As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine, and the risk of mass displacement, the World Meteorological Organization warned Thursday.
The 22 Arab region countries covered in the WMO’s new State of the Climate report produce about a quarter of the world’s oil, yet directly account for only 5 to 7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from their own territories. The climate paradox positions the region as both a linchpin of the global fossil-fuel economy and one of the most vulnerable geographic areas.
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said extreme heat is pushing communities in the region to their physical limits. Droughts show no sign of letting up in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions, but at the same time, parts of it have been devastated by record rains and flooding, she added.
When ice freezes and melts, it creates vortices that drag warmer waters from the depths to the surface, where they eat away at the continent's rapidly degrading ice shelves.
Global expectations around climate change has shifted dramatically in the last decade, suggesting that similarly significant changes are on the horizon.
On Tuesday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai warned of “irrationality” in the AI market, telling the BBC in an interview, “I think no company is going to be immune, including us.” His comments arrive as scrutiny over the state of the AI market has reached new heights, with Alphabet shares doubling in value over seven months to reach a $3.5 trillion market capitalization.
Speaking exclusively to the BBC at Google’s California headquarters, Pichai acknowledged that while AI investment growth is at an “extraordinary moment,” the industry can “overshoot” in investment cycles, as we’re seeing now. He drew comparisons to the late 1990s Internet boom, which saw early Internet company valuations surge before collapsing in 2000, leading to bankruptcies and job losses.
“We can look back at the Internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the Internet was profound,” Pichai said. “I expect AI to be the same. So I think it’s both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.”
It was October 2024, and Hurricane Helene had just devastated the US Southeast. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia found an abstract target on which to pin the blame: “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
There was no word on who “they” were, but maybe it was better that way.
She was repeating what’s by now a pretty familiar and popular conspiracy theory: that shadowy forces are out there, wielding unknown technology to control the weather and wreak havoc on their supposed enemies. This claim, fundamentally preposterous from a scientific standpoint, has grown louder and more common in recent years. It pops up over and over when extreme weather strikes: in Dubai in April 2024, in Australia in July 2022, in the US after California floods and hurricanes like Helene and Milton. In the UK, conspiracy theorists claimed that the government had fixed the weather to be sunny and rain-free during the first covid lockdown in March 2020. Most recently, the theories spread again when disastrous floods hit central Texas this past July. The idea has even inspired some antigovernment extremists to threaten and try to destroy weather radar towers.
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology.
But here’s the thing: While Greene and other believers are not correct, this conspiracy theory—like so many others—holds a kernel of much more modest truth behind the grandiose claims.
Sure, there is no current way for humans to control the weather. We can’t cause major floods or redirect hurricanes or other powerful storm systems, simply because the energy involved is far too great for humans to alter significantly.
But there are ways we can modify the weather. The key difference is the scale of what is possible.
The most common weather modification practice is called cloud seeding, and it involves injecting small amounts of salts or other materials into clouds with the goal of juicing levels of rain or snow. This is typically done in dry areas that lack regular precipitation. Research shows that it can in fact work, though advances in technology reveal that its impact is modest—coaxing maybe 5% to 10% more moisture out of otherwise stubborn clouds.
But the fact that humans can influence weather at all gives conspiracy theorists a foothold in the truth. Add to this a spotty history of actual efforts by governments and militaries to control major storms, as well as other emerging but not-yet-deployed-at-any-scale technologies that aim to address climate change … and you can see where things get confusing.
So while more sweeping claims of weather control are ultimately ridiculous from a scientific standpoint, they can’t be dismissed as entirely stupid.
This all helped make the conspiracytheoriesswirling after the recent Texas floods particularly loud and powerful. Just days earlier, 100 miles away from the epicenter of the floods, in a town called Runge, the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker had flown a single-engine plane and released about 70 grams of silver iodide into some clouds; a modest drizzle of less than half a centimeter of rain followed. But once the company saw a storm front in the forecast, it suspended its work; there was no need to seed with rain already on the way.
“We conducted an operation on July 2, totally within the scope of what we were regulatorily permitted to do,” Augustus Doricko, Rainmaker’s founder and CEO, recently told me. Still, when as much as 20 inches of rain fell soon afterward not too far away, and more than 100 people died, the conspiracy theory machine whirred into action.
As Doricko told the Washington Post in the tragedy’s aftermath, he and his company faced “nonstop pandemonium” on social media; eventually someone even posted photos from outside Rainmaker’s office, along with its address. Doricko told me a few factors played into the pile-on, including a lack of familiarity with the specifics of cloud seeding, as well as what he called “deliberately inflammatory messaging from politicians.” Indeed, theories about Rainmaker and cloud seeding spread online via prominent figures including Greene and former national security advisor Mike Flynn.
Unfortunately, all this is happening at the same time as the warming climate is making heavy rainfall and the floods that accompany it more and more likely. “These events will become more frequent,” says Emily Yeh, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado who has examined approaches and reactions to weather modification around the world. “There is a large, vocal group of people who are willing to believe anything but climate change as the reason for Texas floods, or hurricanes.”
Worsening extremes, increasing weather modification activity, improving technology, a sometimes shady track record—the conditions are perfect for an otherwise niche conspiracy theory to spread to anyone desperate for tidy explanations of increasingly disastrous events.
Here, we break down just what’s possible and what isn’t—and address some of the more colorful reasons why people may believe things that go far beyond the facts.
What we can do with the weather—and who is doing it
The basic concepts behind cloud seeding have been around for about 80 years, and government interest in the topic goes back even longer than that.
The primary practice involves using planes, drones, or generators on the ground to inject tiny particles of stuff, usually silver iodide, into existing clouds. The particles act as nuclei around which moisture can build up, forming ice crystals that can get heavy enough to fall out of the cloud as snow or rain.
“Weather modification is an old field; starting in the 1940s there was a lot of excitement,” says David Delene, a research professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of North Dakota and an expert on cloud seeding. In a US Senate report from 1952 to establish a committee to study weather modification, authors noted that a small amount of extra rain could “produce electric power worth hundreds of thousands of dollars” and “greatly increase crop yields.” It also cited potential uses like “reducing soil erosion,” “breaking up hurricanes,” and even “cutting holes in clouds so that aircraft can operate.”
But, as Delene adds, “that excitement … was not realized.”
Through the 1980s, extensive research often funded or conducted by Washington yielded a much better understanding of atmospheric science and cloud physics, though it proved extremely difficult to actually demonstrate the efficacy of the technology itself. In other words, scientists learned the basic principles behind cloud seeding, and understood on a theoretical level that it should work—but it was hard to tell how big an impact it was having on rainfall.
There is huge variability between one cloud and another, one storm system and another, one mountain or valley and another; for decades, the tools available to researchers did not really allow for firm conclusions on exactly how much extra moisture, if any, they were getting out of any given operation. Interest in the practice died down to a low hum by the 1990s.
But over the past couple of decades, the early excitement has returned.
Cloud seeding can enhance levels of rain and snow
While the core technology has largely stayed the same, severalprojects launched in the US and abroad starting in the 2000s have combined statistical modeling with new and improved aircraft-based measurements, ground-based radar, and more to provide better answers on what results are actually achievable when seeding clouds.
“I think we’ve identified unequivocally that we can indeed modify the cloud,” says Jeff French, an associate professor and head of the University of Wyoming’s Department of Atmospheric Science, who has worked for years on the topic. But even as scientists have come to largely agree that the practice can have an impact on precipitation, they also largely recognize that the impact probably has some fairly modest upper limits—far short of massive water surges.
“There is absolutely no evidence that cloud seeding can modify a cloud to the extent that would be needed to cause a flood,” French says. Floods require a few factors, he adds—a system with plenty of moisture available that stays localized to a certain spot for an extended period. “All of these things which cloud seeding has zero effect on,” he says.
The technology simply operates on a different level. “Cloud seeding really is looking at making an inefficient system a little bit more efficient,” French says.
As Delene puts it: “Originally [researchers] thought, well, we could, you know, do 50%, 100% increases in precipitation,” but “I think if you do a good program you’re not going to get more than a 10% increase.”
Asked for his take on a theoretical limit, French was hesitant—“I don’t know if I’m ready to stick my neck out”—but agreed on “maybe 10-ish percent” as a reasonable guess.
Another cloud seeding expert, Katja Friedrich from the University of Colorado–Boulder, says that any grander potential would be obvious by this point: We wouldn’t have “spent the last 100 years debating—within the scientific community—if cloud seeding works,” she writes in an email. “It would have been easy to separate the signal (from cloud seeding) from the noise (natural precipitation).”
It can also (probably) suppress precipitation
Sometimes cloud seeding is used not to boost rain and snow but rather to try to reduce its severity—or, more specifically, to change the size of individual rain droplets or hailstones.
One of the most prominent examples has beenin parts of Canada, where hailstorms can be devastating; a 2024 event in Calgary, for instance, was the country’s second-most-expensive disaster ever, with over $2 billion in damages.
Insurance companies in Alberta have been working together for nearly three decades on a cloud seeding program that’s aimed at reducing some of that damage. In these cases, the silver iodide or other particles are meant to act essentially as competition for other “embryos” inside the cloud, increasing the total number of hailstones and thus reducing each individual stone’s average size.
Smaller hailstones means less damage when they reach the ground. The insurance companies—which continue to pay for the program—say losses have been cut by 50% since the program started, though scientists aren’t quite as confident in its overall success. A 2023 study published in Atmospheric Research examined 10 years of cloud seeding efforts in the province and found that the practice did appear to reduce potential for damage in about 60% of seeded storms—while in others, it had no effect or was even associated with increased hail (though the authors said this could have been due to natural variation).
Similar techniques are also sometimes deployed to try to improve the daily forecast just a bit. During the 2008 Olympics, for instance, China engaged in a form of cloud seeding aimed at reducing rainfall. As MIT Technology Reviewdetailed back then, officials with the Beijing Weather Modification Office planned to use a liquid-nitrogen-based coolant that could increase the number of water droplets in a cloud while reducing their size; this can get droplets to stay aloft a little longer instead of falling out of the cloud. Though it is tough to prove that it definitively would have rained without the effort, the targeted opening ceremony did stay dry.
So, where is this happening?
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization says that some form of weather modification is taking place in “more than 50 countries” and that “demand for these weather modification activities is increasing steadily due to the incidence of droughts and other calamities.”
The biggest user of cloud-seeding tech is arguably China. Following the work around the Olympics, the country announced a huge expansion of its weather modification program in 2020, claiming it would eventually run operations for agricultural relief and other functions, including hail suppression, over an area about the size of India and Algeria combined. Since then, China has occasionally announced bits of progress—including updates to weather modification aircraft and the first use of drones for artificial snow enhancement. Overall, it spends billions on the practice, with more to come.
Elsewhere, desert countries have taken an interest. In 2024, Saudi Arabia announced an expanded research program on cloud seeding—Delene, of the University of North Dakota, was part of a team that conducted experiments in various parts of that country in late 2023. Its neighbor the United Arab Emirates began “rain enhancement” activities back in 1990; this program too has faced outcry, especially after more than a typical year’s worth of rain fell in a single day in 2024, causing massive flooding. (Bloomberg recently published a story about persistent questions regarding the country’s cloud seeding program; in response to the story, French wrote in an email that the “best scientific understanding is still that cloud seeding CANNOT lead to these types of events.” Other experts we asked agreed.)
In the US, a 2024 Government Accountability Office report on cloud seeding said that at least nine states have active programs. These are sometimes run directly by the state and sometimes contracted out through nonprofits like the South Texas Weather Modification Association to private companies, including Doricko’s Rainmaker and North Dakota–based Weather Modification. In August, Doricko told me that Rainmaker had grown to 76 employees since it launched in 2023. It now runs cloud seeding operations in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California, and Texas, as well as forecasting services in New Mexico and Arizona. And in an answer that may further fuel the conspiracy fire, he added they are also operating in one Middle Eastern country; when I asked which one, he’d only say, “Can’t tell you.”
What we cannot do
The versions of weather modification that the conspiracy theorists envision most often—significantly altering monsoons or hurricanes or making the skies clear and sunny for weeks at a time—have so far proved impossible to carry out. But that’s not necessarily for lack of trying.
The US government attempted to alter a hurricane in 1947 as part of a program dubbed Project Cirrus. In collaboration with GE, government scientists seeded clouds with pellets of dry ice, the idea being that the falling pellets could induce supercooled liquid in the clouds to crystallize into ice. After they did this, the storm took a sharp left turn and struck the area around Savannah, Georgia. This was a significant moment for budding conspiracy theories, since a GE scientist who had been working with the government said he was “99% sure” the cyclone swerved because of their work. Other experts disagreed and showed that such storm trajectories are, in reality, perfectly possible without intervention. Perhaps unsurprisingly, public outrage and threats of lawsuits followed.
It took some time for the hubbub to die down, after which several US government agencies continued—unsuccessfully—trying to alter and weaken hurricanes with a long-running cloud seeding program called Project Stormfury. Around the same time, the US military joined the fray with Operation Popeye, essentially trying to harness weather as a weapon in the Vietnam War—engaging in cloud seeding efforts over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with an eye toward increasing monsoon rains and bogging down the enemy. Though it was never really clear whether these efforts worked, the Nixon administration tried to deny them, going so far as to lie to the public and even to congressional committees.
More recently and less menacingly, there have been experiments with Dyn-O-Gel—a Florida company’s super-absorbent powder, intended to be dropped into storm clouds to sop up their moisture. In the early 2000s, the company carried out experiments with the stuff in thunderstorms, and it had grand plans to use it to weaken tropical cyclones. But according to one former NOAA scientist, you would need to drop almost 38,000 tons of it, requiring nearly 380 individual plane trips, in and around even a relatively small cyclone’s eyewall to really affect the storm’s strength. And then you would have to do that again an hour and a half later, and so on. Reality tends to get in the way of the biggest weather modification ideas.
Beyond trying to control storms, there are some other potential weather modification technologies out there that are either just getting started or have never taken off. Swiss researchers have tried to use powerful lasers to induce cloud formation, for example; in Australia, where climate change is imperiling the Great Barrier Reef, artificial clouds created when ship-based nozzles spray moisture into the sky have been used to try to protect the vital ecosystem. In each case, the efforts remain small, localized, and not remotely close to achieving the kinds of control the conspiracy theorists allege.
What is not weather modification—but gets lumped in with it
Further worsening weather control conspiracies is that there is a tendency to conflate cloud seeding and other promising weather modification research with concepts such as chemtrails—a full-on conspiracist fever dream about innocuous condensation trails left by jets—and solar geoengineering, a theoretical stopgap to cool the planet that has been subject to much discussion and modeling research but has never been deployed in any large-scale way.
One controversial form of solar geoengineering, known as stratospheric aerosol injection, would involve having high-altitude jets drop tiny aerosol particles—sulfur dioxide, most likely—into the stratosphere to act essentially as tiny mirrors. They would reflect a small amount of sunlight back into space, leaving less energy to reach the ground and contribute to warming. To date, attempts to launch physical experiments in this space have been shouted down, and only tiny—though stillcontroversial—commercial efforts have taken place.
One can see why it gets lumped in with cloud seeding: bits of stuff, dumped into the sky, with the aim of altering what happens down below. But the aims are entirely separate; geoengineering would alter the global average temperature rather than having measurable effects on momentary cloudbursts or hailstorms. Some research has suggested that the practice could alter monsoon patterns, a significant issue given their importance to much of the world’s agriculture, but it remains a fundamentally different practice from cloud seeding.
Still, the political conversation around supposed weather control often reflects this confusion. Greene, for instance, introduced a bill in July called the Clear Skies Act, which would ban all weather modification and geoengineering activities. (Greene’s congressional office did not respond to a request for comment.) And last year, Tennessee became the first state to enact a law to prohibit the “intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus … into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.” Florida followed suit, with Governor Ron DeSantis signing SB 56 into law in June of this year for the same stated purpose.
Also this year, lawmakers in more than 20 otherstates have also proposed some version of a ban on weather modification, often lumping it in with geoengineering, even though caution on the latter is more widely accepted or endorsed. “It’s not a conspiracy theory,” one Pennsylvania lawmaker who cosponsored a similar bill told NBC News. “All you have to do is look up.”
Oddly enough, as Yeh of the University of Colorado points out, the places where bans have passed are states where weather modification isn’t really happening. “In a way, it’s easy for them to ban it, because, you know, nothing actually has to be done,” she says. In general, neither Florida nor Tennessee—nor any other part of the Southeast—needs any help finding rain. Basically, all weather modification activity in the US happens in the drier areas west of the Mississippi.
Finding a culprit
Doricko told me that in the wake of the Texas disaster, he has seen more people become willing to learn about the true capabilities of cloud seeding and move past the more sinister theories about it.
I asked him, though, about some of his company’s flashier branding: Until recently, visitors to the Rainmaker website were greeted right up top with the slogan “Making Earth Habitable.” Might this level of hypecontribute to public misunderstanding or fear?
He said he is indeed aware that Earth is, currently, habitable, and called the slogan a “tongue-in-cheek, deliberately provocative statement.” Still, in contrast to the academics who seem more comfortable acknowledging weather modification’s limits, he has continued to tout its revolutionary potential. “If we don’t produce more water, then a lot of the Earth will become less habitable,” he said. “By producing more water via cloud seeding, we’re helping to conserve the ecosystems that do currently exist, that are at risk of collapse.”
While other experts cited that 10% figure as a likely upper limit of cloud seeding’s effectiveness, Doricko said they could eventually approach 20%, though that might be years away. “Is it literally magic? Like, can I snap my fingers and turn the Sahara green? No,” he said. “But can it help make a greener, verdant, and abundant world? Yeah, absolutely.”
It’s not all that hard to see why people still cling to magical thinking here. The changing climate is, after all, offering up what’s essentially weaponized weather, only with a much broader and long-term mechanism behind it. There is no single sinister agency or company with its finger on the trigger, though it can be tempting to look for one; rather, we just have an atmosphere capable of holding more moisture and dropping it onto ill-prepared communities, and many of the people in power are doing little to mitigate the impacts.
“Governments are not doing a good job of responding to the climate crisis; they are often captured by fossil-fuel interests, which drive policy, and they can be slow and ineffective when responding to disasters,” Naomi Smith, a lecturer in sociology at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia who has written about conspiracy theories and weather events, writes in an email. “It’s hard to hold all this complexity, and conspiracy theorizing is one way of making it intelligible and understandable.”
“Conspiracy theories give us a ‘big bad’ to point the finger at, someone to blame and a place to put our feelings of anger, despair, and grief,” she writes. “It’s much less satisfying to yell at the weather, or to engage in the sustained collective action we actually need to tackle climate change.”
The sinister “they” in Greene’s accusations is, in other words, a far easier target than the real culprit.
Dave Levitan is an independent journalist, focused on science, politics, and policy. Find his work at davelevitan.com and subscribe to his newsletter at gravityisgone.com.
On a gloomy Saturday morning this past May, a few months after entire blocks of Altadena, California, were destroyed by wildfires, several dozen survivors met at a local church to vent their built-up frustration, anger, blame, and anguish. As I sat there listening to one horror story after another, I almost felt sorry for the very polite consultants who were being paid to sit there, and who couldn’t do a thing about what they were hearing.
Hosted by a third-party arbiter at the behest of Los Angeles County, the gathering was a listening session in which survivors could “share their experiences with emergency alerts and evacuations” for a report on how the response to the Eaton Fire months earlier had succeeded and failed.
It didn’t take long to see just how much failure there had been.
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology.
After a small fire started in the bone-dry brush of Pasadena’s Eaton Canyon early in the evening of Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the raging Santa Ana winds blew its embers into nearby Altadena, the historically Black and middle-class town just to the north. By Wednesday morning, much of it was burning. Its residents spent the night making frantic, desperate scrambles to grab whatever they could and get to safety.
In the aftermath, many claimed that they received no warning to evacuate, saw no first responders battling the blazes, and had little interaction with official personnel. Most were simply left to fend for themselves.
Making matters worse, while no place is “good” for a wildfire, Altadena was especially vulnerable. It was densely packed with 100-year-old wooden homes, many of which were decades behind on the code upgrades that would have better protected them. It was full of trees and other plants that had dried out during the rain-free winter. Few residents or officials were prepared for the seemingly remote possibility that the fires that often broke out in the mountains nearby would jump into town. As a result, resources were strained to the breaking point, and many homes simply burned freely.
So the people packed into the room that morning had a lot to be angry about. They unloaded their own personal ordeals, the traumas their community had experienced, and even catastrophes they’d heard about secondhand. Each was like a dagger to the heart, met with head-nods and “uh-huhs” from people all going through the same thing.
LA County left us to die because we couldn’t get alerts!
I’m sleeping in my car because I was a renter and have no insurance coverage!
Millions of dollars in aid were raised for us, and we haven’t gotten anything!
Developers are buying up Altadena and pricing out the Black families who made this place!
The firefighting planes were grounded on purpose by Joe Biden so he could fly around LA!
One of these things was definitely not like the others. And I knew why.
Two trains collide
It’s something of a familiar cycle by now: Tragedy hits; rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories follow. Think of the deluge of “false flag” and “staged gun grab” conspiracy theories after mass shootings, or the rampant disinformation around covid-19 and the 2020 election. It’s often even more acute in the case of a natural disaster, when conspiracy theories about what “really” caused the calamity run right into culture-war-driven climate change denialism. Put together, these theories obscure real causes while elevating fake ones, with both sides battling it out on social media and TV.
I’ve studied these ideas extensively, having spent the last 10 years writing about conspiracy theories and disinformation as a journalist and researcher. I’ve covered everything from the rise of QAnon to whether Donald Trump faked his assassination attempt to the alarming rises in antisemitism, antivaccine conspiracism, and obsession with human trafficking. I’ve written three books, testified to Congress, and even written a report for the January 6th Committee. So this has been my life for quite a while.
Still, I’d never lived it. Not until the Eaton Fire.
For a long time, I’d been able to talk about the conspiracy theories without letting them in. Now the disinformation was in the room with me, and it was about my life.
My house, a cottage built in 1925, was one of those that burned back in January. Our only official notification to flee had come at 3:25 a.m., nine hours after the fires started. We grabbed what we could in 10 minutes, I locked our front door, and six hours later, it was all gone. We could have died. Eighteen Altadena residents did die—and all but one were in the area that was warned too late.
Previously in my professional life, I’d always been able to look at the survivors of a tragedy, crying on TV about how they’d lost everything, and think sympathetically but distantly, Oh, those poor people. And soon enough, the conspiracy theories I was following about the incident for work would die down, and then it was no longer in my official purview—I could move on to the next disaster and whatever mess came with it.
Now I was one of those poor people. The Eaton Fire had changed everything about my life. Would it change everything about my work as well? It felt as though two trains I’d managed to keep on parallel tracks had collided.
For a long time, I’d been able to talk about the conspiracy theories without letting them in. Now the disinformation was in the room with me, and it was about my life. And I wondered: Did I have a duty to journalism to push back on the wild thinking—or on this particular idea that Biden was responsible?
Or did I have a duty to myself and my sanity to just stay quiet?
Just true enough
In the days following the Eaton Fire, which coincided with another devastating fire in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the Biden plane storyline was just one of countless rumors, false claims, hoaxes, and accusations about what had happened and who was behind them.
Most were culture-war nonsense or political fodder. I also saw clearly fake AI slop (no, the Hollywood sign was not on fire) and bits of TikTok ephemera that could largely be ignored.
They were from something like an alternate world, one where forest floors hadn’t been “raked” and where incompetent “DEI firefighters” let houses burn while water waited in a giant spigot that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, refused to “turn on” because he preferred to protect an endangered fish. There were claims that the fires were set on purpose to clear land for the Olympics, or to cover up evidence of human trafficking. Rumors flew that LA had donated all its firefighting money and gear to Ukraine. Some speculated that the fires were started by undocumented immigrants (one was suspected of causing one of the fires but never charged) or “antifa” or Black Lives Matter activists—never mind that one of the most demographically Black areas in the city was wiped out. Or, as always, it was the Jews. In this case, blame fell on a “wealthy Jewish couple” who supposedly owned most of LA’s water and wouldn’t let it go.
These claims originated from the same “just asking questions” influencers who run the same playbook for every disaster. And they spread rapidly through X, a platform where breaking news had been drowned out by hysterical conspiracism.
But many did have elements of truth to them, surrounded by layers of lies and accusations. A few were just true enough to be impossible to dismiss out of hand, but also not actually true.
So, for the record: Biden did not ground firefighting aircraft in Los Angeles.
According to fact-checking by both USA Today and Reuters, Biden flew into Los Angeles the day before the Eaton Fire broke out (which was also the same day that the Palisades Fire started, roughly 30 miles to the west), to dedicate two new national monuments. He left two days later. And while there were security measures in place, including flight restrictions over the area where he was staying, firefighting planes simply had to coordinate with air traffic controllers to cross into the closed-off space.
But when my sort-of neighbor brought up this particular theory that day in May, I wasn’t able to debunk it. For one thing, this was my first time hearing the rumor. But more than that, what could I say that would assuage this man’s anger? And if he wanted to blame Biden for his house burning down, was it really my place to tell him he was wrong—even if he was?
It’s common for survivors of a disaster to be aware of only parts of the story, struggle to understand the full picture, or fail to fully recollect what happened to them in the moment of survival. Once the trauma ebbs, we’re left looking for answers and clarity and someone who knows what’s going on, because we certainly don’t have a clue. Hoaxes and misinformation stem from anger, confusion, and a lack of clear answers to rapidly evolving questions.
I can confirm that it was dizzying. Rumors and hoaxes were going around in my personal circles too, even if they weren’t so lurid and even if we didn’t really believe them. Bits of half-heard news circulated constantly in our group texts, WhatsApp chains, Facebook groups, and in-person gatherings.
There was confusion over who was responsible for the extent of the devastation, genuine anger about purported LA Fire Department budget cuts (though those had not actually happened to the extent conspiracists claimed they did), and fears that a Trump-controlled federal government would abandon California.
Many of the homes and businesses that we heard had burned down hadn’t, and others that we heard had survived were gone. In an especially heartbreaking early bit of misinformation, a local child-care facility shared a Facebook post stating that FEMA was handing out vouchers to pay 90% of your rent for the next three years—except FEMA doesn’t hand out rent vouchers without an application process. I quietly reached out to the source, who took it down.
In this information vacuum, and given my work, friends started asking me questions, and answering them took energy and time I didn’t have. Honestly, the “disinformation researcher” was largely just as clueless as everyone else.
Some of the questions were harmless enough. At one point a friend texted me about a picture from Facebook of a burned Bible page that survived the fire when everything else had turned to ash. It looked too corny and convenient to be real. But I had also found a burned page of Psalms that had survived. I kept it in a ziplock bag because it seemed like the right thing to do. So I told my friend I didn’t know if it was real. I still don’t—but I also still have that ziplock somewhere.
Under attack
As weeks passed, we began to deal with another major issue where truth and misinformation walked together: the reasonable worry that a new president who constantly belittled California would not be willing to provide relief funds.
Recovery depended on FEMA to distribute grants, on the EPA to clear toxic debris, on the Small Business Administration to make loans for rebuilding or repairing homes, on the Army Corps of Engineers to remove the detritus of burned structures, and so much more. How would this square with the new “government efficiency” mandate touting the trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs to be cut from the federal budget?
Nobody knew—including the many kind government employees who spent months in Altadena helping us recover while silently wondering if they were about to be fired.
We dealt with scammers, grifters, squatters, thieves, and even tow truck companies that simply stole cars parked outside burned lots and held them for ransom. After a decade of helping people recognize scams and frauds, there was little I could do when they came for us.
Many residents of Altadena began to have trepidation about accepting government assistance, particularly in its Black community, which already had a well-earned deep distrust of the federal government. Many Black residents felt that their needs and stories were being left behind in the recovery, and feared they would be the first to be priced out of whatever Altadena would become in the future.
Outreach in person became critical. I happened to meet the two-star general in charge of the Army Corps’ effort at lunch one day, as he and his team tried to find outside-the-box ways to engage with exhausted and wary residents. He told me they had tried to use technology—texts, emails, clips designed to go viral—but it was too much information, all apparently delivered in the wrong way. Many of the people they needed to reach, particularly older residents, didn’t use social media, weren’t able to communicate well via text, and were easy prey for sophisticated scammers. It was also easy for the real information to get lost as we got bombarded with communications, including many from hoaxers and frauds.
This, too, wasn’t new to me. Many of the movements I’ve covered are awash in grift and worthless wellness products. I know the signs of a scam and a snake-oil salesman. Still, I watched helplessly as my friends and my community, desperate for help, were turned into chum for cash-hungry sharks opening their jaws wide.
The community was hammered by dodgy contractors and fly-by-night debris removal companies, relief scams and phony grants, and spam calls from “repair companies” and builders. We dealt with scammers, grifters, squatters, thieves, and even tow truck companies that simply stole cars parked outside burned lots and held them for ransom. We were also victimized by looting: Abandoned wires on our lot were stripped for copper, and our neighbor’s unlocked garage was ransacked. After a decade of helping people recognize scams and frauds, there was little I could do when they came for us.
The fear of being conned was easily transmittable, even to me personally. After hearing of friends who couldn’t get a FEMA grant because a previous owner of their home had fraudulently filed an application, we delayed our own appointment with FEMA for weeks. The agency’s call had come so out of the blue that we were convinced it was fake. Maybe my job made me overcautious, or maybe we were just paralyzed by the sheer tonnage of decisions and calls that needed to be handled. Whatever the reason, the fear meant we later had to make multiple calls just to get our meeting rescheduled. It’s a small thing, but when you’re as exhausted and dispirited as we were, there are no small things.
Contractors for the US Army Corps of Engineers remove hazardous materials from a home destroyed in the Eaton Fire, near a burned-out car.
Making all this even more frustrating was that the scammers, the people spinning tales of lasers and endangered fish and antifa, were very much ignoring the reality: that our planet is trying to kill us. While federal officials recently made an arrest in the Palisades Fire, the direct causes of that fire and the nearby Eaton Fire may still take years of investigation and litigation to be fully known. But even now, it can’t be denied to any reasonable degree that climate change worsened the wind that made the fires spread more quickly.
The Santa Ana winds bombarding Southern California were among the worst ever to hit the region. Their ferocity drove the embers well beyond the nominal fire danger line, particularly in Altadena. Many landed in brush left brittle and dead by the decades-long drought plaguing California. And they had even more fuel because the previous two winters had been among the wettest in the region’s recent history. Such rapid swings between wet and dry or cold and hot have become so common around the world that they even have a name: climate whiplash.
There are the conspiracy theory gurus who see this and make money off it, peddling disinformation on their podcasts and livestreams, while blaming everyone and everything but the real reasons. Many of these figures have spent decades railing against the very idea that the climate could change. And if it is changing, they claimed, human consumption and urbanization have nothing to do with it. When faced with a disaster that undeniably reflected climate change at work, their business models—which rely on sales of subscriptions and merchandise—demanded that they just keep denying it was climate change at work.
As more cities and countries deal with “once in a century” climate disasters, I have no doubt that these figures will continue to deflect attention away from human activity. They will use crackpot science, conspiracy theories, politics, and—increasingly—fake videos depicting whatever AI can generate. They will prey on their audiences’ limited understanding of basic science, their inability to perceive how climate and weather differ, and their fears that globalist power brokers will somehow use the weather against them. And their message will spread with little pushback from social media platforms more concerned with virality and shareholder value than truth.
Resisting the temptation
When you cover disinformation and live through an event creating a massive volume of disinformation, it’s like floating outside your body on an operating table as your heart is being worked on, while also being a heart surgeon. I knew I should be trying to help. But I did not have the mental capacity, the time, or, to be honest, the interest in covering what the worst people on the internet were saying about the worst time of my life. I had very real questions about where my family would live. Thinking about my career was not a priority.
But of course, these experiences cannot now be excised from my career. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how trauma influences conspiracism; see how the isolation and boredom of covid created a new generation of conspiracy theory believers. And now I had my own trauma, and it has been a test of my abilities as a journalist and a thinker to avoid falling into the pit of despair.
At the same time, I have a much deeper understanding of the psychology at work in conspiracy belief. One of the biggest reasons conspiracy theories take off after a disaster is that they serve to make sense out of something that makes no sense. Neighborhoods aren’t supposed to burn down in an era of highly trained firefighters and seemingly fireproof materials. They especially aren’t supposed to burn down in Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. These were seven- and eight-figure homes going up like matches. There must be a reason, people figured. Someone, or something, must be responsible.
So, as I emerge from the haze to something resembling “normal,” I feel more compassion and understanding for trauma victims who turn to conspiracy theories. Having faced the literal burning down of my life, I get the urge to assign meaning to such a calamity and point a finger at whoever we think did it to us.
Meanwhile, the people of Altadena and Pacific Palisades continue to slowly put our lives and communities back together. The effects of both our warming planet and our disinformation crisis continue to assert themselves every day. It’s still alluring to look for easy answers in outrageous conspiracy theories, but such answers are not real and offer no actual help—only the illusion of help.
It’s equally tempting for someone who researches and debunks conspiracy theories to mock or belittle the people who believe these ideas. How could anyone be so dumb as to think Joe Biden caused the fire that burned down my home?
I kept my mouth shut that day at the meeting in the church, though, again, I can now sympathize much more deeply with something I’d otherwise think completely inane.
But even a journalist who lost his house is still a journalist. So I decided early on that what I really needed to do was keep Altadena in the news. I went on TV and radio, blogged, and happily told our story to anyone who asked. I focused on the community, the impact, the people who would be working to recover long after the national spotlight moved to the next shiny object.
If there is a professional lesson to be taken from this nightmare, it might be that the people caught up in tragedies are exactly that: caught up. And those who believe this nonsense find something of value in it. They find hope and comfort and the reassurance that whoever did this to them will get what they deserve.
I could have done it too, throwing away years of experience to embrace conspiracist nihilism in the face of unspeakable trauma. After all, those poor people going through this weren’t just on my TV.
They were my friends. They were me. They could be anyone.
Mike Rothschild is a journalist and an expert on the growth and impact of conspiracy theories and disinformation. He has written three books, including The Storm Is Upon Us, about the QAnon conspiracy movement, and Jewish Space Lasers, about the myths around the Rothschild banking family. He also is a frequent expert witness in legal cases involving conspiracy theories and has spoken at colleges and conferences around the country. He lives in Southern California.
Cipher executive editor Amy Harder and Bill Gates at the Breakthrough Energy Summit in Seattle on Oct. 19, 2022. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler)
Less than two weeks ahead of the United Nations climate conference, Bill Gates posted a memo on his personal blog encouraging folks to just calm down about climate change.
“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates wrote.
The missive seems to run counter to earlier climate actions taken by the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire, but also echoes Gates’ long-held priorities and perspectives. In some regards, it’s the framing, timing and broader political context that heighten the memo’s impact.
What the world needs to do, he said, is to shift the goals away from reducing carbon emissions and keeping warming below agreed-upon temperature targets.
“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” he wrote. “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.“
More than four years ago, Gates published “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” a book highlighting the urgency and necessity of cutting carbon emissions and promoting the need to reduce “green premiums” in order to make climate friendly technologies as cheap as unsustainable alternatives.
“It’ll be tougher than anything humanity’s ever done, and only by staying constant in working on this over the next 30 years do we have a chance to do it,” Gates told GeekWire in 2021. “Having some people who think it’s easy will be an impediment. Having people who think that it’s not important will be an impediment.”
Gates’ clean energy efforts go back even earlier. In 2006 he helped launch the next-gen nuclear company TerraPower, which is currently building its first reactor in Wyoming. In 2015 he founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1 billion fund to support carbon-cutting startups, which evolved into Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella organization tackling clean tech policies, funding for researchers and data generation.
Earlier this year, however, Gates began taking steps that suggested a cooling commitment to the challenge.
Roughly two months after President Trump took office in January, and as clean energy policies and funding began getting axed, Breakthrough Energy laid off staff. In May Gates announced he would direct nearly all of his wealth to his eponymous global health foundation, deploying $200 billion through the organization over two decades.
At the same time, many of the key points in the memo published today reflect statements that Gates has made in the past.
In both his new post and at a 2022 global climate summit organized in Seattle by Breakthrough Energy, Gates urged people to focus on reducing green premiums more than on cutting emissions as a key benchmark.
“If you keep the primary measures, which is the emissions reductions in the near term, you’re going to be very depressed,” Gates said. At his summit talk, he shared optimism that new innovations were arriving quickly and would address climate challenges.
A curious paradox in Gates’ stance is the reality that people living in lower-income nations and in regions important to the Gates Foundation are often hardest hit by the rising temperatures and natural disasters that are stoked by increased carbon emissions.
Gates acknowledged that truth in his post this week, and said that solutions such as engineering drought tolerant crops and making air conditioning more widespread can address some of those harms. At the Seattle summit three years ago, one of the Breakthrough Energy executives likewise said the organization was going to increase its investment into technologies for adapting to climate change.
On Nov. 10, global climate leaders will meet in Brazil for COP30 to discuss climate progress and issues. Gates has often attended the event, but the New York Times reported that won’t be the case this year.
UN efforts meanwhile continue to emphasize the importance of reducing emissions. A statement today from the organization notes that while carbon emissions are curving downward, it’s not happening fast enough.
The world needs to raise its climate ambitions, the statement continues, “to avoid the worst climate impacts by limiting warming to 1.5°C this century, as science demands.”
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.
In the early 2020s, a little-known aquaculture company in Portland, Maine, snagged more than $50 million by pitching a plan to harness nature to fight back against climate change. The company, Running Tide, said it could sink enough kelp to the seafloor to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year, according to one of its early customers.
Instead, the business shut down its operations last summer, marking the biggest bust to date in the nascent carbon removal sector.
Its demise was the most obvious sign of growing troubles and dimming expectations for a space that has spawned hundreds of startups over the last few years. A handful of other companies have shuttered, downsized, or pivoted in recent months as well. Venture investments have flagged. And the collective industry hasn’t made a whole lot more progress toward that billion-ton benchmark.
The hype phase is over and the sector is sliding into the turbulent business trough that follows, warns Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, a public-benefit corporation that provides data and analysis on the carbon removal industry.
“We’re past the peak of expectations,” he says. “And with that, we could see a lot of companies go out of business, which is natural for any industry.”
The open question is: If the carbon removal sector is heading into a painful if inevitable clearing-out cycle, where will it go from there?
The odd quirk of carbon removal is that it never made a lot of sense as a business proposition: It’s an atmospheric cleanup job, necessary for the collective societal good of curbing climate change. But it doesn’t produce a service or product that any individual or organization strictly needs—or is especially eager to pay for.
To date, a number of businesses have voluntarily agreed to buy tons of carbon dioxide that companies intend to eventually suck out of the air. But whether they’re motivated by sincere climate concerns or pressures from investors, employees, or customers, corporate do-goodism will only scale any industry so far.
Most observers argue that whether carbon removal continues to bobble along or transforms into something big enough to make a dent in climate change will depend largely on whether governments around the world decide to pay for a whole, whole lot of it—or force polluters to.
“Private-sector purchases will never get us there,” says Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for the removal and reuse of carbon dioxide. “We need policy; it has to be policy.”
What’s the problem?
The carbon removal sector began to scale up in the early part of this decade, as increasingly grave climate studies revealed the need to dramatically cut emissions and suck down vast amounts of carbon dioxide to keep global warming in check.
Specifically, nations may have to continually remove as much as 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year by around midcentury to have a solid chance of keeping the planet from warming past 2 °C over preindustrial levels, according to a UN climate panel report in 2022.
A number of startups sprang up to begin developing the technology and building the infrastructure that would be needed, trying out a variety of approaches like sinking seaweed or building carbon-dioxide-sucking factories.
And they soon attracted customers. Companies including Stripe, Google, Shopify, Microsoft, and others began agreeing to pre-purchase tons of carbon removal, hoping to stand up the nascent industry and help offset their own climate emissions. Venture investments also flooded into the space, peaking in 2023 at nearly $1 billion, according to data provided by PitchBook.
From early on, players in the emerging sector sought to draw a sharp distinction between conventional carbon offset projects, which studies have shown frequently exaggerate climate benefits, and “durable” carbon removal that could be relied upon to suck down and store away the greenhouse gas for decades to centuries. There’s certainly a big difference in the price: While buying carbon offsets through projects that promise to preserve forests or plant trees might cost a few dollars per ton, a ton of carbon removal can run hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the approach.
That high price, however, brings big challenges. Removing 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year at, say, $300 a ton adds up to a global price tag of $3 trillion—a year.
Which brings us back to the fundamental question: Who should or would foot the bill to develop and operate all the factories, pipelines, and wells needed to capture, move, and bury billions upon billions of tons of carbon dioxide?
The state of the market
The market is still growing, as companies voluntarily purchase tons of carbon removal to make strides toward their climate goals. In fact, sales reached an all-time high in the second quarter of this year, mostly thanks to several massive purchases by Microsoft.
But industry sources fear that demand isn’t growing fast enough to support a significant share of the startups that have formed or even the projects being built, undermining the momentum required to scale the sector up to the size needed by midcentury.
To date, all those hundreds of companies that have spun up in recent years have disclosed deals to sell some 38 million tons of carbon dioxide pulled from the air, according to CDR.fyi. That’s roughly the amount the US pumps out in energy-related emissions every three days.
And they’ve only delivered around 940,000 tons of carbon removal. The US emits that much carbon dioxide in less than two hours. (Not every transaction is publicly announced or revealed to CDR.fyi, so the actual figures could run a bit higher.)
Another concern is that the same handful of big players continue to account for the vast majority of the overall purchases, leaving the health and direction of the market dependent on their whims and fortunes.
Most glaringly, Microsoft has agreed to buy 80% of all the carbon removal purchased to date, according to CDR.fyi. The second-biggest buyer is Frontier, a coalition of companies that includes Google, Meta, Stripe, and Shopify, which has committed to spend $1 billion.
If you strip out those two buyers, the market shrinks from 16 million tons under contract during the first half of this year to just 1.2 million, according to data provided to MIT Technology Review by CDR.fyi.
Signs of trouble
Meanwhile, the investor appetite for carbon removal is cooling. For the 12-month period ending in the second quarter of 2025, venture capital investments in the sector fell more than 13% from the same period last year, according to data provided by PitchBook. That tightening funding will make it harder and harder for companies that aren’t bringing in revenue to stay afloat.
Other companies that have already shut down include the carbon removal marketplace Nori, the direct air capture company Noya and Alkali Earth, which was attempting to use industrial by-products to tie up carbon dioxide.
Still other businesses are struggling. Climeworks, one of the first companies to build direct-air-capture (DAC) factories, announced it was laying off 10% of its staff in May, as it grapples with challenges on several fronts.
The company’s plans to collaborate on the development of a major facility in the US have been at least delayed as the Trump administration has held back tens of millions of dollars in funding granted in 2023 under the Department of Energy’s Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. It now appears the government could terminate the funding altogether, along with perhaps tens of billions of dollars’ worth of additional grants previously awarded for a variety of other US carbon removal and climate tech projects.
“Market rumors have surfaced, and Climeworks is prepared for all scenarios,” Christoph Gebald, one of the company’s co-CEOs, said in a previous statement to MIT Technology Review. “The need for DAC is growing as the world falls short of its climate goals and we’re working to achieve the gigaton capacity that will be needed.”
But purchases from direct-air-capture projects fell nearly 16% last year and account for just 8% of all carbon removal transactions to date. Buyers are increasingly looking to categories that promise to deliver tons faster and for less money, notably including burying biochar or installing carbon capture equipment on bioenergy plants. (Read more in my recent story on that method of carbon removal, known as BECCS, here.)
CDR.fyi recently described the climate for direct air capture in grim terms: “The sector has grown rapidly, but the honeymoon is over: Investment and sales are falling, while deployments are delayed across almost every company.”
“Most DAC companies,” the organization added, “will fold or be acquired.”
What’s next?
In the end, most observers believe carbon removal isn’t really going to take off unless governments bring their resources and regulations to bear. That could mean making direct purchases, subsidizing these sectors, or getting polluters to pay the costs to do so—for instance, by folding carbon removal into market-based emissions reductions mechanisms like cap-and-trade systems.
More government support does appear to be on the way. Notably, the European Commission recently proposed allowing “domestic carbon removal” within its EU Emissions Trading System after 2030, integrating the sector into one of the largest cap-and-trade programs. The system forces power plants and other polluters in member countries to increasingly cut their emissions or pay for them over time, as the cap on pollution tightens and the price on carbon rises.
That could create incentives for more European companies to pay direct-air-capture or bioenergy facilities to draw down carbon dioxide as a means of helping them meet their climate obligations.
There are also indications that the International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN organization that establishes standards for the aviation industry, is considering incorporating carbon removal into its market-based mechanism for reducing the sector’s emissions. That might take several forms, including allowing airlines to purchase carbon removal to offset their use of traditional jet fuel or requiring the use of carbon dioxide obtained through direct air capture in some share of sustainable aviation fuels.
Meanwhile, Canada has committed to spend $10 million on carbon removal and is developing a protocol to allow direct air capture in its national offsets program. And Japan will begin accepting several categories of carbon removal in its emissions trading system.
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back funding for the development of carbon-sucking projects, the US does continue to subsidize storage of carbon dioxide, whether it comes from power plants, ethanol refineries, direct-air-capture plants, or other facilities. The so-called 45Q tax credit, which is worth up to $180 a ton, was among the few forms of government support for climate-tech-related sectors that survived in the 2025 budget reconciliation bill. In fact, the subsidies for putting carbon dioxide to other uses increased.
Even in the current US political climate, Burns is hopeful that local or federal legislators will continue to enact policies that support specific categories of carbon removal in the regions where they make the most sense, because the projects can provide economic growth and jobs as well as climate benefits.
“I actually think there are lots of models for what carbon removal policy can look like that aren’t just things like tax incentives,” she says. “And I think that this particular political moment gives us the opportunity in a unique way to start to look at what those regionally specific and pathway specific policies look like.”
The dangers ahead
But even if more nations do provide the money or enact the laws necessary to drive the business of durable carbon renewal forward, there are mounting concerns that a sector conceived as an alternative to dubious offset markets could increasingly come to replicate their problems.
Various incentives are pulling in that direction.
Financial pressures are building on suppliers to deliver tons of carbon removal. Corporate buyers are looking for the fastest and most affordable way of hitting their climate goals. And the organizations that set standards and accredit carbon removal projects often earn more money as the volume of purchases rises, creating clear conflicts of interest.
Some of the same carbon registries that have long signed off on carbon offset projects have begun creating standards or issuing credits for various forms of carbon removal, including Verra and Gold Standard.
“Reliable assurance that a project’s declared ton of carbon savings equates to a real ton of emissions removed, reduced, or avoided is crucial,” Cynthia Giles, a senior EPA advisor under President Biden, and Cary Coglianese, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a recent editorial in Science. “Yet extensive research from many contexts shows that auditors selected and paid by audited organizations often produce results skewed toward those entities’ interests.”
Noah McQueen, the director of science and innovation at Carbon180, has stressed that the industry must strive to counter the mounting credibility risks, noting in a recent LinkedIn post: “Growth matters, but growth without integrity isn’t growth at all.”
In an interview, McQueen said that heading off the problem will require developing and enforcing standards to truly ensure that carbon removal projects deliver the climate benefits promised. McQueen added that to gain trust, the industry needs to earn buy-in from the communities in which these projects are built and avoid the environmental and health impacts that power plants and heavy industry have historically inflicted on disadvantaged communities.
Getting it right will require governments to take a larger role in the sector than just subsidizing it, argues David Ho, a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa who focuses on ocean-based carbon removal.
He says there should be a massive, multinational research drive to determine the most effective ways of mopping up the atmosphere with minimal environmental or social harm, likening it to a Manhattan Project (minus the whole nuclear bomb bit).
“If we’re serious about doing this, then let’s make it a government effort,” he says, “so that you can try out all the things, determine what works and what doesn’t, and you don’t have to please your VCs or concentrate on developing [intellectual property] so you can sell yourself to a fossil-fuel company.”
Ho adds that there’s a moral imperative for the world’s historically biggest climate polluters to build and pay for the carbon-sucking and storage infrastructure required to draw down billions of tons of greenhouse gas. That’s because the world’s poorest, hottest nations, which have contributed the least to climate change, will nevertheless face the greatest dangers from intensifying heat waves, droughts, famines, and sea-level rise.
“It should be seen as waste management for the waste we’re going to dump on the Global South,” he says, “because they’re the people who will suffer the most from climate change.”
Correction (October 24): An earlier version of this article referred to Noya as a carbon removal marketplace. It was a direct air capture company.
Good morning, readers, and happy Friday. Welcome to This Week in Space, our Friday morning roundup of the week’s most important space news. Today we’ve got a bunch of good news, including a newfound exoplanet and a dozen new moons orbiting Jupiter. We’ve also got a report of an absolutely wild idea — a literal moonshot — for fighting climate change with moon dust.
SpaceX Starship Aces Static Fire Test
Thursday afternoon, SpaceX ran a successful static fire test of its gigantic Starship rocket. With 33 separate Raptor engines, Starship has the most engines of any rocket ever. Together, their thrust is twice that of a Saturn V or the Space Launch System. Is anyone else amazed the struts can hold that thing on the gantry?
Only 31 of the 33 engines fired. However, that’s actually good news because it means Starship can handle multiple engine failures.
SpaceX hopes to attempt a test flight for Starship in March. “That first flight test is going to be really exciting. It’s going to happen in the next month or so,” said Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer.
“We will go for a test flight and we will learn from the test flight and we will do more test flights,” Shotwell added. “The real goal is to not blow up the launch pad. That is success.”
ISS Astronauts Work On Plasma Crystals, Space Plumbing
We’ve talked about how the folks aboard the International Space Station have to become polymaths to keep up with the demands of life in orbit. This winter, among many other pursuits, NASA astronauts on the ISS have been tending tomatoes and working on avant-garde methods of space propulsion. But the most recent projects in low-earth orbit make space tomatoes sound outdated. Over the past few days, crew on the ISS have been working on plasma crystals, servicing jetpacks, and… doing space plumbing.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata spent Thursday doing maintenance on the station’s water recovery system and orbital plumbing for the station’s bathroom, respectively. Meanwhile, station commander Sergey Prokopyev worked inside the Columbus lab “configuring video hardware that records how clouds of highly charged particles, or plasma crystals, behave in microgravity.”
Hubble Captures New Portrait of Tarantula Nebula
The Tarantula Nebula is the brightest star-forming region in our cosmic neighborhood. It’s not even in our galaxy — it’s in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies. But it’s so bright that it dazzles even at that distance. Astronomers recently used the Hubble space telescope to capture this image of the Tarantula Nebula in all its splendor:
What you see here is actually a joint effort between two different astronomy projects. One team sought to analyze the properties of dust grains floating between stars — a proposal dubbed Scylla by the Hubble team. Those dust grains create the dark, wispy clouds spread across the frame. The other, called Ulysses, studies interstellar dust and starlight interactions.
Curiosity Finds Clues to Mars’ Watery Past
NASA’s Perseverance rover went to Mars with a plan: Scour the planet’s surface for evidence that can teach us about Mars’ history and tell us whether the Red Planet might once have supported life. During its two years on Mars, the rover has found silicate clay and other minerals, signs that liquid water once flowed across Mars’ surface. But none of its discoveries have had evidence of water as visually obvious as a photograph that the agency’s Curiosity rover recently captured. The rover caught a photo of sandstone rock with ripples carved out of its surface, showing that the rock was once at the bottom of a lake.
The ripples support our observations of Mars’ weather and climate. Gentle, constant winds create standing ripple patterns like these. This fits with the constant prevailing winds and planetwide dust storms we’ve seen on Mars. It’s also exciting evidence that Mars indeed had liquid water once upon a time.
Russia Launches Progress Spacecraft to International Space Station
Russia successfully launched a Progress capsule aboard a Soyuz rocket this week, bound for the International Space Station. The rocket launched from Russia’s Baikonur aerodrome early Thursday morning, local time. This capsule, ISS Progress 83 (83P), carries about three tons of supplies, including food, water, and air. It will dock with the Russian Zvezda module on Saturday morning, replacing the Progress capsule that left Monday afternoon.
What happens to Progress 82 once it departs? Progress capsules are expendable. This means that the crew on the ISS loads the capsules with trash from the station while it’s docked. Then, hours or days after the capsule undocks, it burns up in the atmosphere.
CAPSTONE Lunar Satellite Reports In After 11-Day Glitch
NASA’s CAPSTONE satellite is finally responding to hails after nearly two weeks incommunicado. A software glitch left the probe unresponsive on Jan. 26 until it rebooted itself Monday.
“The spacecraft remained overall healthy and on-course throughout the issue,” NASA said in a blog post. “On Feb. 6, an automatic command-loss timer rebooted CAPSTONE, clearing the issue and restoring two-way communications between CAPSTONE and the ground.”
The satellite has made twelve successful circuits in its near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) — twice what its original mission expected. That’s great news for NASA. CAPSTONE is trying out the fancy new NRHO orbit because it’s more fuel efficient than other lunar orbits we’ve used. In twelve orbits, CAPSTONE has only had to fire its engine twice. This smashing success means the agency may use the new orbital pattern for lunar support satellites under the aegis of its Artemis project.
Rolls-Royce Building Nuclear Engine For Spaceships
Did you know Ball makes Mason jars — and parts for space telescopes? Ball made parts for Hubble and the mirrors for the JWST. In a similar fashion, Rolls-Royce appears to be branching out. Way out. The luxury automaker’s subsidiary, Rolls-Royce Holdings, has announced plans to build a nuclear engine for deep space exploration.
Webb Telescope Breaks Own ‘Speed Limit’ Tracking DART Impact
NASA’s Guaranteed Time Observation program gives a certain amount of telescope time to those who worked on the JWST. One GTO project: Making observations of NASA’s DART kinetic asteroid redirect test. However, the project brought an unlooked-for surprise. Wednesday, JWST deputy project scientist Stefanie Milam explained how the telescope broke its own speed limit watching the asteroid impact.
Webb launched with the ability to track objects moving through the sky as fast as Mars. But scientists who study fast-moving small bodies like asteroids, comets, and interstellar objects “really wanted to study objects that moved faster than Mars,” said Milam. So, the team set out to show that not only could Webb exceed this “notional speed limit,” it could go much faster. Their efforts paid off when it came time to observe the DART asteroid impact.
NASA’s DART kinetic asteroid redirect test, as seen by the JWST. Image: NASA/JPL
The video Webb captured of the Dimorphos impact showed that the telescope can move its field of regard at more than triple its original maximum speed. Most of the time, though, Milam says the telescope will confine itself to double its original turning speed. Darn.
Chris Hadfield Meets With King Charles III
On Thursday, Canada’s favorite astronaut, Chris Hadfield, met with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace. The two sat down to discuss “efforts to encourage sustainability in space,” according to the Royal Family’s official Twitter.
“What a pleasure and privilege to be asked to advise and assist, and make the King laugh,” Hadfield wrote afterward.
While we don’t yet have specifics, Charles is a longtime environmentalist. Could it be that the King is interested in cleaning up space junk?
A Shield of Lunar Dust Could Help Cool Earth
Astrophysicists are pondering the pros and cons of a literal moonshot to blunt the effects of climate change. In a recent study, a group of researchers proposed launching moon dust into orbit around Earth to create a dusty shield that would reduce Earth’s exposure to the Sun. Evidently, lunar dust grains are just the right size and composition to block some of the solar energy that would hit the Earth.
For six days out of the year, the researchers say, the dust cloud would shield Earth from a few percent of the Sun’s radiation. To carry out this plan, the researchers’ numbers require dredging up some 22 billion pounds of lunar dust. They could fire the dust into orbit from the Moon or a platform in orbit — potato, poterrible idea. Surely there is some lower-hanging fruit?
Scientists Find a Dozen New Moons Orbiting Jupiter
In October 2019, astronomers at the Carnegie Institution for Science found 20 new moons orbiting Saturn. This made Saturn the “moon king” of the Solar System, with a total of 83. However, the same team has announced they’ve found a dozen new moons orbiting Jupiter.
An international team of astronomers has reported a newfound exoplanet in our cosmic backyard. The new planet, Wolf 1069 b, is between 1 and 1.4 Earth masses and just 8% bigger. Calling it Earth-like might be a stretch: Wolf 1069 b zips around its low-mass red dwarf star in just 15 Earth days. However, it’s just 31 light-years away.
Unlike our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, Wolf 1069 doesn’t show the characteristic bursts of violent flares we frequently see in red dwarf stars. This could mean it has managed to retain an atmosphere. If so, the planet’s surface temperature could be about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. If not, it’s more likely an iceball, too cold to sustain liquid water.
Skywatchers Corner
Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is a once-in-an-epoch visitor from the outer solar system. We haven’t seen it since the time of the Neanderthals, but it’s come back for one last visit. The outbound comet passed close to Earth last week. Now, it’s buzzing Mars.
It’s green! Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) and its twin tails. Image: NASA
The green comet will be near Mars in the constellation of Taurus for the next several days. After sunset, look high in the sky for the best shot at catching it through binoculars or a telescope. After Feb. 14, the comet will start heading toward Orion and Eridanus.
If you don’t have a good shot at viewing the comet where you are, you can still catch it online. This weekend, the Virtual Telescope Project is webcasting a free livestream of the comet’s approach to the Red Planet. The livestream will begin this Saturday, Feb. 11, at 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT). You can watch it on the project’s website and YouTube channel.
Feature image: This week’s waning gibbous moon, taken from the International Space Station. Courtesy of NASA HQ Flickr.
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