Normal view
Elon Musk’s New “Election Integrity Community” Is Already Full of Lies
Over the past few months, Elon Musk has seemingly done everything in his power to get former President Donald Trump reelected.
On Monday, he debuted another effort: X added a purported “Election Integrity Community”—a feed where users of the site can add instances “of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” America PAC—the political action committee Musk founded and reportedly sent $75 million—is behind the move. By Tuesday afternoon, the “Election Integrity Community” had 10,000 members.
The crowdsourced space appears meant to replace X’s actual team of people employed to ensure election integrity, which Musk said he disbanded last year. But the channel has already been filled with misinformation.
“Everyone needs to watch the movie 2000 Mules to understand what happened in 2020 and be better prepared for it,” one member posted Monday. The discredited film by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, 2,000 Mules, is the movie that Trump falsely claimed showed widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. It has since been recalled by its distributor.
Several posters in the X community also have shared a video from NBC Boston alleging ballot fraud—which, as the “community note” points out, is actually from a local election in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, last November, and led to two people being indicted on voter fraud charges.
Another video circulating in the community purports to show a poll worker destroying a ballot filled out for Trump—but as fact-checks from Reuters and Politifact explain, the video was made as a joke four years ago by someone who admitted they were not actually an election worker.
As Mother Jones has previously reported, Musk’s other moves have included making legally dubious payments to pro-Trump voters in swing states and sharing anti-Democrat disinformation on X, the platform he owns.
The new channel may sound harmless enough—righteous, even. The problem is that voter fraud is rare—and, as I reported yesterday, the right is using unjustified fears about undocumented immigrants and dead people voting to rile up their base to closely monitor polls in ways that could lead to violence on Election Day.
It’s unclear if Musk’s new initiative has any formal connections to the Republican National Committee’s so-called election integrity initiative, which has recruited 200,000 pro-Trump poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the election results should Trump lose, as the New Yorker recently reported. A GOP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones about whether the party was aware of or connected to Musk’s effort, and X no longer responds to journalists’ questions under Musk’s ownership.
One irony of the new “election integrity” channel is that research has shown Musk and his platform are massive purveyors of election-related disinformation. For example, Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states after President Biden dropped out, prompting five secretaries of state to demand Musk “immediately implement changes” to the tool.
The goal of the new community appears to be helping elect Trump—and reverse-engineering allegations of fraud. One member said the quiet part out loud in a post early Tuesday morning: “Congratulations in advance, Trump.”
Elon Musk’s New “Election Integrity Community” Is Already Full of Lies
Over the past few months, Elon Musk has seemingly done everything in his power to get former President Donald Trump reelected.
On Monday, he debuted another effort: X added a purported “Election Integrity Community”—a feed where users of the site can add instances “of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” America PAC—the political action committee Musk founded and reportedly sent $75 million—is behind the move. By Tuesday afternoon, the “Election Integrity Community” had 10,000 members.
The crowdsourced space appears meant to replace X’s actual team of people employed to ensure election integrity, which Musk said he disbanded last year. But the channel has already been filled with misinformation.
“Everyone needs to watch the movie 2000 Mules to understand what happened in 2020 and be better prepared for it,” one member posted Monday. The discredited film by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, 2,000 Mules, is the movie that Trump falsely claimed showed widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. It has since been recalled by its distributor.
Several posters in the X community also have shared a video from NBC Boston alleging ballot fraud—which, as the “community note” points out, is actually from a local election in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, last November, and led to two people being indicted on voter fraud charges.
Another video circulating in the community purports to show a poll worker destroying a ballot filled out for Trump—but as fact-checks from Reuters and Politifact explain, the video was made as a joke four years ago by someone who admitted they were not actually an election worker.
As Mother Jones has previously reported, Musk’s other moves have included making legally dubious payments to pro-Trump voters in swing states and sharing anti-Democrat disinformation on X, the platform he owns.
The new channel may sound harmless enough—righteous, even. The problem is that voter fraud is rare—and, as I reported yesterday, the right is using unjustified fears about undocumented immigrants and dead people voting to rile up their base to closely monitor polls in ways that could lead to violence on Election Day.
It’s unclear if Musk’s new initiative has any formal connections to the Republican National Committee’s so-called election integrity initiative, which has recruited 200,000 pro-Trump poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the election results should Trump lose, as the New Yorker recently reported. A GOP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones about whether the party was aware of or connected to Musk’s effort, and X no longer responds to journalists’ questions under Musk’s ownership.
One irony of the new “election integrity” channel is that research has shown Musk and his platform are massive purveyors of election-related disinformation. For example, Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states after President Biden dropped out, prompting five secretaries of state to demand Musk “immediately implement changes” to the tool.
The goal of the new community appears to be helping elect Trump—and reverse-engineering allegations of fraud. One member said the quiet part out loud in a post early Tuesday morning: “Congratulations in advance, Trump.”
Officials Are Sounding the Alarm Over Musk’s Payments to Pro-Trump Voters
After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.
As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.
While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”
Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said officials were aware of the concerns but could not comment on whether they were investigating.)
WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024
Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”
Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.
This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.
Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.
Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with a response from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.
Officials Are Sounding the Alarm Over Musk’s Payments to Pro-Trump Voters
After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.
As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.
While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”
Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said officials were aware of the concerns but could not comment on whether they were investigating.)
WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024
Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”
Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.
This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.
Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.
Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with a response from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.
Elon Musk Is Offering People Cash To Identify Trump Voters. What Could Go Wrong?
Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, has gone “Deep MAGA.” The billionaire owner of X—the “everything app“—endorsed Donald Trump seconds after the former president was nearly assassinated in July, and within a few days was hatching plans to spend $45 million to get Trump elected. On Saturday, Musk joined the former president on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he did his signature hop (which is vaguely in the shape of an X), and predicted that if Kamala Harris is elected there will be no more elections in the United States.
Musk has a habit of making predictions that don’t amount to much. It is one of the defining facets of his personality, up there with scientific racism and being a guy with a signature hop. You can go online and watch a supercut of him promising fully autonomous self-driving cars every year since 2014. Musk promised to put a man on Mars “in 10 years” 13 years ago. He revised his prediction, in 2016, to say that he would send humans to Mars in 2024. Sometimes you have to set aside the net worth and remember you are talking about someone who believes that people have gotten smarter because C-sections make it easier for babies to have big heads.
So, there’s a good chance he’s wrong about a President Kamala Harris ending democracy as we know it. But the money he and his allies are spending is real. America PAC, the super-PAC Musk launched over the summer with a promise to not be “hyper-partisan” and a goal of saving “meritocracy,” has spent more than $8 million this year on independent expenditures boosting Republican candidates, and tens of millions of dollars on paid organizers to support Trump’s campaign efforts.
It has not been entirely smooth—the New York Times recently reported that Musk’s PAC cut ties with the consulting it was using to run its field operations, and hired a new one. But on Sunday, he unveiled a secret weapon for the campaign, straight from the world of gym memberships: Refer a friend! Specifically, Musk is offering to pay $47 to anyone who successfully gets a registered voter in a swing state to sign a petition “to support the Constitution,” by which he means “The First and Second Amendments.” Per the fine print:
Each person may only sign this petition once. Eligible people may only list one eligible person as their referrer. Before payment is made, America PAC will verify the accuracy of all information of the referrer and referee.
This is a perfect Musk stunt for two reasons. One is that he seemingly chose this number as a gimmick because Trump would be the 47th president. (This is a guy who was once fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after tweeting that he could take Tesla private at $420 a share.) The other is the confidence with which Musk is attempting to invent the concept of “email lists.”
His end goal is fairly straightforward. America PAC wants to collect data on Trump supporters for the purposes of turning them out on or before Election Day. It is like any email asking you to wish Hillary Clinton a Happy Birthday or to sign this petition to urge Congress to stop adults from ordering off the kids menu. If you are anything like me, you are besieged with list-building petitions and surveys, and you try to tune them out. (Then again, I’ve never had anyone offer me money to get someone to sign one.)
Musk is essentially paying people to collect voter information—which is a standard thing campaigns and organizations do, only in this arrangement he’s paying his distributed organizers by the signature instead of by the hour. His PAC is banking on that cash incentive to juice the MAGA outreach effort, and hopefully identify some new Trump voters. It can then use the information to get out the vote.
This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.
It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. A Washington Post story from July on how Musk ended up endorsing Trump included the following anecdote:
Musk asked people in the room to tell their friends to vote for Trump, saying he had learned from his experience selling Teslas that word-of-mouth promotion was critical. Some people in the crowd shook their heads and winced.
After his appearance in Butler, according to Politico, Musk planned on making more campaign appearances in the state where he once lived while attending the University of Pennsylvania. (The Politico piece includes the immortal line: “In addition to the Steelers, he is also a Philadelphia Eagles fan.”) Republicans love his money, no doubt. But it’s sort of peak donor-brain to think that swing-state voters want to hear anything more from a union-buster with the emotional maturity of a seventh-grade gamer.
Part of being so rich is that no one ever really says “no” to you. You can use drugs and keep your security clearance. You can joke about someone assassinating the vice president and still keep your federal contracts. An employee can accuse you of offering them a horse in exchange for sex and it will not necessarily become the one thing everyone knows about you. (Musk has called that last allegation “utterly untrue.”)
This social immunity has largely redounded to Musk’s benefit, even if one would not necessarily read his missives and conclude that this is a man who is “doing well.” But Musk’s lack of accountability has often clouded his judgment.
The classic rich person’s delusion is to assume people want your wisdom when all they are really after is your money. Because not every billionaire’s idea is a billion-dollar idea. This one may result in a large number of people, who aren’t necessarily who they say they are, looking to make a few bucks. Come to think of it, that actually sounds a lot like Elon Musk’s X.
Elon Musk Is Offering People Cash To Identify Trump Voters. What Could Go Wrong?
Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, has gone “Deep MAGA.” The billionaire owner of X—the “everything app“—endorsed Donald Trump seconds after the former president was nearly assassinated in July, and within a few days was hatching plans to spend $45 million to get Trump elected. On Saturday, Musk joined the former president on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he did his signature hop (which is vaguely in the shape of an X), and predicted that if Kamala Harris is elected there will be no more elections in the United States.
Musk has a habit of making predictions that don’t amount to much. It is one of the defining facets of his personality, up there with scientific racism and being a guy with a signature hop. You can go online and watch a supercut of him promising fully autonomous self-driving cars every year since 2014. Musk promised to put a man on Mars “in 10 years” 13 years ago. He revised his prediction, in 2016, to say that he would send humans to Mars in 2024. Sometimes you have to set aside the net worth and remember you are talking about someone who believes that people have gotten smarter because C-sections make it easier for babies to have big heads.
So, there’s a good chance he’s wrong about a President Kamala Harris ending democracy as we know it. But the money he and his allies are spending is real. America PAC, the super-PAC Musk launched over the summer with a promise to not be “hyper-partisan” and a goal of saving “meritocracy,” has spent more than $8 million this year on independent expenditures boosting Republican candidates, and tens of millions of dollars on paid organizers to support Trump’s campaign efforts.
It has not been entirely smooth—the New York Times recently reported that Musk’s PAC cut ties with the consulting it was using to run its field operations, and hired a new one. But on Sunday, he unveiled a secret weapon for the campaign, straight from the world of gym memberships: Refer a friend! Specifically, Musk is offering to pay $47 to anyone who successfully gets a registered voter in a swing state to sign a petition “to support the Constitution,” by which he means “The First and Second Amendments.” Per the fine print:
Each person may only sign this petition once. Eligible people may only list one eligible person as their referrer. Before payment is made, America PAC will verify the accuracy of all information of the referrer and referee.
This is a perfect Musk stunt for two reasons. One is that he seemingly chose this number as a gimmick because Trump would be the 47th president. (This is a guy who was once fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after tweeting that he could take Tesla private at $420 a share.) The other is the confidence with which Musk is attempting to invent the concept of “email lists.”
His end goal is fairly straightforward. America PAC wants to collect data on Trump supporters for the purposes of turning them out on or before Election Day. It is like any email asking you to wish Hillary Clinton a Happy Birthday or to sign this petition to urge Congress to stop adults from ordering off the kids menu. If you are anything like me, you are besieged with list-building petitions and surveys, and you try to tune them out. (Then again, I’ve never had anyone offer me money to get someone to sign one.)
Musk is essentially paying people to collect voter information—which is a standard thing campaigns and organizations do, only in this arrangement he’s paying his distributed organizers by the signature instead of by the hour. His PAC is banking on that cash incentive to juice the MAGA outreach effort, and hopefully identify some new Trump voters. It can then use the information to get out the vote.
This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.
It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. A Washington Post story from July on how Musk ended up endorsing Trump included the following anecdote:
Musk asked people in the room to tell their friends to vote for Trump, saying he had learned from his experience selling Teslas that word-of-mouth promotion was critical. Some people in the crowd shook their heads and winced.
After his appearance in Butler, according to Politico, Musk planned on making more campaign appearances in the state where he once lived while attending the University of Pennsylvania. (The Politico piece includes the immortal line: “In addition to the Steelers, he is also a Philadelphia Eagles fan.”) Republicans love his money, no doubt. But it’s sort of peak donor-brain to think that swing-state voters want to hear anything more from a union-buster with the emotional maturity of a seventh-grade gamer.
Part of being so rich is that no one ever really says “no” to you. You can use drugs and keep your security clearance. You can joke about someone assassinating the vice president and still keep your federal contracts. An employee can accuse you of offering them a horse in exchange for sex and it will not necessarily become the one thing everyone knows about you. (Musk has called that last allegation “utterly untrue.”)
This social immunity has largely redounded to Musk’s benefit, even if one would not necessarily read his missives and conclude that this is a man who is “doing well.” But Musk’s lack of accountability has often clouded his judgment.
The classic rich person’s delusion is to assume people want your wisdom when all they are really after is your money. Because not every billionaire’s idea is a billion-dollar idea. This one may result in a large number of people, who aren’t necessarily who they say they are, looking to make a few bucks. Come to think of it, that actually sounds a lot like Elon Musk’s X.
Elon Musk Co-Starred in Trump’s Disinformation Fest in Butler
On Saturday, Elon Musk furthered an ongoing effort in support of Donald Trump: He went onstage to sow misinformation about the integrity of American elections.
At the former president’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—in the same location where Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July—Musk awkwardly took to the stage in a Black MAGA hat and a t-shirt that said “OCCUPY MARS,” jumping up and down on his way to the podium. The right-wing owner of X then falsely told the crowd that “the other side” wants “to take away your right to vote, effectively.”
Musk offered no evidence to back up that claim. (The Republican Party has in fact worked for a long time to disenfranchise voters and rig the voting system in its favor.) He lambasted a new California law that bans local governments from requiring people to present identification to vote. “I still can’t believe that’s real,” Musk said of that law and other voter ID policies in more than a dozen other states. “How are you supposed to have a good, proper election if there’s no ID? It’s just meaningless,” he claimed.
That is highly misleading: As the National Conference of State Legislatures has made clear, states without voter ID laws use other methods, such as signatures on file, to verify voters’ identities. Meanwhile, research shows that strict ID laws do not impact voter fraud—which is very rare in US elections to begin with. What impact such laws do have is reducing turnout among minority voters and deterring them from voting.
This is far from the first time Musk has spread these kinds of falsehoods. As I reported back in August, research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Musk frequently spread false claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud and that Democrats are “importing voters” through illegal immigration—claims that, along with a deepfake of Vice President Kamala Harris that Musk re-posted, racked up a staggering 1.2 billion views.
Musk also repeated in a lengthy screed last week false claims about Democrats recruiting undocumented people to vote. But as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported:
Noncitizen voting is a non-issue, despite Republicans’ best efforts to make it one… a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.
Musk also repeated his baseless claims on Saturday that Democrats are censuring speech. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. And if people don’t know what’s going on, if they don’t know the truth, how can you make an informed vote?” he said. “You must have free speech in order to have democracy.”
Musk’s stated concerns about free speech and truth seem especially strange given that the CCDH report found that Musk’s own social media platform is an engine of disinformation. In August, five secretaries of state warned Musk about Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium X subscribers, after it disseminated false information about Harris being ineligible to appear on the ballots in multiple states.
- Mother Jones
- Your Phones and Computers Rely on This Remote North Carolina Mine. Helene Just Walloped It.
Your Phones and Computers Rely on This Remote North Carolina Mine. Helene Just Walloped It.
This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
You wouldn’t expect to find the linchpin of the global microchip industry tucked away in a Blue Ridge Mountains town, but it’s there. Scattered across the outskirts of Spruce Pine, a series of mines has been extracting some of the purest quartz on Earth for decades. The resource is so essential that almost every advanced microchip produced today touches it during the manufacturing process.
Those mines are now closed indefinitely, after Hurricane Helene dumped 2 feet of water on Spruce Pine, devastating the area. And with this singular supply of ultra-pure quartz cut off for the foreseeable future, the world’s supply of chips hangs in the balance.
To be clear, Spruce Pine is not the only place on the planet with high-purity quartz. Quartz, which is mostly made of crystallized silicon, is the second-most abundant mineral in Earth’s crust. But what’s beneath Spruce Pine is special.
Spruce Pine lies along a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains that were formed when two paleocontinents collided to create a single landmass, Pangea, some 380 million years ago. The precise conditions around that collision meant few impurities mixed into the molten minerals that swirled miles beneath the surface. Now cooled and worn, the rocks around Spruce Pine has the look of a dirty snowball thanks to a combination of feldspar, mica, and quartz. When ground up, it just looks like white sand, but when isolated, the quartz is perhaps the purest in the world.
“It’s not like the silicon that comes out of the ground in North Carolina then becomes part of a silicon chip,” said Ed Conway, author of Material World. “But you can’t make a silicon chip without it.”
Because it needs minimal refining after being pulled from the ground, Spruce Pine quartz is also cheaper than the competition. That doesn’t mean it’s cheap. High-purity Spruce Pine quartz can sell for up to $20,000 per ton, and the waste materials from mining are pristine enough that they’re even used to fill the bunkers at the Augusta National Golf Course, home of the Master’s tournament.
The high-silicon, low-contaminant nature of Spruce Pine quartz makes it integral to advanced chip manufacturing, where even an atomic quantity of impurity can jam up the circuitry etched into a semiconductor. The chips themselves aren’t actually made of quartz. High-purity quartz crucibles are used to melt down polysilicon, the pure silicon needed to make computer chips and solar panels.
The crucibles only last a few weeks before they need to be replaced, and the need for advanced chips is increasing at a breakneck pace. A surge in AI-powered devices is expected to increase global demand for advanced chips by at least 30 percent by 2026, according to a recent Bain report that warned of an imminent shortage.
By some estimates, Spruce Pine accounted for 70 percent of the high-purity quartz needed to produce the pure silicon used to make most advanced chips, including those needed for AI. On top of that, a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, manufactures the majority of those chips. And now, the disaster in Spruce Pine is drawing attention to how fragile the global chip supply chain already is.
“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon,” said Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University who studies solar cell supply chains.
We don’t yet know how bad the damage is at the Spruce Pine mining facilities. The two companies that own most of the quartz mines, Sibelco and the Quartz Corp, both halted production on September 26, as the storm was moving through western North Carolina. Images of Spruce Pine show the downtown completely flooded and buildings washed out near the rail lines that connect the mines to the rest of the world.
Sibelco said in a statement that it was “actively collaborating with government agencies and third-party rescue and recovery operations to mitigate the impact of this event and to resume operations as soon as possible.” The Quartz Corp is similarly assessing the situation at its three mines in the area as well as the infrastructure around them, and “its US plants are stopped for an unknown duration,” the company’s spokesperson May Kristin Haugen said in an email.
As for how much this will upend the global chip supply chain, well, we’ll have to wait and see.
Even with the Spruce Pine mines offline, chipmakers should have stockpiles of polysilicon or the ultra-pure quartz they need to make it available for some amount of time. And if they run out of the Spruce Pine quartz, there are other sources of quartz in places like China and India that are viable but not as high quality or cost effective.
And, perhaps anticipating some future disaster, the mining companies in Spruce Pine don’t keep all their high-purity quartz on site. “Between our own safety stocks, which are built in different locations, and the ones down in the value chain, we are not concerned about shortages in the short or medium term,” said Haugen, who cited the pandemic as a teaching moment in supply chain resiliency.
What we might expect, however, is prices of some electronics to rise. If there’s not enough Spruce Pine quartz to go around, especially in the long term, the industry will have to come up with alternative sources of high-purity quartz. The methods for refining those minerals elsewhere are more resource intensive and potentially carry a heavier carbon footprint because the quartz used as a raw material doesn’t start out as pure as the quartz from Spruce Pine. As one expert told Wired magazine, the climate-fueled flooding in western North Carolina could lead to more negative consequences for the climate, contributing to more disasters in the future.
To many casual technology users, this all comes as a surprise. After all, we’re used to thinking about chips being designed in Silicon Valley and then made in Taiwan. Of course these places aren’t safe from shocks—earthquakes and wildfires are a threat in Southern California and Taiwan is prone to earthquakes and landslides. We don’t often think about the many raw materials needed to fill the supply chain and the globalized economy’s habit of always seeking out the cheapest available option, even if it comes from a single small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains that happens to be prone to floods.
“We just don’t pay much attention, or as much attention as we should, to the underbelly of our economy,” said Conway. “And this is part of the underbelly.”
- Mother Jones
- Your Phones and Computers Rely on This Remote North Carolina Mine. Helene Just Walloped It.
Your Phones and Computers Rely on This Remote North Carolina Mine. Helene Just Walloped It.
This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
You wouldn’t expect to find the linchpin of the global microchip industry tucked away in a Blue Ridge Mountains town, but it’s there. Scattered across the outskirts of Spruce Pine, a series of mines has been extracting some of the purest quartz on Earth for decades. The resource is so essential that almost every advanced microchip produced today touches it during the manufacturing process.
Those mines are now closed indefinitely, after Hurricane Helene dumped 2 feet of water on Spruce Pine, devastating the area. And with this singular supply of ultra-pure quartz cut off for the foreseeable future, the world’s supply of chips hangs in the balance.
To be clear, Spruce Pine is not the only place on the planet with high-purity quartz. Quartz, which is mostly made of crystallized silicon, is the second-most abundant mineral in Earth’s crust. But what’s beneath Spruce Pine is special.
Spruce Pine lies along a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains that were formed when two paleocontinents collided to create a single landmass, Pangea, some 380 million years ago. The precise conditions around that collision meant few impurities mixed into the molten minerals that swirled miles beneath the surface. Now cooled and worn, the rocks around Spruce Pine has the look of a dirty snowball thanks to a combination of feldspar, mica, and quartz. When ground up, it just looks like white sand, but when isolated, the quartz is perhaps the purest in the world.
“It’s not like the silicon that comes out of the ground in North Carolina then becomes part of a silicon chip,” said Ed Conway, author of Material World. “But you can’t make a silicon chip without it.”
Because it needs minimal refining after being pulled from the ground, Spruce Pine quartz is also cheaper than the competition. That doesn’t mean it’s cheap. High-purity Spruce Pine quartz can sell for up to $20,000 per ton, and the waste materials from mining are pristine enough that they’re even used to fill the bunkers at the Augusta National Golf Course, home of the Master’s tournament.
The high-silicon, low-contaminant nature of Spruce Pine quartz makes it integral to advanced chip manufacturing, where even an atomic quantity of impurity can jam up the circuitry etched into a semiconductor. The chips themselves aren’t actually made of quartz. High-purity quartz crucibles are used to melt down polysilicon, the pure silicon needed to make computer chips and solar panels.
The crucibles only last a few weeks before they need to be replaced, and the need for advanced chips is increasing at a breakneck pace. A surge in AI-powered devices is expected to increase global demand for advanced chips by at least 30 percent by 2026, according to a recent Bain report that warned of an imminent shortage.
By some estimates, Spruce Pine accounted for 70 percent of the high-purity quartz needed to produce the pure silicon used to make most advanced chips, including those needed for AI. On top of that, a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, manufactures the majority of those chips. And now, the disaster in Spruce Pine is drawing attention to how fragile the global chip supply chain already is.
“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon,” said Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University who studies solar cell supply chains.
We don’t yet know how bad the damage is at the Spruce Pine mining facilities. The two companies that own most of the quartz mines, Sibelco and the Quartz Corp, both halted production on September 26, as the storm was moving through western North Carolina. Images of Spruce Pine show the downtown completely flooded and buildings washed out near the rail lines that connect the mines to the rest of the world.
Sibelco said in a statement that it was “actively collaborating with government agencies and third-party rescue and recovery operations to mitigate the impact of this event and to resume operations as soon as possible.” The Quartz Corp is similarly assessing the situation at its three mines in the area as well as the infrastructure around them, and “its US plants are stopped for an unknown duration,” the company’s spokesperson May Kristin Haugen said in an email.
As for how much this will upend the global chip supply chain, well, we’ll have to wait and see.
Even with the Spruce Pine mines offline, chipmakers should have stockpiles of polysilicon or the ultra-pure quartz they need to make it available for some amount of time. And if they run out of the Spruce Pine quartz, there are other sources of quartz in places like China and India that are viable but not as high quality or cost effective.
And, perhaps anticipating some future disaster, the mining companies in Spruce Pine don’t keep all their high-purity quartz on site. “Between our own safety stocks, which are built in different locations, and the ones down in the value chain, we are not concerned about shortages in the short or medium term,” said Haugen, who cited the pandemic as a teaching moment in supply chain resiliency.
What we might expect, however, is prices of some electronics to rise. If there’s not enough Spruce Pine quartz to go around, especially in the long term, the industry will have to come up with alternative sources of high-purity quartz. The methods for refining those minerals elsewhere are more resource intensive and potentially carry a heavier carbon footprint because the quartz used as a raw material doesn’t start out as pure as the quartz from Spruce Pine. As one expert told Wired magazine, the climate-fueled flooding in western North Carolina could lead to more negative consequences for the climate, contributing to more disasters in the future.
To many casual technology users, this all comes as a surprise. After all, we’re used to thinking about chips being designed in Silicon Valley and then made in Taiwan. Of course these places aren’t safe from shocks—earthquakes and wildfires are a threat in Southern California and Taiwan is prone to earthquakes and landslides. We don’t often think about the many raw materials needed to fill the supply chain and the globalized economy’s habit of always seeking out the cheapest available option, even if it comes from a single small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains that happens to be prone to floods.
“We just don’t pay much attention, or as much attention as we should, to the underbelly of our economy,” said Conway. “And this is part of the underbelly.”
The AI Boom Has Raised Hopes for a Nuclear Comeback
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
For five years, reactor one at Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania has lain dormant. Now, thanks to a deal with Microsoft, the reactor will start running again in 2028—this time to exclusively supply the tech firm with oodles of low-carbon electricity.
It’s all part of an ongoing flirtation between Big Tech and nuclear power. In March, Amazon Web Services agreed to buy a data center powered by Susquehanna nuclear power station in Pennsylvania. At an event at Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned small modular nuclear reactors as one potential source of energy for data centers. The links don’t stop there either: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chairs the boards of nuclear startups Oklo and Helion Energy.
The AI boom has left technology companies scrambling for low-carbon sources of energy to power their data centers. The International Energy Agency estimates that electricity demand from AI, data centers, and crypto could more than double by 2026. Even its lowball estimates say that the added demand will be equivalent to all the electricity used in Sweden or—in the high-usage case—Germany.
This surge in energy demand is music to the ears of the nuclear power industry. Electricity demand in the US has been fairly flat for decades, but the sheer scale and intensity of the AI boom is changing that dynamic. One December 2023 report from a power industry consultancy declared the era of flat power demand over, thanks to growing demand from data centers and industrial facilities. The report forecasts that peak electricity demand in the US will grow by 38 gigawatts by 2028, roughly equivalent to 46 times the output of reactor one at Three Mile Island.
“[AI] is really taking off, and it’s garnering a lot of attention in the energy industry,” says John Kotek, senior vice president for policy development and public affairs at nuclear industry trade association the Nuclear Energy Institute. Kotek says there’s also a national security angle. “People legitimately see AI as a field of competition between the US and our global competitors.” The US falling behind in the AI race because it doesn’t have enough power “is something that’s really causing people to focus attention,” he says.
Nuclear power is attractive to tech companies because it provides low-carbon electricity round-the-clock, unlike solar and wind, which run intermittently unless coupled with a form of energy storage. Reactivating reactor one will provide Microsoft with 835 megawatts of low-carbon energy over the 20 years that the deal will run for. Since Microsoft has pledged to be carbon negative by 2030, spiraling electricity demand from AI poses a major threat to the firm’s climate plans unless it can find sources of low-carbon power. In 2023, Microsoft’s emissions increased by 29 percent compared with 2020, primarily driven by the construction of new data centers.
Three Mile Island nuclear power station has two reactors. The second reactor was infamously the site of a partial meltdown in 1979 and it has remained out of action ever since. But reactor one kept on chugging away without incident until 2019, when it was taken offline for financial reasons—mainly due to competition from gas- and wind-powered electricity. Kotek says there are relatively few idle reactors that could also be brought back online fairly quickly, but that a lot of power plant owners are interested in extending their operating licenses of their existing plants to try and ride the AI power wave.
Part of the enthusiasm from power plant operators is due to government incentives to keep low-carbon power online. The Inflation Reduction Act includes tax credits tied to electricity production at existing nuclear power plants, but Kotek says that the industry will also have to get busy building new reactors if it wants to capture that projected energy demand. The number of operating nuclear reactors in the US peaked at 112 in 1990 and declined to 92 by 2022, and the most recently built reactors in the US—at Vogtle power plant in Georgia—took more than 14 years to build and came in at more than double the expected budget.
“The US showed at Vogtle that we’re not very good at building plants,” says Todd Allen, chair of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at University of Michigan. But Allen points out that China seems to build nuclear power plants much more quickly than the US, so speeding up is possible, and that if energy demand from data centers continues to grow, then building entirely new plants will increasingly look like an attractive option.
These potentially lengthy timescales are part of the reason why Microsoft is interested in small modular reactors, which should be quicker and cheaper to build. But tech firms have tended to emphasize searching for new sources of energy rather than improving the efficiency of their artificial intelligence operations, says Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate leader at Hugging Face, a company that develops tools for building applications using machine learning. “Regulation could be one way to incentivize [great efficiency], starting with mandatory reporting and transparency for companies providing AI tools and services,” she says.
At the Carnegie Mellon University event, Pichai said that work on improving the consumption side of AI’s energy usage was still in its “early phases.” “We are all inefficiently pretraining these models, absolutely,” he said, but added that inference—actually asking an AI model to perform a task—could become “dramatically more efficient over time.”
Google’s emissions in 2023 were 48 percent higher than their 2019 baseline, primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions, putting Google’s goal to reach net zero emissions by 2030 increasingly under threat. “The energy demands of AI are rising right now,” says Luccioni, but the renewable or low-carbon energy to fuel AI isn’t keeping pace quickly enough.
For some, the prospect of the site of the US’s most notorious nuclear disaster being used to power the AI revolution might sit uneasily. But Allen points out that reactor one did not shut down because of operational issues. Restarting the reactor, he says, will mostly be a question of making sure it is still in good operating condition and that there are enough trained staff to run it smoothly.
Big Tech Would Be Key to Delivering Project 2025’s Anti-Abortion Plans
If Project 2025 becomes a reality under a second Trump term, there are several ways it plans to further restrict and surveil abortion access nationwide, including criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills and forcing states to turn over abortion data to the federal government.
Many of these proposals have received wide media coverage thanks in part to Democrats’ aggressive campaigning on Project 2025. But there has been far less attention on how major technology companies—which have increasingly helped people access abortions across state lines in light of bans nationwide—could play a role. In fact, some warn that tech would be key to implementing Project 2025’s anti-abortion goals.
Advocates are now working to preemptively thwart such cooperation. Last week, 15 civil liberties groups sent a letter to the CEOs of eight of the biggest tech companies—including Meta, Apple, TikTok, and Google, among others—demanding they explain how they would protect users’ data and privacy, as well as combat abortion-related misinformation on their platforms if Project 2025’s anti-abortion recommendations were set in motion. “As written, Project 2025 would rely heavily on your companies to further its extreme agenda,” states the letter, which Mother Jones is the first to report. The signatories—which include Accountable Tech, GLAAD, and The Tech Oversight Project—warn that Project 2025’s anti-abortion policies would lead to “heightened surveillance and an increase in the trend of law enforcement using criminal subpoenas to weaponize the consumer data your companies collect and store.”
Many of these concerns have already been realized. Last year, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison after Meta gave law enforcement the Facebook messages in which she and her pregnant teenage daughter—who was reportedly past the state’s then-20-week gestational limit (that has since been further restricted to 12 weeks)—discussed obtaining abortion pills and disposing of “the evidence.” Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) office in February accused a data broker of allegedly tracking visits to almost 600 Planned Parenthood locations nationwide and then selling that information to anti-abortion advertisers. Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates say tech platforms have censored their initiatives.
All this, advocates say, makes it critical that tech companies prepare for how they could be deputized to criminalize abortion-seekers if Trump is reelected in November. “These companies are already mechanized to be the stewards of a nightmarish plan like Project 2025,” Daly Barnett, a staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group focused on digital rights, told me.
I spoke with Barnett over Zoom this week to discuss how abortion rights advocates can better protect themselves and their privacy online and how tech platforms could protect users in another Trump era.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.
What kind of failures or inadequacies have you seen from some of these tech platforms in terms of protecting users’ privacy and data relating to abortion?
There are a lot of passive surveillance technologies, like ad tracking technologies that collect browsing data on people that can be combined with other personally identifiable information and used against people. We have examples of commercial platforms like Google Search and Facebook Messenger used to actually criminalize women in different cases, either for their own pregnancy outcomes or, in the case of Facebook Messenger logs, a woman helping her daughter navigate self-managed abortion.
So these communication platforms or these messaging features on social media apps that aren’t employing good privacy and security practices are suddenly dangerous to people, and I think the tech industry at large has yet to realize how culpable they are.
Can you say more about what sort of digital threats or barriers abortion seekers are facing now, even without Project 2025 being in place?
I tend to break it down into three distinct threat models that people need to be aware of: people navigating healthcare and trying to seek abortion; their allies and advocates; and healthcare workers.
There’s digital evidence being used in abortion-related cases, so these [social media companies] that don’t think of themselves as culpable in abortion access can still be used against people when they have bad privacy. I also think of doxxing. Healthcare workers, especially, those whose information is subject to public records requests and FOIA, information could be used against them if they’re in reproductive healthcare. There are data brokers—which is an unregulated, vampiric nightmare industry that needs to be curtailed yesterday—that are constantly being weaponized against people. It contributes so much to the amount of data that can be collated and collected and used against people to create these vastly sophisticated portraits of who you are, what you’re doing online.
One example I think of with data brokers is [Sen. Wyden’s investigation]. That’s just an example of what happens when you have this unregulated industry that every tech company contributes to because it generates profit for them.
If there were a federal ban on abortion and abortion medications were suddenly outlawed, the surveillance of the mail service or of services that distribute medications like that would be under a newly focused threat of surveillance. Basically every aspect of our lives could potentially be used against us, depending on where we are in the abortion access struggle.
If Project 2025 were implemented under another Trump term, what would it actually look like in practice for some of these platforms to be involved with carrying out some of its anti-abortion aims?
As long as these tech companies have piss poor privacy and security policies—specifically privacy policies—around user data, ad tracking and collection, behavioral tracking of users’ data, they are already mechanized for some really dystopic consequences—Project 2025 or not. We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday.
In the meantime, users have to fight for themselves to keep their information and their dignity and safety intact.
As long as communication platforms and messaging features on social media apps— as long as the status quo is not to have good data retention or to not have end-to-end encryption—all of those records are subject to law enforcement requests to enter subpoena, and that will impact users’ safety. We already have examples of this, quite literally, in criminal evidence, so it will only increase in that potential landscape.
What are some of the concrete ways that tech companies can and should bolster privacy and data protection for abortion seekers now and under another potential Trump administration?
I’m glad you asked this; this is the most important thing. I think tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it, including law enforcement.
Everyone needs to take their position seriously in the tech industry. That can start with better data retention policies. You need to have solid encryption at rest so that when law enforcement comes knocking, if you do have anything to hand over, you can be compliant without actually handing over anything that’s useful to the criminal investigations. But also, you can just delete old data. Having good encryption is great, but if you have really good deleting policies, deleting anything that isn’t absolutely essential to operations, that keeps you safe from both law enforcement requests and subpoena, but also data breaches—that’s huge.
Another big thing: stop tracking users on web and mobile platforms. The ad industry is corrupt, and users are wisening up to it. People are already more likely to choose platforms that respect their privacy now, because the overall understanding of privacy is normalized, thankfully, and now that we have a better understanding of how dangerous the data broker industry is, it’s imperative that tech companies do better for people.
Lastly, I would say all of these policies—data retention, not ad tracking, users, etc.—[companies have to] make these things transparent. You need to make it known that you’re a privacy-first alternative to the otherwise dangerous status quo,
How can abortion seekers protect their data and privacy online now, particularly if they are living in states with abortion bans?
Step one is definitely threat modeling. You have to take a serious point of view about what activities you’re up to, who you are in the space, and the risky behaviors or communications or aspects of your life that need to be compartmentalized away from other things. From there, you can begin to take some more meaningful approaches—like compartmentalizing that data, so maybe having multiple browsers and saving a privacy-forward browser like Tor, or maybe Brave, or Firefox with some settings turned up on it, as opposed to a more privacy-invasive one like Chrome.
Knowing when to compartmentalize sensitive communications to a more privacy focused platform [is also important]—so moving off of social media chat applications and onto end-to-end encrypted ones. Knowing how to attend protests safely; knowing what to look for if you’re on the ground and you’re escorting people to and from clinics; getting to know automatic license plate readers; getting to know how your device might be tracked. There’s a litany of measures people can take to protect themselves. Go learn more at Surveillance Self-Defense, where we have a bunch of different educational resources for people to look at.
Big Tech Would Be Key to Delivering Project 2025’s Anti-Abortion Plans
If Project 2025 becomes a reality under a second Trump term, there are several ways it plans to further restrict and surveil abortion access nationwide, including criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills and forcing states to turn over abortion data to the federal government.
Many of these proposals have received wide media coverage thanks in part to Democrats’ aggressive campaigning on Project 2025. But there has been far less attention on how major technology companies—which have increasingly helped people access abortions across state lines in light of bans nationwide—could play a role. In fact, some warn that tech would be key to implementing Project 2025’s anti-abortion goals.
Advocates are now working to preemptively thwart such cooperation. Last week, 15 civil liberties groups sent a letter to the CEOs of eight of the biggest tech companies—including Meta, Apple, TikTok, and Google, among others—demanding they explain how they would protect users’ data and privacy, as well as combat abortion-related misinformation on their platforms if Project 2025’s anti-abortion recommendations were set in motion. “As written, Project 2025 would rely heavily on your companies to further its extreme agenda,” states the letter, which Mother Jones is the first to report. The signatories—which include Accountable Tech, GLAAD, and The Tech Oversight Project—warn that Project 2025’s anti-abortion policies would lead to “heightened surveillance and an increase in the trend of law enforcement using criminal subpoenas to weaponize the consumer data your companies collect and store.”
Many of these concerns have already been realized. Last year, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison after Meta gave law enforcement the Facebook messages in which she and her pregnant teenage daughter—who was reportedly past the state’s then-20-week gestational limit (that has since been further restricted to 12 weeks)—discussed obtaining abortion pills and disposing of “the evidence.” Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) office in February accused a data broker of allegedly tracking visits to almost 600 Planned Parenthood locations nationwide and then selling that information to anti-abortion advertisers. Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates say tech platforms have censored their initiatives.
All this, advocates say, makes it critical that tech companies prepare for how they could be deputized to criminalize abortion-seekers if Trump is reelected in November. “These companies are already mechanized to be the stewards of a nightmarish plan like Project 2025,” Daly Barnett, a staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group focused on digital rights, told me.
I spoke with Barnett over Zoom this week to discuss how abortion rights advocates can better protect themselves and their privacy online and how tech platforms could protect users in another Trump era.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.
What kind of failures or inadequacies have you seen from some of these tech platforms in terms of protecting users’ privacy and data relating to abortion?
There are a lot of passive surveillance technologies, like ad tracking technologies that collect browsing data on people that can be combined with other personally identifiable information and used against people. We have examples of commercial platforms like Google Search and Facebook Messenger used to actually criminalize women in different cases, either for their own pregnancy outcomes or, in the case of Facebook Messenger logs, a woman helping her daughter navigate self-managed abortion.
So these communication platforms or these messaging features on social media apps that aren’t employing good privacy and security practices are suddenly dangerous to people, and I think the tech industry at large has yet to realize how culpable they are.
Can you say more about what sort of digital threats or barriers abortion seekers are facing now, even without Project 2025 being in place?
I tend to break it down into three distinct threat models that people need to be aware of: people navigating healthcare and trying to seek abortion; their allies and advocates; and healthcare workers.
There’s digital evidence being used in abortion-related cases, so these [social media companies] that don’t think of themselves as culpable in abortion access can still be used against people when they have bad privacy. I also think of doxxing. Healthcare workers, especially, those whose information is subject to public records requests and FOIA, information could be used against them if they’re in reproductive healthcare. There are data brokers—which is an unregulated, vampiric nightmare industry that needs to be curtailed yesterday—that are constantly being weaponized against people. It contributes so much to the amount of data that can be collated and collected and used against people to create these vastly sophisticated portraits of who you are, what you’re doing online.
One example I think of with data brokers is [Sen. Wyden’s investigation]. That’s just an example of what happens when you have this unregulated industry that every tech company contributes to because it generates profit for them.
If there were a federal ban on abortion and abortion medications were suddenly outlawed, the surveillance of the mail service or of services that distribute medications like that would be under a newly focused threat of surveillance. Basically every aspect of our lives could potentially be used against us, depending on where we are in the abortion access struggle.
If Project 2025 were implemented under another Trump term, what would it actually look like in practice for some of these platforms to be involved with carrying out some of its anti-abortion aims?
As long as these tech companies have piss poor privacy and security policies—specifically privacy policies—around user data, ad tracking and collection, behavioral tracking of users’ data, they are already mechanized for some really dystopic consequences—Project 2025 or not. We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday.
In the meantime, users have to fight for themselves to keep their information and their dignity and safety intact.
As long as communication platforms and messaging features on social media apps— as long as the status quo is not to have good data retention or to not have end-to-end encryption—all of those records are subject to law enforcement requests to enter subpoena, and that will impact users’ safety. We already have examples of this, quite literally, in criminal evidence, so it will only increase in that potential landscape.
What are some of the concrete ways that tech companies can and should bolster privacy and data protection for abortion seekers now and under another potential Trump administration?
I’m glad you asked this; this is the most important thing. I think tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it, including law enforcement.
Everyone needs to take their position seriously in the tech industry. That can start with better data retention policies. You need to have solid encryption at rest so that when law enforcement comes knocking, if you do have anything to hand over, you can be compliant without actually handing over anything that’s useful to the criminal investigations. But also, you can just delete old data. Having good encryption is great, but if you have really good deleting policies, deleting anything that isn’t absolutely essential to operations, that keeps you safe from both law enforcement requests and subpoena, but also data breaches—that’s huge.
Another big thing: stop tracking users on web and mobile platforms. The ad industry is corrupt, and users are wisening up to it. People are already more likely to choose platforms that respect their privacy now, because the overall understanding of privacy is normalized, thankfully, and now that we have a better understanding of how dangerous the data broker industry is, it’s imperative that tech companies do better for people.
Lastly, I would say all of these policies—data retention, not ad tracking, users, etc.—[companies have to] make these things transparent. You need to make it known that you’re a privacy-first alternative to the otherwise dangerous status quo,
How can abortion seekers protect their data and privacy online now, particularly if they are living in states with abortion bans?
Step one is definitely threat modeling. You have to take a serious point of view about what activities you’re up to, who you are in the space, and the risky behaviors or communications or aspects of your life that need to be compartmentalized away from other things. From there, you can begin to take some more meaningful approaches—like compartmentalizing that data, so maybe having multiple browsers and saving a privacy-forward browser like Tor, or maybe Brave, or Firefox with some settings turned up on it, as opposed to a more privacy-invasive one like Chrome.
Knowing when to compartmentalize sensitive communications to a more privacy focused platform [is also important]—so moving off of social media chat applications and onto end-to-end encrypted ones. Knowing how to attend protests safely; knowing what to look for if you’re on the ground and you’re escorting people to and from clinics; getting to know automatic license plate readers; getting to know how your device might be tracked. There’s a litany of measures people can take to protect themselves. Go learn more at Surveillance Self-Defense, where we have a bunch of different educational resources for people to look at.
Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t Done With Politics. His Politics Have Just Changed.
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of the world’s richest men had recently experienced a major epiphany. After bankrolling a political organization that supported immigration reform, espousing his support for social justice, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support local election workers during the 2020 election, “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.”
The Facebook founder and part-time Hawaiian feudal lord, according to the piece, “believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company,” and felt burned by the criticism he has faced in recent years, on everything from the proliferation of disinformation on Facebook to his investment in election administration (which conservatives dismissively referred to as “Zuckerbucks”). He is mad, in other words, that people are mad at him, and it has made him rethink his entire theory of how the world works.
It’s an interesting piece, which identifies a real switch in how Zuckerberg—who along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, has made a non-binding pledge to give away a majority of his wealth by the end of his lifetime—thinks about his influence and his own ideology. But there’s a fallacy underpinning that headline: Zuckerberg isn’t done with politics. His politics have simply changed.
Like a lot of unfathomably wealthy people who have the resources to harvest their own beef, Zuckerberg now reportedly considers himself a “libertarian.” He has spent a lot of time in recent years attempting to cultivate a personal brand as a sort of happy-go-lucky #GirlDad. His new politics are not as ominous or viscerally off-putting as the red-pilled divorced energy of Elon Musk. But they are a politics. Deciding that you no longer want to advocate for a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform is as political as the act of advocating for it was. Responding to years of conspiracy theories and personal attacks from conservative politicians by cultivating closer relationships with them is a political tactic. According to the report, Zuckerberg twice talked to Donald Trump by phone this summer, while his new Republican political attache has sought to reassure the ex-president that Zuckerberg has no plans to spend money shoring up election infrastructure this year. It does not really get more political than a pleasant phone call with a man who tried a coup.
Zuckerberg’s efforts to discourage political activism among Meta employees (per the piece) mirror his own efforts to discourage political content on the platforms he controls, such as Facebook and Instagram. Attempting to mute or disincentivize political speech is, of course, a political act, and it betrays an ominous worldview. In that sense, at least, he and Musk aren’t so different; they’re collectively building a “digital public square” where you can find everything but reported, factual news. Zuckerberg has made it clear that he is frustrated with specific kinds of political speech—including criticism of him.
The truth is there is no such thing as an apolitical oligarch. Zuckerberg’s fortune came from a monopolistic enterprise that’s been used to foment ethnic cleansing and collectively unlearn a century-and-a-half of germ theory. His wealth is sustained and protected by political structures, and his spending and strategic priorities can make or break communities, newsrooms, and democratic norms. When he puts his foot down, you notice it. But when he lifts his foot up, you notice that too.
Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t Done With Politics. His Politics Have Just Changed.
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of the world’s richest men had recently experienced a major epiphany. After bankrolling a political organization that supported immigration reform, espousing his support for social justice, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support local election workers during the 2020 election, “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.”
The Facebook founder and part-time Hawaiian feudal lord, according to the piece, “believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company,” and felt burned by the criticism he has faced in recent years, on everything from the proliferation of disinformation on Facebook to his investment in election administration (which conservatives dismissively referred to as “Zuckerbucks”). He is mad, in other words, that people are mad at him, and it has made him rethink his entire theory of how the world works.
It’s an interesting piece, which identifies a real switch in how Zuckerberg—who along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, has made a non-binding pledge to give away a majority of his wealth by the end of his lifetime—thinks about his influence and his own ideology. But there’s a fallacy underpinning that headline: Zuckerberg isn’t done with politics. His politics have simply changed.
Like a lot of unfathomably wealthy people who have the resources to harvest their own beef, Zuckerberg now reportedly considers himself a “libertarian.” He has spent a lot of time in recent years attempting to cultivate a personal brand as a sort of happy-go-lucky #GirlDad. His new politics are not as ominous or viscerally off-putting as the red-pilled divorced energy of Elon Musk. But they are a politics. Deciding that you no longer want to advocate for a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform is as political as the act of advocating for it was. Responding to years of conspiracy theories and personal attacks from conservative politicians by cultivating closer relationships with them is a political tactic. According to the report, Zuckerberg twice talked to Donald Trump by phone this summer, while his new Republican political attache has sought to reassure the ex-president that Zuckerberg has no plans to spend money shoring up election infrastructure this year. It does not really get more political than a pleasant phone call with a man who tried a coup.
Zuckerberg’s efforts to discourage political activism among Meta employees (per the piece) mirror his own efforts to discourage political content on the platforms he controls, such as Facebook and Instagram. Attempting to mute or disincentivize political speech is, of course, a political act, and it betrays an ominous worldview. In that sense, at least, he and Musk aren’t so different; they’re collectively building a “digital public square” where you can find everything but reported, factual news. Zuckerberg has made it clear that he is frustrated with specific kinds of political speech—including criticism of him.
The truth is there is no such thing as an apolitical oligarch. Zuckerberg’s fortune came from a monopolistic enterprise that’s been used to foment ethnic cleansing and collectively unlearn a century-and-a-half of germ theory. His wealth is sustained and protected by political structures, and his spending and strategic priorities can make or break communities, newsrooms, and democratic norms. When he puts his foot down, you notice it. But when he lifts his foot up, you notice that too.
You can buy a diamond-making machine for $200,000 on Alibaba
In an age when you can get just about anything online, it's probably no surprise that you can buy a diamond-making machine for $200,000 on Chinese eCommerce site Alibaba. If, like me, you haven't been paying attention to the diamond industry, it turns out that the availability of these machines reflects an ongoing trend toward democratizing diamond production—a process that began decades ago and continues to evolve.
The history of lab-grown diamonds dates back at least half a century. According to Harvard graduate student Javid Lakha, writing in a comprehensive piece on lab-grown diamonds published in Works in Progress last month, the first successful synthesis of diamonds in a laboratory setting occurred in the 1950s. Lakha recounts how Howard Tracy Hall, a chemist at General Electric, created the first lab-grown diamonds using a high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) process that mimicked the conditions under which diamonds form in nature.
Since then, diamond-making technology has advanced significantly. Today, there are two primary methods for creating lab-grown diamonds: the HPHT process and chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Both types of machines are now listed on Alibaba, with prices starting at around $200,000, as pointed out in a Hacker News comment by engineer John Nagle (who goes by "Animats" on Hacker News). A CVD machine we found is more pricey, at around $450,000.
The Weather Gods Who Want Us to Believe They Can Make Rain on Demand
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
After I put on a hairnet, a lab coat, and tinted safety goggles, Matras shows me into a lab, where I watch a remarkable thing. Inside a broad, black box the size of a small television sits an immensely powerful laser. A tech switches it on. Nothing happens. Then Matras leans forward and opens a lens, focusing the laser beam.
There’s a high-pitched but very loud buzz, like the whine of an electric motor. It is the sound of the air being ripped apart. A very fine filament, maybe half a centimeter across, appears in midair. It looks like a strand of spider’s silk, but it’s bright blue. It’s plasma—the fourth state of matter. Scale up the size of the laser and the power, and you can actually set a small part of the atmosphere on fire. Man-made lightning. Obviously my first question is to ask what would happen if I put my hand in it. “Your hand would turn into plasma,” another researcher says, entirely deadpan. I put my hand back in my pocket.
Matras says these laser beams will be able to enhance rainfall in three ways. First, acoustically—like the concussion theory of old, it’s thought that the sound of atoms in the air being ripped apart might shake adjacent raindrops so that they coalesce, get bigger, and fall to earth. Second: convection—the beam will create heat, generating updrafts that will force droplets to mix. (I’m reminded of a never-realized 1840s plan to create rain by setting fire to large chunks of the Appalachian Mountains.) Finally: ionization. When the beam is switched off, the plasma will reform—the nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules inside will clump back together into random configurations, creating new particles for water to settle around.
The plan is to scale this technology up to something the size of a shipping container that can be put on the back of a truck and driven to where it’s needed. It seems insane—I’m suddenly very aware that I’m on a military base. Couldn’t this giant movable laser be used as a weapon? “Yes,” Matras says. He picks up a pencil, the nib honed to a sharp point. “But anything could be a weapon.”
These words hang over me as I ride back into the city, past lush golf courses and hotel fountains and workmen swigging from plastic bottles. Once again, there’s not a cloud in the sky. But maybe that doesn’t matter. For the UAE, so keen to project its technological prowess around the region and the world, it’s almost irrelevant whether cloud seeding works. There’s soft power in being seen to be able to bend the weather to your will—in 2018, an Iranian general accused the UAE and Israel of stealing his country’s rain.
Anything could be a weapon, Matras had said. But there are military weapons, and economic weapons, and cultural and political weapons too. Anything could be a weapon—even the idea of one.
The Weather Gods Who Want Us to Believe They Can Make Rain on Demand
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
How accurate are wearable fitness trackers? Less than you might think
Back in 2010, Gary Wolf, then the editor of Wired magazine, delivered a TED talk in Cannes called “the quantified self.” It was about what he termed a “new fad” among tech enthusiasts. These early adopters were using gadgets to monitor everything from their physiological data to their mood and even the number of nappies their children used.
Wolf acknowledged that these people were outliers—tech geeks fascinated by data—but their behavior has since permeated mainstream culture.
From the smartwatches that track our steps and heart rate, to the fitness bands that log sleep patterns and calories burned, these gadgets are now ubiquitous. Their popularity is emblematic of a modern obsession with quantification—the idea that if something isn’t logged, it doesn’t count.