‘Lives torn apart': Miami activists decry Supreme Court ruling on migrant protections
'I've realized that while we try to be politically correct, lives are being torn apart,' said Tessa Petit, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. 'We've become a quota. Because they can't meet their deportation targets, they're fabricating charges — illegally— just to satisfy an inhumane drive rooted in racism, xenophobia and white supremacy.'
Petit spoke during a press conference at the headquarters of the Family Action Network Movement, where activists condemned Friday's Supreme Court decision to dismantle the so-called CHNV humanitarian parole program, for the initials of the nationalities affected. The program had allowed hundreds of thousands of people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to legally enter the United States for two years.
The ruling threatens the legal status of more than half a million migrants — many of them now settled in South Florida.
Petit and others stressed that protecting migrants serves the national interest, calling on the U.S.-born children of earlier immigrant generations to stand in solidarity.
'To the American people, I say this: It's us now, but your turn will come,' Petit warned. 'If you don't look, speak, or act a certain way, your turn will come. You are allowing precedents that will change your world forever.'
Linda Julien, the first Haitian-American elected to the Miami Gardens City Council, denounced what she called the hypocrisy at the heart of U.S. immigration policy.
'We are a nation that sings liberty but whispers restrictions. A nation that demands labor but blocks legal pathways,' she said. 'Enough with the contradictions. Let this moment reflect not just compassion, but consistency.'
Haitians are the largest group affected by the CHNV program, with approximately 211,010 beneficiaries by the end of 2024. Initially excluded, Haitians were later included by the Biden administration in response to the country's collapse into violent instability. The goal was twofold: provide humanitarian relief and avert a mass migration crisis in South Florida.
Speaking on behalf of the 117,330 Venezuelans also facing deportation in the CHNV ruling, Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan American Caucus, stressed that this is not an abstract policy dispute.
'This is about families. About dignity. About human beings who followed the rules and are now being punished for it,' she said.
Ferro pointed out that more than 530,000 CHNV recipients complied with a rigorous vetting process — undergoing background checks and securing U.S.-based sponsors who committed to financially supporting them.
For many Venezuelans fleeing the Nicolás Maduro regime—marked by violence, persecution and economic collapse—CHNV was a critical lifeline.
'It was the bridge that reunited parents with children, siblings torn apart by years of trauma, and survivors of authoritarian regimes who finally had a chance to rebuild in safety,' Ferro said.
The Supreme Court's ruling, she warned, jeopardizes even those who did everything right. 'This isn't about illegal entries or breaking the law,' she said. 'It targets people who entered legally, passed background checks and were federally approved.'
For Ana Sofia Pelaez, the fight for Cuban freedom is deeply personal — woven through generations. It's her grandparents arriving in Miami in the 1960s, her parents' sacrifices, her community's struggle. Today, it's also about over a hundred thousand Cubans facing potential detention and deportation following a ruling that sent shockwaves through immigrant communities nationwide.
'To force Cubans who have applied and received parole to return now would be a moral failure,' said Pelaez, co-founder and executive director of the Miami Freedom Project. 'The island is under a repressive dictatorship, where dissent is punished with imprisonment, torture and exile.'
The ruling is viewed by many in the Cuban-American community as a profound betrayal. Cuba remains gripped by crisis after the historic July 11, 2021, protests—the largest anti-government demonstrations in decades—were met with brutal crackdowns, mass arrests and long prison terms.
Cuba continues to suffer widespread shortages of food and medicine, a collapsing economy and unrelenting state surveillance.
'The government silences opposition through harassment and brutality,' Pelaez said. 'And economic desperation pushes people to the brink. This is not a place to which anyone should be forcibly returned.'
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Yahoo
a minute ago
- Yahoo
Inside a US guitar string maker's strategy to navigate the trade war
By Timothy Aeppel FARMINGDALE, NY (Reuters) -Once a week, executives of D'Addario & Company, a maker of strings and drumsticks for the world's top musicians, gather at the company's headquarters about 40 miles east of New York to strategize how they should respond to the President Donald Trump's trade war between the U.S. and the rest of the world. 'We literally call it our trade war task force,' said CEO John D'Addario III. Back in April, Trump was generating so much turmoil on trade that they met daily. But as they've gotten the hang of responding to constantly changing rules, they've scaled back to meeting weekly to map out plans to protect their business and take advantage of opportunities that may arise. Strategy sessions like this are happening across corporate America as Trump's tariffs create kinks and extra costs in global supply chains built up over decades. For D'Addario, a family-owned business that has been around for over half a century, this has meant looking at every aspect of their business to assess exposure, resulting in strategies that include setting up their own free trade zone and rerouting shipments to avoid tariffs, Reuters reporting shows. U.S. companies are learning there are no quick fixes to their trade woes. What seems to work one week may be outdated the next as the levies, or threats of levies, shift. In the past few months, the U.S. has slapped a minimum 10% tariff on most imported goods, with higher rates on steel, aluminum, cars, and car parts. The trade war so far has pushed the effective U.S. tariff rate to around 20%, according to the Budget Lab at Yale, a level not seen since the 1930s. D'Addario is one of the world's leading makers of music accessories, with annual sales of $235 million and six U.S. factories. Five of those plants are clustered in this Long Island suburb, including one that churns out 750,000 strings a day for everything from bass guitars and banjos to violas and mandolins. The company has a devoted following among professional musicians as well as amateurs. John Oates--of the former rock duo Hall & Oates--uses their strings, as does jazz guitarist Pat Metheny and country singer Chris Stapleton. Neil Peart, the late Rush drummer, used D'Addario's drumsticks--and the company still sells sticks that were designed specifically for his playing style and bear his signature. A set of those hung on the wall of the conference room where the task force met one recent morning. While the company makes nearly all their products in the U.S., their supply chain and distribution are global. They export nearly 45% of what they make to 120 countries. Their biggest foreign market is Japan. TRADE WAR ROOM D'Addario's global footprint means they keep finding new vulnerabilities. For instance, one item on the agenda of the recent meeting was Japanese oak. D'Addario uses the wood, known as Shira Kashi oak, to craft a line of drumsticks coveted for their durability and feel. Some drummers won't play anything else. But the cost of the material is set to jump on August 1 if Trump makes good on his vow to push through a wide range of new tariffs, including 25% on Japanese goods. 'There isn't really any good alternative—people want their Shira Kashi oak,' Hank Sheller, the company's strategic sourcing manager, told the group of eight other executives gathered around a conference table three days after Trump announced the new levies on Japan. The group concluded that, in this case, a price increase to offset tariffs would be readily accepted by consumers because the wood is so unique. 'That's just something people will pay for,' said D'Addario. Other topics under discussion were more difficult to resolve, like what Trump's promise of a 50% copper tariff, announced the day after the Japan duties, would do to their costs. D'Addario doesn't buy raw copper but consumes large amounts of copper rod that it draws out into ultra-fine thread used to wind many types of musical strings. 'The problem is we don't really know the origin of the copper we're getting—whether it's from a domestic source or imported,' said D'Addario. 'But it's more likely there will be a cost increase for us, even if it is a U.S.-based supplier.' And unlike Japanese oak, copper strings are a commodity, so raising consumer prices to cover the tariff cost is unlikely. The task force has found ways to sidestep some tariffs. For example, after the U.S. started raising tariffs sharply on China, they shifted how they ship Chinese-produced goods to customers outside the U.S. It previously imported most of those goods, which account for about 5% of their total sales, to its warehouse on Long Island, where they were stockpiled and then sent on to end customers as they filled orders. The task force realized they could get around U.S. tariffs by having the goods sent directly to foreign customers from the Chinese factories. It helped that the Chinese factories were eager to help. In the past, they resisted directly shipping smaller orders. 'As a result of tariffs, our Chinese suppliers suddenly became much more accommodating,' said D'Addario. 'WE'LL SEE WHAT HAPPENS' The task force has also applied for permission to create a free trade zone in part of their warehouse in Farmingdale, which will allow them to hold imported products and only pay tariffs when they need to be used to supply domestic orders. The company also plans to do some assembly work there. 'We'll be able to bring parts from China and assemble them with domestic parts—and then you could re-export that without paying any tariffs,' said D'Addario. Though that won't be a quick fix. D'Addario estimates it will likely take more than a year to get the necessary approvals and to build that facility, which must be secured with fencing and special monitoring equipment. Another effort is aimed at changing how they sell musical strings in China. Until now, they've produced them in New York and had workers here put them into retail packaging. They're testing sending the strings in bulk to China and having a logistics company there do the final packaging. Since the value of bulk strings is lower than the same number of strings packaged for retail, the tariff bill is cut. Savings like that will be crucial if the Chinese retaliate against U.S. tariffs after August 1, said D'Addario. 'At least we'll have the capability proven,' he added, 'so we're able to respond to whatever happens.' Despite the task force's efforts, the company's tariff bill is still expected to hit $2.2 million by the end of this year, compared to just $700,000 last year. Part of that is new costs to import cane from the company's own plantations in France and Argentina, which it uses to make woodwind reeds. The tariff on cane has risen to 10% and is set to go much higher. 'Trump said he'll put a 30% tariff on Mexico and Europe, so we're expecting anything from our plantation in France to cost even more,' said D'Addario. 'Assuming it goes through. We'll see what happens on August first.' Sign in to access your portfolio
Chicago Tribune
3 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
ICE arrests increase across Chicago under Trump, many with no convictions, data shows
With the Trump administration pushing far more aggressive immigration enforcement across the country and in Chicago, a Tribune analysis of newly released data shows a significant increase in the number of immigrants detained in the Chicago area — particularly those with no known criminal background. The findings come from a Tribune analysis of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained and shared by the research group Deportation Data Project. The analysis shows that, as President Donald Trump's administration has pushed enforcement in sanctuary cities such as Chicago, ICE saw notable spikes in the number of people initially detained at two ICE processing centers in the area. The figures peaked at 88 bookings on an early June day that, at the time, drew attention for clashes between Chicago community members and federal immigration agents. Of the 88 booked that day, the latest analysis found, three-fourths had no criminal record logged by ICE. The surge in detentions — including immigrants with no known criminal record — mirrors broader trends across the country. The second Trump administration has increasingly focused on boosting the number of people arrested who lack legal status to be in the country, even if the efforts ensnared more people who didn't fit the traditional ICE focus on tracking down and deporting those who committed serious crimes. The analysis suggests that the efforts locally have done both — with ICE agents under the second Trump administration detaining double the rate of those convicted of violent felonies and sex crimes, while detaining nine times as many immigrants with no known criminal past. Local ICE officials have not released such detailed data on their enforcement efforts. When told about the Tribune's analysis and asked about its findings, a spokesman for ICE's local office did not immediately respond. The data used by the Tribune in its analysis was obtained by the law school of the University of California at Los Angeles, as part of a December 2024 lawsuit it filed to force ICE to release the data under the Freedom of Information Act. Court records show that ICE produced the raw data in batches this summer, and the law school shared the data with the Deportation Data Project, which posted the latest batch online Tuesday to share with reporters and researchers. (ICE refused earlier this year to directly provide the Tribune with similar raw data the newspaper had requested under the open records law.) The raw data has limitations. It does not identify detained people by name — unlike traditional jail logs or prison rosters, which by law typically must identify the people being held behind bars. And while the data lists details of each detention and some biographical information on who was detained, it does not list the cities, or even the counties, where people were arrested. That makes it impossible to tally the precise numbers of arrests in Chicago and the suburbs. The data, however, does log when people were booked into ICE's facilities in Broadview and Chicago, offering a proxy to gauge the number of people detained in the Chicago region, and the type of person being detained in a second Trump administration in a city that Trump's 'border czar,' Tom Homan, called 'ground zero' for enforcement. The Tribune analysis found that in Trump's first 150 days, ICE detained three times the number of immigrants convicted of crimes than in President Joe Biden's last 150 days in office. But, under Trump, ICE detained nine times as many immigrants without any known criminal past. A deeper look at ICE data finds that, among those deemed convicted of crimes, agents in Trump's first 150 days booked nearly double the number of people convicted of violent felony or sex crimes, compared with Biden's last 150 days. But the data also shows that, under Trump, a far higher proportion of the bookings for convicted immigrants were for those who'd committed lesser crimes, with a nearly fivefold uptick in drunken-driving or traffic offenses. That trend could be seen on ICE's busiest day for booking in the Chicago area — June 4. On that Wednesday, ICE data logged no known criminal convictions for three-fourths of the 88 people. Of the remaining 22, half had pending charges and half had convictions. Of the 11 with convictions, two had convictions for violent felony or sex crimes. Three had convictions for drug or property crimes. Three had convictions for drunken-driving or traffic offenses. Two had listed convictions illegally entering or reentering the country. And one had violated probation for an unspecified crime. On that day, ICE sent text messages requesting immigrants to report to a downtown office for check-ins, and advocates said about 20 of those immigrants never came out of the building. Over two dozen aldermen and community organizers gathered to protest outside before clashing with immigration agents who pulled those inside the building into unmarked white vans. One alderman reported that the agents shoved protesters and used batons like the 'Gestapo.' At the time, an ICE spokesperson said in a statement to the Tribune that everyone arrested had a deportation order by an immigration judge and 'had not complied with that order.' As of three weeks later — the most recent update to the ICE data — of the 88 detained, 25 had either been deported or left the country voluntarily, in a category deemed 'removals,' according to ICE data. That included four convicted of a crime: someone convicted of firing a weapon, another of shoplifting, one of drunken driving, and another for illegally reentering the country when previously deported, according to the ICE data analyzed by the Tribune. Six more with pending criminal charges were removed before they could be tried. And 15 people with no criminal background were removed. More broadly, of those booked into Chicago-area facilities, the data shows that nearly half of those removed during the second Trump administration had a criminal conviction, while about a third of those removed had no known criminal background. And while Trump, as a candidate, railed against the recent arrival of Venezuelan immigrants, and particularly claims of a violent Venezuelan street gang overrunning the country, the vast majority of Chicago-area removals under his second administration were of immigrants born in Mexico — 302 — compared with 136 born in Venezuela. And of the smaller group with violent felony or sex convictions, nearly all were born in Mexico. But the majority of people removed since inauguration day who had no criminal background were born in Venezuela, albeit with a significant number born in Mexico, too. Of those with no criminal record, the youngest removed was a boy born in 2021. The data doesn't specify if he was traveling with relatives but shows that the boy entered and exited the country with a married Venezuelan woman in her 30s and three other children — all of whom also had no known criminal record. All five entered the country in July 2023, were ordered to be deported in March 2024, and were detained somewhere in Illinois on June 11 and then sent to Venezuela five days later. The oldest was a married man born in Mexico in 1957, putting him in his late 60s. ICE records show he had been ordered to leave the country in 2009 and was arrested roughly 16 years later — on April 11 — by ICE. He was then shipped between three different facilities over five days — from Broadview to two jails in central Indiana before he was deported out of Texas. Little else is known about the man.
Los Angeles Times
3 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
How a California cloud-seeding company became the center of a Texas flood conspiracy
Two days before the waters of the Guadalupe River swelled into a deadly and devastating Fourth of July flood in Kerr County, Texas, engineers with a California-based company called Rainmaker took off in an airplane about 100 miles away and dispersed 70 grams of silver iodide into a cloud. Their goal? To make it rain over Texas — part of a weather modification practice known as cloud seeding, which uses chemical compounds to augment water droplets inside clouds, making the drops large enough and heavy enough to fall to the ground. But in the hours after the flood swept through the greater Kerrville area and killed at least 135 people, including three dozen children, conspiracy theories began swirling among a small but vocal group of fringe figures. 'I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS … WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?' wrote Pete Chambers, a former U.S. special forces commander and prominent far-right activist, on the social media platform X. The post received 3.1 million views, yet was only one of several accusations that sprang up around Rainmaker's activities and its alleged connection to the flood. 'Anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves,' wrote Michael Flynn, former national security advisor under the first Trump administration, atop a repost of Chambers' tweet. The flurry of allegations was quickly debunked, with a number of independent scientists saying that the company's actions could not have produced anywhere close to the amount of rain that triggered the flood. 'It's very clear that they have nothing to do with it,' said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, in a YouTube briefing following the flood. Rainmaker also denied the claims. The storm dropped as much as four inches of rain per hour over Texas Hill Country, and the river in some places rose by 26 feet in less than 45 minutes. But in some ways, the damage was done. Conspiracy theorists who have long alleged that Deep State Democrats are controlling the weather now had a real incident to point to. And researchers, companies and experts working to study and perform weather modification and geoengineering practices — which some say will be needed as climate change worsens — now have an even bigger hurdle to overcome. Within hours of the deadly flood, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she was introducing a bill to make all forms of weather modification — such as cloud seeding — a felony. 'This is not normal,' the Georgia representative said in a post on X. 'No person, company, entity, or government should ever be allowed to modify our weather by any means possible!!' That same week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched two new websites to 'address public questions and concerns ' about weather modification, geoengineering, and contrails, or the thin clouds that form behind aircraft at high altitudes. 'To anyone who's ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked,' what the heck is going on?,' or seen headlines about private actors and even governments looking to blot out the sun in the name of stopping global warming — we've endeavored to answer all of your questions,' EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a video accompanying the websites' launch. 'In fact, EPA shares many of the same concerns when it comes to potential threats to human health and the environment.' The EPA website notes that there is a distinction between geoengineering, which involves a broad range of activities designed to modify global temperatures, and weather modification techniques such as cloud seeding, which are generally short-lived and localized. In fact, the process of cloud seeding was invented in the United States and has existed for nearly 80 years. General Electric scientists Vincent Schaefer, Irving Langmuir and Bernard Vonnegut — older brother of the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut — began experimenting with it as early as 1946. On July 2, Rainmaker's team was working in Runge, Texas, about 125 miles southeast of where the Guadalupe River would soon flood, according to Augustus Doricko, founder and chief executive of the company, which is headquartered in El Segundo. The team flew its plane to an elevation of 1,600 feet and dispersed about 70 grams of silver iodide into the clouds — an amount smaller than a handful of Skittles, Doricko said. The bright yellow compound is known to latch onto water droplets that are already present in clouds, converting them into ice crystals that can fall as rain or snow, depending on the temperature below. Soon after the flight, Rainmaker's meteorologists identified an inflow of moisture to the region and advised the team to suspend operations, which they did, Doricko said. Around 1 a.m. the next day, the National Weather Service issued its first flash flood watch for the Kerr County region. Doricko said there's no chance Rainmaker's actions — which were contracted by the nonprofit South Texas Weather Modification Assn. and on file with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — contributed to the flood. 'The biggest and best cloud seeding operations we've seen to date have produced tens of millions — and maximally like 100 million — gallons of precipitation,' he said. 'We saw in excess of a trillion gallons of precipitation from that flood. Not only could cloud seeding not have caused this, but the aerosols that we dispersed days prior could not have persisted in the atmosphere long enough to have had any consequence on the storm.' Multiple independent experts agreed. During his briefing, Swain noted that cloud seeding does not create new clouds — it must be conducted on preexisting clouds that already have water vapor or small liquid drops inside of them, essentially enhancing what already had the potential to fall. What's more, its effects last 'minutes to maybe an hour,' Swain said. 'Best-case-scenario estimates — absolute best-case — are that these cloud-seeding operations are able to augment the amount of precipitation by at most 10% to 15% over very limited areas,' Swain said. 'On average, it's a lot lower than that. In fact, in some cases, it's difficult to prove that cloud seeding does anything at all.' Indeed, Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, has gone so far as to call cloud seeding a scam — in part because it can prey on farmers and other people who are desperate for rain, and because it typically delivers only modest results, he said. 'There's no physical way that cloud seeding could have made the Texas storm,' Dessler said, noting that the storm was fueled by extremely high levels of atmospheric water that stemmed from a tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico. 'This is a nonsense argument. There's no debate here about whether cloud seeding played a role in this disaster.' Dessler said the whole dust-up surrounding Rainmaker and the Texas flood is a distraction from the very real issues and challenges posed by global warming. The amount of material injected into the atmosphere during cloud seeding and geoengineering operations pales in comparison to the trillions of tons of carbon dioxide humans have already spewed into the atmosphere, he said. 'The real irony here is that in some sense, the argument they're making is correct — there is a conspiracy to change the climate,' Dessler said. 'It's through the emission of carbon dioxide, and it's by fossil fuel interests and the ecosystem that goes with that. That's the conspiracy.' Such limitations haven't stopped governments and municipalities from investing in cloud-seeding technology. One of Rainmaker's first clients was the Utah Department of Natural Resources, which was interested in cloud seeding as a response to the drying of the Great Salt Lake, Doricko said. His company has also contracted with the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, the Oregon Department of Agriculture and multiple municipalities in California, including the Public Works Departments of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. David Spiegel, supervising engineer with San Luis Obispo County's Public Works Department, said the county first began exploring cloud-seeding technology in the early 2000s in response to severe drought conditions and dwindling supplies at the Lopez Lake reservoir, which feeds five city agencies nearby. It took years to get the program off the ground, and it didn't ultimately run until 2019 through 2024 — when the state was dealing with yet another drought — to somewhat middling results. Specifically, San Luis Obispo's cloud-seeding program added about 1,200 acre-feet of water per year to the nearly 50,000 acre-foot reservoir, he said. (An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons.) In its best year, it added about 2,500 acre-feet. Part of the challenge was that there weren't many clouds in the area to work with, Spiegel said. 'We didn't have enough storms to seed because we were still in this drought period, so it was kind of unfortunate.' However, he still saw the program as a success because the small water supply gains that came from the cloud seeding priced out to about $300 per acre-foot — far less than the cost of importing supplies from other sources such as the State Water Project, which can run closer to $1,500 an acre-foot. He said he would still consider cloud seeding in the future should the reservoir run low again. 'We definitely see it as a viable option,' Spiegel said. So far, the state isn't investing in its own cloud-seeding programs, though it does keep a close eye on them, according to Jason Ince, a spokesman with the California Department of Water Resources. He said any groups conducting cloud seeding work are required to notify the agency by submitting a notice of intent. An October report published by the department indicates there have been at least 16 cloud-seeding projects across multiple counties and watersheds in California in recent years. Such efforts could become useful as climate conditions keep moving in the wrong direction: Warming temperatures and overuse are sapping groundwater supplies in California, while state and federal officials are still mired in negotiations over use of the Colorado River — a rapidly shrinking water lifeline that supplies 40 million people across the American West. Meanwhile, global average temperatures continue to soar driven largely by fossil fuel emissions and human activity. Many experts say there's a good chance that some form of intervention — weather modification, geoengineering or some altogether new technology — will be needed in the years ahead. 'Weather modification projects are vital resources to enhance fresh water supply for communities within their watersheds,' the Department of Water Resources report says. It recommends that the state continue to support existing cloud-seeding projects in the state and help facilitate new ones. Speigel, of San Luis Obispo County, said laws banning cloud seeding and other weather modification measures — such as the one posed by Rep. Greene — would be a detriment to the region. 'It would be a setback for us, because we are constantly looking for other opportunities for water,' he said. 'It would limit our ability to seek out means of more water in these long drought periods. ... I definitely think it would stifle our ability to help our customers.' Even more controversial than cloud seeding are geoengineering techniques to block the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth. Some involve injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. A 2021 report on geoengineering published by the National Academies of Sciences affirmed that 'meeting the challenge of climate change requires a portfolio of options,' but advised caution around such methods. '[Solar geoengineering] could potentially offer an additional strategy for responding to climate change but is not a substitute for reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions,' the report says. Dessler, who is also the director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M, likened geoengineering to airbags on a car — something no one ever hopes to use but that would be good to have in a climate emergency. He said the focus should continue to be on reducing the use of fossil fuels, and that the talk of banning geoengineering, cloud seeding and other forms of weather modification by members of the Trump administration and some lawmakers is more political than scientific. 'It makes no sense — it shows you that this is not an argument about facts. It's an argument about worldview,' he said. The president has taken many steps to undo efforts to address climate change in recent months, including withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, an agreement among some 200 nations to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The EPA has also removed several barriers and regulations that govern oil and gas drilling in the U.S., and has said it wants to repeal the endangerment finding — a long-held legal and scientific determination that CO2 emissions harm human health and welfare, among other significant changes. Doricko, Rainmaker's CEO, said he was disappointed to see cloud seeding politicized in the wake of the Texas flood. He was taken aback when he saw that Rep. Greene had posted a picture of his face on X — 'insinuating somewhat that cloud seeding, or I, was responsible for the natural disaster in Texas, when any meteorologist or atmospheric scientist could tell you otherwise,' he said. 'Human civilization is unintentionally modifying the weather and the climate all the time,' Doricko said, including through fossil fuel emissions and urban heat islands that warm surrounding areas. 'What Rainmaker is trying to do is bring some intentionality to that, so that we can modify the weather for our benefit and deliberately.' Doricko said he is also an advocate of more transparent reporting, more stringent regulations, and whatever else is needed to build trust with the public about 'a really consequential technology.' He said he will continue to engage with skeptics of the technology in good faith. 'Cloud seeding is a water supply tool, and whether you're a farmer in a red state or an environmentalist in a blue state, water is as nonpartisan as it gets,' he said. 'Everybody needs water.'
