. “Sure, they’re going to take a very large amount of charge,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. “But things like school buses don’t run that often, so they have a great potential to be a resource.”

That resource ain’t free: Utilities pay owners of V2G vehicles to provide power to the grid. (Because V2G is so new, utilities are still experimenting with what this rate structure looks like.) Zum says that that revenue helps bring down the transportation costs of its buses to be on par with cheaper diesel-powered buses. Oakland Unified and other districts can get still more money from the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program, which is handing out $5 billion between 2022 and 2026 to make the switch.

The potential of V2G is that there are so many different kinds of electric vehicles (or vehicle types left to electrify). Garbage trucks run early in the day, while delivery trucks and city vehicles do more of a nine-to-five. Passenger vehicles are kind of all over the place, with some people taking them to work, while others sit in garages all day. Basically, lots of batteries—big and small—parked idle at different times to send power back to the grid.

All the while, fiercer heat waves will require more energy-hungry air conditioning to keep people healthy. (Though ideally, everyone would get a heat pump instead.) “We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility so we can deploy it quicker,” Schneider said. In the near future, you may get home on a sweltering day and still be able to switch on your AC—thanks to an electric school bus sitting in a lot.