Why it’s so hard to bust the weather control conspiracy theory

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 conspiracy theories swirling 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, several projects 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 been in 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 Review detailed 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 still controversial—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 other states 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 hype contribute 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

What it’s like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert)

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.
STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY IMAGES

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.

Four thoughts from Bill Gates on climate tech

Bill Gates doesn’t shy away or pretend modesty when it comes to his stature in the climate world today. “Well, who’s the biggest funder of climate innovation companies?” he asked a handful of journalists at a media roundtable event last week. “If there’s someone else, I’ve never met them.”

The former Microsoft CEO has spent the last decade investing in climate technology through Breakthrough Energy, which he founded in 2015. Ahead of the UN climate meetings kicking off next week, Gates published a memo outlining what he thinks activists and negotiators should focus on and how he’s thinking about the state of climate tech right now. Let’s get into it. 

Are we too focused on near-term climate goals?

One of the central points Gates made in his new memo is that he thinks the world is too focused on near-term emissions goals and national emissions reporting.

So in parallel with the national accounting structure for emissions, Gates argues, we should have high-level climate discussions at events like the UN climate conference. Those discussions should take a global view on how to reduce emissions in key sectors like energy and heavy industry.

“The way everybody makes steel, it’s the same. The way everybody makes cement, it’s the same. The way we make fertilizer, it’s all the same,” he says.

As he noted in one recent essay for MIT Technology Review, he sees innovation as the key to cutting the cost of clean versions of energy, cement, vehicles, and so on. And once products get cheaper, they can see wider adoption.

What’s most likely to power our grid in the future?

“In the long run, probably either fission or fusion will be the cheapest way to make electricity,” he says. (It should be noted that, as with most climate technologies, Gates has investments in both fission and fusion companies through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, so he has a vested interest here.)

He acknowledges, though, that reactors likely won’t come online quickly enough to meet rising electricity demand in the US: “I wish I could deliver nuclear fusion, like, three years earlier than I can.”

He also spoke to China’s leadership in both nuclear fission and fusion energy. “The amount of money they’re putting [into] fusion is more than the rest of the world put together times two. I mean, it’s not guaranteed to work. But name your favorite fusion approach here in the US—there’s a Chinese project.”

Can carbon removal be part of the solution?

I had my colleague James Temple’s recent story on what’s next for carbon removal at the top of my mind, so I asked Gates if he saw carbon credits or carbon removal as part of the problematic near-term thinking he wrote about in the memo.

Gates buys offsets to cancel out his own personal emissions, to the tune of about $9 million a year, he said at the roundtable, but doesn’t expect many of those offsets to make a significant dent in climate progress on a broader scale: “That stuff, most of those technologies, are a complete dead end. They don’t get you cheap enough to be meaningful.

“Carbon sequestration at $400, $200, $100, can never be a meaningful part of this game. If you have a technology that starts at $400 and can get to $4, then hallelujah, let’s go. I haven’t seen that one. There are some now that look like they can get to $40 or $50, and that can play somewhat of a role.”

 Will AI be good news for innovation? 

During the discussion, I started a tally in the corner of my notebook, adding a tick every time Gates mentioned AI. Over the course of about an hour, I got to six tally marks, and I definitely missed making a few.

Gates acknowledged that AI is going to add electricity demand, a challenge for a US grid that hasn’t seen net demand go up for decades. But so too will electric cars and heat pumps. 

I was surprised at just how positively he spoke about AI’s potential, though:

“AI will accelerate every innovation pipeline you can name: cancer, Alzheimer’s, catalysts in material science, you name it. And we’re all trying to figure out what that means. That is the biggest change agent in the world today, moving at a pace that is very, very rapid … every breakthrough energy company will be able to move faster because of using those tools, some very dramatically.”

I’ll add that, as I’ve noted here before, I’m skeptical of big claims about AI’s potential to be a silver bullet across industries, including climate tech. (If you missed it, check out this story about AI and the grid from earlier this year.) 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

What’s next for carbon removal?

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.

This startup is about to conduct the biggest real-world test of aluminum as a zero-carbon fuel

The crushed-up soda can disappears in a cloud of steam and—though it’s not visible—hydrogen gas. “I can just keep this reaction going by adding more water,” says Peter Godart, squirting some into the steaming beaker. “This is room-temperature water, and it’s immediately boiling. Doing this on your stove would be slower than this.” 

Godart is the founder and CEO of Found Energy, a startup in Boston that aims to harness the energy in scraps of aluminum metal to power industrial processes without fossil fuels. Since 2022, the company has worked to develop ways to rapidly release energy from aluminum on a small scale. Now it’s just switched on a much larger version of its aluminum-powered engine, which Godart claims is the largest aluminum-water reactor ever built. 

Early next year, it will be installed to supply heat and hydrogen to a tool manufacturing facility in the southeastern US, using the aluminum waste produced by the plant itself as fuel. (The manufacturer did not want to be named until the project is formally announced.)

If everything works as planned, this technology, which uses a catalyst to unlock the energy stored within aluminum metal, could transform a growing share of aluminum scrap into a zero-carbon fuel. The high heat generated by the engine could be especially valuable to reduce the substantial greenhouse-gas emissions generated by industrial processes, like cement production and metal refining, that are difficult to power with electricity directly.

“We invented the fuel, which is a blessing and a curse,” says Godart, surrounded by the pipes and wires of the experimental reactor. “It’s a huge opportunity for us, but it also means we do have to develop all of the systems around us. We’re redefining what even is an engine.”

Engineers have long eyed using aluminum as a fuel thanks to its superior energy density. Once it has been refined and smelted from ore, aluminum metal contains more than twice as much energy as diesel fuel by volume and almost eight times as much as hydrogen gas. When it reacts with oxygen in water or air, it forms aluminum oxides. This reaction releases heat and hydrogen gas, which can be tapped for zero-carbon power.

Liquid metal

The trouble with aluminum as a fuel—and the reason your soda can doesn’t spontaneously combust—is that as soon as the metal starts to react, an oxidized layer forms across its surface that prevents the rest of it from reacting. It’s like a fire that puts itself out as it generates ash. “People have tried it and abandoned this idea many, many times,” says Godart.

Some believe using aluminum as a fuel remains a fool’s errand. “This potential use of aluminum crops up every few years and has no possibility of success even if aluminum scrap is used as the fuel source,” says Geoff Scamans, a metallurgist at Brunel University of London who spent a decade working on using aluminum to power vehicles in the 1980s. He says the aluminum-water reaction isn’t efficient enough for the metal to make sense as a fuel given how much energy it takes to refine and smelt aluminum from ore to begin with: “A crazy idea is always a crazy idea.”

But Godart believes he and his company have found a way to make it work. “The real breakthrough was thinking about catalysis in a different way,” he says: Instead of trying to speed up the reaction by bringing water and aluminum together onto a catalyst, they “flipped it around” and “found a material that we could actually dissolve into the aluminum.”

Petert Godart holding up two glass jars; one with metal spheres and the other with flat metal shapes

JAMES DINNEEN

The liquid metal catalyst at the heart of the company’s approach “permeates the microstructure” of the aluminum, says Godart. As the aluminum reacts with water, the catalyst forces the metal to froth and split open, exposing more unreacted aluminum to the water. 

The composition of the catalyst is proprietary, but Godart says it is a “low-melting-point liquid metal that’s not mercury.” His dissertation research focused on using a liquid mixture of gallium and indium as the catalyst, and he says the principle behind the current material is the same.

During a visit in early October, Godart demonstrated the central reaction in the Found R&D lab, which after the company’s $12 million seed round last year now fills the better part of two floors of an industrial building in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood. Using a pair of tongs to avoid starting the reaction with the moisture on his fingers, he placed a pellet of aluminum treated with the secret catalyst in a beaker and then added water. Immediately, the metal began to bubble with hydrogen. Then the water steamed away, leaving behind a frothing gray mass of aluminum hydroxide.

“One of the impediments to this technology taking off is that [the aluminum-water reaction] was just too sluggish,” says Godart. “But you can see here we’re making steam. We just made a boiler.”

From Europa to Earth

Godart was a scientist at NASA when he first started thinking about fresh ways to unlock the energy stored in aluminum. He was working on building aluminum robots that could consume themselves for fuel when roving on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. But that work was cut short when Congress reduced funding for the mission.

“I was sort of having this little mini crisis where I was like, I need to do something about climate change, about Earth problems,” says Godart. “And I was like, you know—I bet this aluminum technology would be even better for Earth applications.” After completing a dissertation on aluminum fuels at MIT, he started Found Energy in his house in Cambridge in 2022 (the next year, he earned a place on MIT Technology Review’s annual 35 Innovators under 35 list).

Until this year, the company was working at a tiny scale, tweaking the catalyst and testing different conditions within a small 10-kilowatt reactor to make the reaction release more heat and hydrogen more quickly. Then, in January, it began designing an engine that’s 10 times larger, big enough to supply a useful amount of power for industrial processes beyond the lab.

This larger engine took up most of the lab on the second floor. The reactor vessel resembled a water boiler turned on its side, with piping and wires connected to monitoring equipment that took up almost as much space as the engine itself. On one end, there was a pipe to inject water and a piston to deliver pellets of aluminum fuel into the reactor at variable rates. On the other end, outflow pipes carried away the reaction products: steam, hydrogen gas, aluminum hydroxide, and the recovered catalyst. Godart says none of the catalyst is lost in the reaction, so it can be used again to make more fuel.

The company first switched on the engine to begin testing in July. In September, it managed to power it up to its targeted power of 100 kilowatts—roughly as much as can be supplied by the diesel engine in a small pickup truck. In early 2026, it plans to install the 100-kilowatt engine to supply heat and hydrogen to the tool manufacturing facility. This pilot project is meant to serve as the proof of concept needed to raise the money for a 1-megawatt reactor, 10 times larger again.

The initial pilot will use the engine to supply hot steam and hydrogen. But the energy released in the reactor could be put to use in a variety of ways across a range of temperatures, according to Godart. The hot steam could spin a turbine to produce electricity, or the hydrogen could produce electricity in a fuel cell. By burning the hydrogen within the steam, the engine can produce superheated steam as hot as 1,300 °C, which could be used to generate electricity more efficiently or refine chemicals. Burning the hydrogen alone could generate temperatures of 2,400 °C, hot enough to make steel.

Picking up scrap

Godart says he and his colleagues hope the engine will eventually power many different industrial processes, but the initial target is the aluminum refining and recycling industry itself, as it already handles scrap metal and aluminum oxide supply chains. “Aluminum recyclers are coming to us, asking us to take their aluminum waste that’s difficult to recycle and then turn that into clean heat that they can use to re-melt other aluminum,” he says. “They are begging us to implement this for them.”

Citing nondisclosure agreements, he wouldn’t name any of the companies offering up their unrecyclable aluminum, which he says is something of a “dirty secret” for an industry that’s supposed to be recycling all it collects. But estimates from the International Aluminium Institute, an industry group, suggest that globally a little over 3 million metric tons of aluminum collected for recycling currently goes unrecycled each year; another 9 million metric tons isn’t collected for recycling at all or is incinerated with other waste. Together, that’s a little under a third of the estimated 43 million metric tons of aluminum scrap that currently gets recycled each year.

Even if all that unused scrap was recovered for fuel, it would still supply only a fraction of the overall industrial demand for heat, let alone the overall industrial demand for energy. But the plan isn’t to be limited by available scrap. Eventually, Godart says, the hope is to “recharge” the aluminum hydroxide that comes out of the reactor by using clean electricity to convert it back into aluminum metal and react it again. According to the company’s estimates, this “closed loop” approach could supply all global demand for industrial heat by using and reusing a total of around 300 million metric tons of aluminum—around 4% of Earth’s abundant aluminum reserves. 

However, all that recharging would require a lot of energy. “If you’re doing that, [aluminum fuel] is an energy storage technology, not so much an energy providing technology,” says Jeffrey Rissman, who studies industrial decarbonization at Energy Innovation, a think tank in California. As with other forms of energy storage like thermal batteries or green hydrogen, he says, that could still make sense if the fuel can be recharged using low-cost, clean electricity. But that will be increasingly hard to come by amid the scramble for clean power for everything from AI data centers to heat pumps.

Despite these obstacles, Godart is confident his company will find a way to make it work. The existing engine may already be able to squeeze out more power from aluminum than anticipated. “We actually believe this can probably do half a megawatt,” he says. “We haven’t fully throttled it.”

James Dinneen is a science and environmental journalist based in New York City. 

What a massive thermal battery means for energy storage

Rondo Energy just turned on what it says is the world’s largest thermal battery, an energy storage system that can take in electricity and provide a consistent source of heat.

The company announced last week that its first full-scale system is operational, with 100 megawatt-hours of capacity. The thermal battery is powered by an off-grid solar array and will provide heat for enhanced oil recovery (more on this in a moment).

Thermal batteries could help clean up difficult-to-decarbonize sectors like manufacturing and heavy industrial processes like cement and steel production. With Rondo’s latest announcement, the industry has reached a major milestone in its effort to prove that thermal energy storage can work in the real world. Let’s dig into this announcement, what it means to have oil and gas involved, and what comes next.

The concept behind a thermal battery is overwhelmingly simple: Use electricity to heat up some cheap, sturdy material (like bricks) and keep it hot until you want to use that heat later, either directly in an industrial process or to produce electricity.

Rondo’s new system has been operating for 10 weeks and achieved all the relevant efficiency and reliability benchmarks, according to the company. The bricks reach temperatures over 1,000 °C (about 1,800 °F), and over 97% of the energy put into the system is returned as heat.

This is a big step from the 2 MWh pilot system that Rondo started up in 2023, and it’s the first of the mass-produced, full-size heat batteries that the company hopes to put in the hands of customers.

Thermal batteries could be a major tool in cutting emissions: 20% of total energy demand today is used to provide heat for industrial processes, and most of that is generated by burning fossil fuels. So this project’s success is significant for climate action.

There’s one major detail here, though, that dulls some of that promise: This battery is being used for enhanced oil recovery, a process where steam is injected down into wells to get stubborn oil out of the ground.

It can be  tricky for a climate technology to show its merit by helping harvest fossil fuels. Some critics argue that these sorts of techniques keep that polluting infrastructure running longer.

When I spoke to Rondo founder and chief innovation officer  John O’Donnell about the new system, he defended the choice to work with oil and gas.  

“We are decarbonizing the world as it is today,” O’Donnell says. To his mind, it’s better to help an oil and gas company use solar power for its operation than leave it to continue burning natural gas for heat. Between cheap solar, expensive natural gas, and policies in California, he adds, Rondo’s technology made sense for the customer.

Having a willing customer pay for a full-scale system has been crucial to Rondo’s effort to show that it can deliver its technology.

And the next units are on the way: Rondo is currently building three more full-scale units in Europe. The company will be able to bring them online cheaper and faster because of what it’s learned from the California project, O’Donnell says. 

The company has the capacity to build more batteries, and do it quickly. It currently makes batteries at its factory in Thailand, which has the capacity to make 2.4 gigawatt-hours’ worth of heat batteries today.

I’ve been following progress on thermal batteries for years, and this project obviously represents a big step forward. For all the promises of cheap, robust energy storage, there’s nothing like actually building a large-scale system and testing it in the field.

It’s definitely hard to get excited about enhanced oil recovery—we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and do it quickly, to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. But I see the argument that as long as oil and gas operations exist, there’s value in cleaning them up.

And as O’Donnell puts it, heat batteries can help: “This is a really dumb, practical thing that’s ready now.”

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Flowers of the future

Flowers play a key role in most landscapes, from urban to rural areas. There might be dandelions poking through the cracks in the pavement, wildflowers on the highway median, or poppies covering a hillside. We might notice the time of year they bloom and connect that to our changing climate. Perhaps we are familiar with their cycles: bud, bloom, wilt, seed. Yet flowers have much more to tell in their bright blooms: The very shape they take is formed by local and global climate conditions. 

The form of a flower is a visual display of its climate, if you know what to look for. In a dry year, its petals’ pigmentation may change. In a warm year, the flower might grow bigger. The flower’s ultraviolet-absorbing pigment increases with higher ozone levels. As the climate changes in the future, how might flowers change? 

white flower and a purple flower
Anthocyanins are red or indigo pigments that supply antioxidants and photoprotectants, which help a plant tolerate climate-related stresses such as droughts.
© 2021 SULLIVAN CN, KOSKI MH

An artistic research project called Plant Futures imagines how a single species of flower might evolve in response to climate change between 2023 and 2100—and invites us to reflect on the complex, long-term impacts of our warming world. The project has created one flower for every year from 2023 to 2100. The form of each one is data-driven, based on climate projections and research into how climate influences flowers’ visual attributes. 

two rows of flowers that are both yellow and purple
More ultraviolet pigment protects flowers’ pollen against increasing ozone levels.
MARCO TODESCO
a white flower with a yellow center
Under unpredictable weather conditions, the speculative flowers grow a second layer of petals. In botany, a second layer is called a “double bloom” and arises from random mutations.
COURTESY OF ANNELIE BERNER

Plant Futures began during an artist residency in Helsinki, where I worked closely with the biologist Aku Korhonen to understand how climate change affected the local ecosystem. While exploring the primeval Haltiala forest, I learned of the Circaea alpina, a tiny flower that was once rare in that area but has become more common as temperatures have risen in recent years. Yet its habitat is delicate: The plant requires shade and a moist environment, and the spruce population that provides those conditions is declining in the face of new forest pathogens. I wondered: What if the Circaea alpina could survive in spite of climate uncertainty? If the dark, shaded bogs turn into bright meadows and the wet ground dries out, how might the flower adapt in order to survive? This flower’s potential became the project’s grounding point. 

The author studying historical Circaea samples in the Luomus Botanical Collections.
COURTESY OF ANNELIE BERNER

Outside the forest, I worked with botanical experts in the Luomus Botanical Collections. I studied samples of Circaea flowers from as far back as 1906, and I researched historical climate conditions in an attempt to understand how flower size and color related to a year’s temperature and precipitation patterns. 

I researched how other flowering plants respond to changes to their climate conditions and wondered how the Circaea would need to adapt to thrive in a future world. If such changes happened, what would the Circaea look like in 2100? 

We designed the future flowers through a combination of data-driven algorithmic mapping and artistic control. I worked with the data artist Marcin Ignac from Variable Studio to create 3D flowers whose appearance was connected to climate data. Using Nodes.io, we made a 3D model of the Circaea alpina based on its current morphology and then mapped how those physical parameters might shift as the climate changes. For example, as the temperature rises and precipitation decreases in the data set, the petal color shifts toward red, reflecting how flowers protect themselves with an increase in anthocyanins. Changes in temperature, carbon dioxide levels, and precipitation rates combine to affect the flowers’ size, density of veins, UV pigments, color, and tendency toward double bloom.
2025: Circaea alpina is ever so slightly larger than usual owing to a warmer summer, but it is otherwise close to the typical Circaea flower in size, color, and other attributes.
2064: We see a bigger flower with more petals, given an increase in carbon dioxide levels and temperature. The bull’s-eye pattern, composed of UV pigment, is bigger and messier because of an increase in ozone and solar radiation. A second tier of petals reflects uncertainty in the climate model.
2074: The flower becomes pinker, an antioxidative response to the stress of consecutive dry days and higher temperatures. Its size increases, primarily because of higher levels of carbon dioxide. The double bloom of petals persists as the climate model’s projections increase in uncertainty.
2100: The flower’s veins are densely packed, which could signal appropriation of a technique leaves use to improve water transport during droughts. It could also be part of a strategy to attract pollinators in the face of worsening air quality that degrades the transmission of scents.
2023—2100: Each year, the speculative flower changes. Size, color, and form shift in accordance with the increased temperature and carbon dioxide levels and the changes in precipitation patterns.
In this 10-centimeter cube of plexiglass, the future flowers are “preserved,” allowing the viewer to see them in a comparative, layered view.
COURTESY OF ANNELIE BERNER

Based in Copenhagen, Annelie Berner is a designer, researcher, teacher, and artist specializing in data visualization.

The problem with Big Tech’s favorite carbon removal tech

Sucking carbon pollution out of the atmosphere is becoming a big business—companies are paying top dollar for technologies that can cancel out their own emissions.

Today, nearly 70% of announced carbon removal contracts are for one technology: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Basically, the idea is to use trees or some other types of biomass for energy, and then capture the emissions when you burn it.

While corporations, including tech giants like Microsoft, are betting big on this technology, there are a few potential problems with BECCS, as my colleague James Temple laid out in a new story. And some of the concerns echo similar problems with other climate technologies we cover, like carbon offsets and alternative jet fuels.

Carbon math can be complicated.

To illustrate one of the biggest issues with BECCS, we need to run through the logic on its carbon accounting. (And while this tech can use many different forms of biomass, let’s assume we’re talking about trees.)

When trees grow, they suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Those trees can be harvested and used for some intended purpose, like making paper. The leftover material, which might otherwise be waste, is then processed and burned for energy.

This cycle is, in theory, carbon neutral. The emissions from burning the biomass are canceled out by what was removed from the atmosphere during plants’ growth. (Assuming those trees are replaced after they’re harvested.)

So now imagine that carbon-scrubbing equipment is added to the facility that burns the biomass, capturing emissions. If the cycle was logically carbon neutral before, now it’s carbon negative: On net, emissions are removed from the atmosphere. Sounds great, no notes. 

There are a few problems with this math, though. For one, it leaves out the emissions that might be produced while harvesting, transporting, and processing wood. And if projects require clearing land to plant trees or grow crops, that transformation can wind up releasing emissions too.

Issues with carbon math might sound a little familiar if you’ve read any of James’s reporting on carbon offsets, programs where people pay for others to avoid emissions. In particular, his 2021 investigation with ProPublica’s Lisa Song laid out how this so-called solution was actually adding millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Carbon capture may entrench polluting facilities.

One of the big benefits of BECCS is that it can be added to existing facilities. There’s less building involved than there might be in something like a facility that vacuums carbon directly out of air. That helps keep costs down, so BECCS is currently much cheaper than direct air capture and other forms of carbon removal.

But keeping legacy equipment running might not be a great thing for emissions or local communities in the long run.

Carbon dioxide is far from the only pollutant spewing out of these facilities. Burning biomass or biofuels can release emissions that harm human health, like particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide. Carbon capture equipment might trap some of these pollutants, like sulfur dioxide, but not all.

Assuming that waste material wouldn’t be used for something else might not be right.

It sounds great to use waste, but there’s a major asterisk lurking here, as James lays out in the story:

But the critical question that emerges with waste is: Would it otherwise have been burned or allowed to decompose, or might some of it have been used in some other way that kept the carbon out of the atmosphere? 

Biomass can be used for other things, like making plastic, building material, or even soil additives that can help crops get more nutrients. So the assumption that it’s BECCS or nothing is flawed.

Moreover, a weird thing happens when you start making waste valuable: There’s an incentive to produce more of it. Some experts are concerned that companies could wind up trimming more trees or clearing more forests than what’s needed to make more material for BECCS.

These waste issues remind me of conversations around sustainable aviation fuels. These alternative fuels can be made from a huge range of materials, including crop waste or even used cooking oil. But as demand for these clean fuels has ballooned, things have gotten a little wonky—there are even some reports of fraud, where scammers try to pass off newly made oil from crops as used cooking oil.

BECCS is a potentially useful technology, but like many things in climate tech, it can quickly get complicated. 

James has been reporting on carbon offsets and carbon removal for years. As he put it to me this week when we were chatting about this story: “Just cut emissions and stop messing around.”

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Unlocking the potential of SAF with book and claim in air freight

Used in aviation, book and claim offers companies the ability to financially support the use of SAF even when it is not physically available at their locations.

As companies that ship goods by air or provide air freight related services address a range of climate goals aiming to reduce emissions, the importance of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) couldn’t be more pronounced. In its neat form, SAF has the potential to reduce life cycle GHG emissions by up to 80% compared to conventional jet fuel.

In this exclusive webcast, leaders discuss the urgency for reducing air freight emissions for freight forwarders and shippers, and reasons why companies should use SAF. They also explain how companies can best make use of the book and claim model to support their emissions reduction strategies.

Learn from the leaders

  • What book and claim is and how companies can use it
  • Why SAF use is so important
  • How freight-forwarders and shippers can both potentially utilise and contribute to the benefits of SAF

Featured speakers

Raman Ojha, President, Shell Aviation. Raman is responsible for Shell’s global aviation business, which supplies fuels, lubricants, and lower carbon solutions, and offers a range of technical services globally. During almost 20 years at Shell, Raman has held leadership positions across a variety of industry sectors, including energy, lubricants, construction, and fertilisers. He has broad experience across both matured markets in the Americas and Europe, as well as developing markets including China, India, and Southeast Asia.  

Bettina Paschke, VP ESG Accounting, Reporting & Controlling, DHL Express. Bettina Paschke leads ESG Accounting, Reporting & Controlling, at DHL Express a division of DHL Group. In her role, she is responsible for ESG, including, EU Taxonomy Reporting, and Carbon Accounting. She has more than 20 years’ experience in Finance. In her role she is driving the Sustainable Aviation Fuel agenda at DHL Express and is engaged in various industry initiatives to allow reliable book and claim transactions.

Christoph Wolff, Chief Executive Officer at Smart Freight Centre. Christoph Wolff is currently the Chief Executive Officer at Smart Freight Centre, leading programs focused on sustainability in freight transport. Prior to this role, Christoph served as the Senior Advisor and Director at ACME Group, a global leader in green energy solutions. With a background in various industries, Christoph has held positions such as Managing Director at European Climate Foundation and Senior Board Advisor at Ferrostaal GmbH. Christoph has also worked at Novatec, Solar Millennium AG, DB Schenker, McKinsey & Company, and served as an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University – Kellogg School of Management. Christoph holds multiple degrees from RWTH Aachen University and ETH Zürich, along with ongoing executive education at the University of Michigan.

Watch the webcast.

This discussion is presented by MIT Technology Review Insights in association with Avelia. Avelia is a Shell owned solution and brand that was developed with support from Amex GBT, Accenture and Energy Web Foundation. The views from individuals not affiliated with Shell are their own and not those of Shell PLC or its affiliates. Cautionary note | Shell Global

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.

Not all offerings are available in all jurisdictions. Depending on jurisdiction and local laws, Shell may offer the sale of Environmental Attributes (for which subject to applicable law and consultation with own advisors, buyers might be able to use such Environmental Attributes for their own emission reduction purposes) and/or Environmental Attribute Information (pursuant to which buyers are helping subsidize the use of SAF and lower overall aviation emissions at designated airports but no emission reduction claims may be made by buyers for their own emissions reduction purposes). Different offerings have different forms of contracts, and no assumptions should be made about a particular offering without reading the specific contractual language applicable to such offering.

Big Tech’s big bet on a controversial carbon removal tactic

Over the last century, much of the US pulp and paper industry crowded into the southeastern corner of the nation, setting up mills amid sprawling timber forests to strip the fibers from juvenile loblolly, long leaf, and slash pine trees.

Today, after the factories chip the softwood and digest it into pulp, the leftover lignin, spent chemicals, and remaining organic matter form a dark, syrupy by-product known as black liquor. It’s then concentrated into a biofuel and burned, which heats the towering boilers that power the facility—and releases carbon dioxide into the air.

Microsoft, JP MorganChase, and a tech company consortium that includes Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and Stripe have all recently struck multimillion-dollar deals to pay paper mill owners to capture at least hundreds of thousands of tons of this greenhouse gas by installing carbon scrubbing equipment in their facilities.

The captured carbon dioxide will then be piped down into saline aquifers more than a mile underground, where it should be sequestered permanently.

Big Tech is suddenly betting big on this form of carbon removal, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. The sector also includes biomass-fueled power plants, waste incinerators, and biofuel refineries that add carbon capturing equipment to their facilities.

Since trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and these factories will trap emissions that would have gone into the air, together they can theoretically remove more greenhouse gas from the atmosphere than was released, achieving what’s known as “negative emissions.”

The companies that pay for this removal can apply that reduction in carbon dioxide to cancel out a share of their own corporate pollution. BECCS now accounts for nearly 70% of the announced contracts in carbon removal, a popularity due largely to the fact that it can be tacked onto industrial facilities already operating on large scales.

“If we’re balancing cost, time to market, and ultimate scale potential, BECCS offers a really attractive value proposition across all three of those,” says Brian Marrs, senior director of energy and carbon removal at Microsoft, which has become by far the largest buyer of carbon removal credits as it races to balance out its ongoing emissions by the end of the decade.

But experts have raised a number of concerns about various approaches to BECCS, stressing they may inflate the climate benefits of the projects, conflate prevented emissions with carbon removal, and extend the life of facilities that pollute in other ways. It could also create greater financial incentives to log forests or convert them to agricultural land. 

When greenhouse-gas sources and sinks are properly tallied across all the fields, forests, and factories involved, it’s highly difficult to achieve negative emissions with many approaches to BECCS, says Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University. That undermines the logic of dedicating more of the world’s limited land, crops, and woods to such projects, he argues.

“I call it a ‘BECCS and switch,’” he says, adding later: “It’s folly at some level.”

The logic of BECCS

For a biomass-fueled power plant, BECCS works like this:

A tree captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it grows, sequestering the carbon in its bark, trunk, branches, and roots while releasing the oxygen. Someone then cuts it down, converts it into wood pellets, and delivers it to a power plant that, in turn, burns the wood to produce heat or electricity.

Usually, that facility will produce carbon dioxide as the wood incinerates. But under both European Union and US rules, the burning of the wood is generally treated as carbon neutral, so long as the timber forests are managed in sustainable ways and the various operations abide by other regulations. The argument is that the tree pulled CO2 out of the air in the first place, and new plant growth will bring that emissions debt back into balance over time. 

If that same power plant now captures a significant share of the greenhouse gas produced in the process and pumps it underground, the process can potentially go from carbon neutral to carbon negative.

But the starting assumption that biomass is carbon neutral is fundamentally flawed, because it doesn’t fully take into account other ways that emissions are released throughout the process, according to Searchinger.

Among other things, a proper analysis must also ask: How much carbon is left behind in roots or branches on the forest floor that will begin to decompose and release greenhouse gases after the plant is removed? How much fossil fuel was burned in the process of cutting, collecting, and distributing the biomass? How much greenhouse gas was produced while converting timber into wood pellets and shipping them elsewhere? And how long will it take to grow back the trees or plants that would have otherwise continued capturing and storing carbon?

“If you’re harvesting wood, it’s essentially impossible to get negative emissions,” Searchinger says.

Burning biomass, or the biofuels created from it, can also produce other forms of pollution that can harm human health, including particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide.

Preventing carbon dioxide emissions at a given factory may necessitate capturing certain other pollutants as well, notably sulfur dioxide. But it doesn’t necessarily filter out all the other pollution floating out of the flue stack, notes Emily Grubert, an associate professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame who focuses on carbon management issues and the transition away from fossil fuels. 

Driving demand

The idea that we might be able to use biomass to generate energy and suck down carbon dates back decades. But as global temperatures and emissions both continued to rise, climate modelers found that more and more BECCS or other types of carbon removal would be needed to prevent the planet from tipping past increasingly dangerous warming thresholds.

In addition to dramatic cuts in emissions, the world may need to suck down 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2050 and 20 billion by 2100 to limit warming to 2 °C over preindustrial levels, according to a 2022 UN climate panel report. That’s a threshold we’re increasingly likely to blow past.

These grave climate warnings sparked growing interest and investments in ways to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Companies sprang up offering to sink seaweed, bury biomass, develop carbon-sucking direct air capture factories, and add alkaline substances to agricultural fields or the oceans. 

But BECCS purchases have dwarfed those other approaches.

For companies with fast-approaching climate deadlines, BECCS is one of the few options for removing hundreds of thousands of tons over the next few years, says Robert Höglund, who cofounded CDR.fyi, ​​a public-benefit corporation that analyzes the carbon removal sector.

“If you have a target you want to meet in 2030 and you want durable carbon removal, that’s the thing you can buy,” he says.

That’s chiefly because these projects can harness the infrastructure of existing industries. At least for now, you don’t have to finance, permit, and develop new facilities.

“They’re not that hard to build, because it’s often a retrofitting of an existing plant,” Höglund says. 

BECCS is also substantially less expensive for buyers than, say, direct air capture, with weighted average prices of $210 a ton compared with $490 among the deals to date, according to CDR.fyi. That’s in part because capturing the carbon dioxide from, say, a pulp and paper mill, where it makes up around 15% of flue gas, takes far less energy than plucking CO2 molecules out of the open air, where they account for just 0.04%.

Microsoft’s big BECCS bet

In 2020, Microsoft announced plans to become carbon negative by the end of this decade and, by midcentury, to remove all the emissions the company generated directly and from electricity use throughout its corporate history. 

It’s leaning particularly heavily on BECCS to meet those climate commitments, with the category accounting for 76% of its known carbon removal purchases to date.

In April, the company announced it would purchase 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide that a paper and pulp mill, located at some unspecified site in the southern US, will eventually capture and store over a 12-year period. It reached the deal through CO280, a startup based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that is forming joint ventures with paper and pulp mill companies in the US and Canada, to finance, develop, and operate the projects. 

It was the biggest carbon removal purchase on record—until four days later, when Microsoft revealed it had agreed to buy 6.75 million tons of carbon removal from AtmosClear, CDR.fyi noted. That company is building a biomass power plant at the Port of Greater Baton Rouge in Louisiana, which will run largely on sugarcane bagasse (a by-product of sugar production) and forest trimmings. AtmosClear says the facility will be able to capture 680,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

“What we’ve seen is a lot of these BECCS projects have been very helpful, if not transformational, for providing investment in rural economies,” Marrs says. “We look at our BECCS deals, in Louisiana with AtmosClear and some other Gulf State providers, like CO280, as a real means of helping support these economies, while at the same time promoting sustainable forestry practices.”

In earlier quarters, Microsoft also made substantial purchases from Orsted, which operates power plants that burn wood pellets; Gaia, which runs facilities that convert municipal waste into energy; and Arbor, whose plants are fueled by “overgrown brush, crop residues, and food waste.” 

Don’t let waste go to waste

Notably, at least three of these projects rely on some form of waste, a category distinct from fresh-cut timber or crops grown for the purpose of fueling BECCS projects. Solid waste, agricultural residues, logging leftovers, and plant material removed from forests to prevent fires present some of the ripest opportunities for BECCS—as well as some difficult questions of carbon accounting.

A 2019 report from the National Academy of Sciences estimated that the US could achieve more than 500 million tons of carbon removal a year through BECCS by 2040, while the world could exceed 3.5 billion tons, by relying just on agricultural by-products, logging residues, and organic waste—without needing to grow crops dedicated to energy.

Roger Aines, chief scientist of the energy program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, argues we should at least be putting these sources to use rather than burning them or leaving them to decompose in fields. (Aines coauthored a similar analysis focused on California’s waste biomass and contributed to a 2022 lab report prepared for Microsoft to evaluate costs and options for carbon removal purchases.)

He stresses that the BECCS sector can learn a lot from using that waste material. For example, it should help to provide a sharper sense of whether the carbon math will work if more land, forests, and crops are dedicated to these sorts of purposes.

“The point is you won’t grow new material to do this in most cases, and won’t have to for a very long time, because there’s so much waste available,” Aines says. “If we get to that point, long into the future, we can address that then.”

Wonky accounting

But the critical question that emerges with waste is: Would it otherwise have been burned or allowed to decompose, or might some of it have been used in some other way that kept the carbon out of the atmosphere? 

Sugarcane bagasse, for instance, is or could also be used to produce recyclable packaging and paper, biodegradable food packaging and cutlery, building materials, or soil amendments that add nutrients back to agricultural fields.

“A lot of the time those materials are being used for something else already, so the accounting gets wonky really quickly,” Grubert says. 

Some fear that the financial incentives to pursue BECCS could also compel companies to trim away more trees and plants than is truly necessary to, say, manage forests or prevent fires—particularly as more and more BECCS plants create greater and greater demand for the limited supplies of such materials.

“Once you start capturing waste, you create an incentive to produce waste, so you have to be very careful about the perverse incentives,” says Danny Cullenward, a researcher and senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania who studies carbon markets.

Due diligence 

Like other big tech companies, Microsoft has lost some momentum when it comes to its climate goals, in large part because of the surging energy demands of its AI data centers. 

But the company has generally earned a reputation for striving to clean up its direct emissions where possible and for seeking out high-quality approaches to carbon removal. It has consulted extensively with critically minded researchers at advisory firms like Carbon Direct and demonstrated a willingness to pay higher prices to support more credible projects.

Marrs says the company has extended that scrutiny to its BECCS deals.

“We want as much positive environmental impact as possible from every project,” he says.

“We’re doing months and months of technical due diligence with teams that visit the site, that interview stakeholders, that produce a report for us that we go through in depth with a third-party engineering provider or technical perspective provider,” he adds.

In a follow-up statement, Microsoft stressed that it strives to validate that every BECCS project it supports will achieve negative emissions, whatever the fuel source.

“Across all of these projects, we conducted substantial due diligence to ensure that BECCS feedstocks would otherwise return carbon to the atmosphere in a few years,” the company said. 

Likewise, Jonathan Rhone, the cofounder and chief executive of CO280, stresses that they’ve worked with consultants, carbon market registries, and pulp and paper mills “to make sure we’re adopting the best standards.” He says they strive to conservatively assess the release and uptake of greenhouse gases across the supply chain of the mills they work with, taking into account the type of biomass used by a given plant, the growth rate of the forests it’s harvested from, the distance trucks drive to ship the timber or sawmill residues, the total emissions of the facility, and more.

Rhone says its typical projects will capture and store away on the order of 850,000 to 900,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. How much that would make up of the plant’s total emissions would vary, based in part on how much of the facility’s energy comes from by-product biomatter and how much comes from fossil fuels. For its first projects, the company will aim to capture 50% to 65% of the CO2 emissions at the pulp and paper mills, but it eventually hopes to exceed 90%. 

In a follow-up email, Rhone said the carbon capture equipment at the mills it works with will also prevent “substantial levels” of particulate matter and sulfur dioxide emissions and might reduce emissions of other pollutants as well.

The company is in active discussions with 10 pulp and paper mills in the Gulf Coast and Canada. Each carbon capture and storage project could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. 

“What we’re trying to do at CO280 is show and demonstrate that we can create a stable, repeatable playbook for developing projects that are low risk and provide the market with what it wants, with what it needs,” Rhone says. 

Proponents of BECCS say we could leverage biomass to deliver substantial volumes of carbon removal, so long as appropriate industry standards are put in place to prevent, or at least minimize, bad behavior.

The question is whether that will be the case—or whether, as the BECCS sector matures, it will veer closer to the pattern of carbon offset markets. 

Studies and investigations have consistently shown that loosely regulated or poorly designed carbon credit and offset programs have allowed, if not invited, companies to significantly exaggerate the climate benefits of tree planting, forest preservation, and similar projects. 

“It appears to me to be something that will be manageable but that we’ll always have to keep an eye on,” Aines says. 

Magic

Even with all these carbon accounting complexities, BECCS projects can often deliver climate benefits, particularly for existing plants.

Adding carbon capture to an operating paper and pulp mill, power plant, or refinery is at least an improvement over the status quo from a climate perspective, insofar as it prevents emissions that would otherwise have continued.

But ambitions for BECCS are already growing beyond existing plants: Last year Drax, the controversial UK power giant, announced plans to launch a Houston-based division tasked with developing enough new BECCS projects to deliver 6 million tons of carbon removal per year, in the US or elsewhere.

Numerous other companies have also built or proposed biomass power plants in recent years, with or without carbon capture systems—decisions driven in part by policies that classify them as carbon neutral.

But if biomass isn’t carbon neutral, as Searchinger and others argue it can’t be in many applications, then these new unfiltered power plants are just adding more emissions to the atmosphere—and BECCS projects aren’t drawing any out of the air. And if that’s the case, it raises tough questions about corporate climate claims that depend on its doing so and the societal trade-offs involved in building lots of new plants dedicated to these purposes.

That’s because crops grown for energy require land, fertilizer, insecticides, and human labor that might otherwise go toward producing food for an expanding global population. And greater demand for wood invites the timber industry to chop down more and more of the world’s forests, which are already sucking up and storing away vast amounts of carbon dioxide and providing homes for immense varieties of plants and animals.

If these projects are merely preventing greenhouse gas from floating into the atmosphere but not drawing any down, we’re better off adding carbon capture and storage (CCS) equipment to an existing natural-gas plant instead, Searchinger argues.

Companies may think that harnessing nature to draw carbon dioxide out of the sky sounds better than cutting the emissions of a fossil-fuel turbine. But the electricity from the latter plant would cost dramatically less, the carbon capture system would reduce emissions more for the amount of same energy generated, and it would avoid the added pressures to cut down trees, he says.

“People think some magic happens—this magic combination of using biomass and CCS creates something bigger than its parts,” Searchinger says. “But it’s not magic; it’s simply the sum of the two.”