Reclaim Our Skies

💰$3.5 billion Bill Gates-funded Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV, 2015) is a climate-tech platform covering policy and research projects. Its contrails team, builds forecasting models and helps define criteria for a ‘warming contrail.’ Contrails org is a science-led nonprofit focused on ➡️policy⬅️, research, open tools, and adoption by airlines and air-traffic systems. It produces models, materials, and publications on ‘aviation-induced cloudiness’ and ‘persistent contrails,’ and ➡️publicizes information⬅️ on formation and altitude adjustments used in current applied work. It partners with the United Kingdom on Operation Blue Skies, contributing forecast assessment, trial design, and data analysis for testing flight-level changes over the North Atlantic. Marc Shapiro, who leads the work, reviewed the National Academies research agenda requested by NASA on the same topic. Contrails org collaborates with Google Research on AI models that use satellite imagery and weather data to predict contrail-forming regions. Separately, Google/Alphabet entities (via Verily’s Debug project) have run and sought EPA permits for large-scale releases of Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes in California and Florida. ~Babooschka

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