Water — and the lack of it — is devastating the country.
On Monday, President Joe Biden flew to eastern Kentucky to visit families affected by historic flooding that struck the Midwest in late July and early August, leaving at least 35 dead and hundreds missing. “It’s going to take a while to get through this, but I promise you we’re not leaving,” Biden said. “As long as it takes, we’re going to be here.”
About 2,000 miles away, the water in Lake Mead — the largest reservoir in the country, and a crucial water source for millions of people in the West — sat at a historic low, exacerbating a drought now in its third year. One part of the country has too much water; another has too little. These two things are related. They were also expected.
“This has been a slow-motion crisis for two decades now,” said Michael Crimmins, a climatologist at the University of Arizona. “It’s just converging at this moment.”
The short answer for why these seemingly opposite things are happening at once is that climate change is making our atmosphere thirstier. Or, in more scientific terms, as the Earth warms, its atmosphere can hold more water vapor. This happens at an exponential rate: The back-of-the-napkin math is that the atmosphere can store about 7 percent more water per degree Celsius of warming, and we’re currently at about 1.2°C above pre-industrial temperatures. The result is an atmosphere that takes longer to get saturated with water, which means fewer rainstorms, but when they do occur, those storms dump more water at once, resulting in floods.
Paradoxically, our changing atmosphere is also a perfect recipe for drought. Higher temperatures mean water evaporates faster, and when it falls, it’s less likely to fall as the snow that has historically fed many of the American West’s rivers and streams. The rain isn’t very helpful either, since lifting a drought requires a combination of snowfall and long, sustained rainy seasons instead of short, extreme bursts.
“Water infrastructure in the West is built around snowpack,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. “It doesn’t need to be stored in a reservoir if it’s being stored in the snowpack.” Reservoirs have limited capacity, Diffenbaugh pointed out, so if an extreme rainstorm filled a reservoir beyond capacity, that water — which otherwise might have fallen as snow, or over a longer period of time — would have to be released.
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Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
Instead, we see a vicious cycle: As the soil and vegetation in drought-prone regions dry up, they become prone to wildfires and less able to retain water, so when extreme rainstorms roll in, they trigger floods and erosion. The heat makes the water dry up before it has any particular impact on the drought, and the erosion makes the soil even less able to retain water, so the next flood becomes ever so slightly worse. We saw this kind of mid-drought flooding just a week before the floods in the Midwest, when monsoon rains swept through Flagstaff, Arizona.
“There’s a real strong negative feedback loop here,” said Bill Gutowski, a professor of meteorology at Iowa State University. “Suddenly you get these compounding effects that come into play.”
As climate change intensifies, we’ll see more extreme rainfall events across the country and the world. We’ll also see more intense droughts. In short, said Crimmins, “dry places will tend to get drier, and wet places will tend to get wetter.”
Those places won’t be able to help each other out, either. The water from the West isn’t being dumped on the Midwest, and the Midwest floodwaters won’t rejuvenate the Colorado River. Instead, the same weather patterns that might have once made those places appealing to move to — the Midwest’s precipitation has, historically, been great for agriculture — is being amplified in ways that we simply weren’t prepared for.
Our built world has historically been designed around a predictable climate, and that era is over. As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained in 2018, once rare “1,000-year” weather events are becoming more and more common. “The real question is, what will it take to design and build infrastructure to protect against flooding in a changing climate?” Diffenbaugh said. “Our assumptions are obsolete.”
The answer won’t lie in infrastructure alone. The Earth will outpace us if we do not make reductions in the emissions that brought us here to begin with, wiping out any gains we might make through engineering. On this front, there is some rare good news: The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the Senate this week, is a monumental step in the right direction. We are making our bed, rather than completely setting it on fire. Now we must learn to adapt to it.
Follow the money to the United Arab Emirates.
The West has shut Russia out of many American and European banks in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
One way wealthy and middle-class Russians, and businessmen close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, have circumvented the unprecedented sanctions Russia faces has been to send their money to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the uberwealthy federation of seven semiautonomous, autocratic petro-states in the Persian Gulf that has chosen not to participate in US-led sanctions.
For years, sanctioned businessmen close to Putin have been investing big in the UAE’s luxury real estate, per leaked databases. In recent months, it has become a yacht sanctuary. More Russian private jets than ever are flying from Moscow to the UAE, according to the New York Times, and Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich parked his Dreamliner in Dubai. The Emirati national airlines, meanwhile, is one of the few that continues direct service from Russia. (The Emirates is also a longtime Russian mob hub and a longtime Russian tourist hub.)
“We can see where their yachts go, we can see where their aircraft are going, and it’s all going there,” said Jodi Vittori, an anti-corruption expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s just a one-stop shop for illicit finance.”
Dirty money from Putin’s inner circle has also flowed in London’s luxury real estate market and into the United Kingdom’s offshore economy, among other less-regulated global cities and markets, like art and cryptocurrency, that provide the shield of anonymity.
But this is dark money going into a dirty money hub. Though watchdog groups have tried to track the dollar amounts being sequestered in the Emirates, the secretive nature of transfers and that some are from lesser-known Russians who are not on sanctions lists makes the shape and scale of it difficult to map.
“The UAE is a big hole in the bucket,” Karen Greenaway, a former FBI agent, explained. “The movement of money — and we can’t see it — allows Russia to continue to run its economy and its war economy.”
Two former Treasury officials with experience working in the Middle East told me that’s a major problem. It’s among the reasons why, in March, the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental standard-setting body based in Paris, gray-listed the UAE. That global watch list identifies countries with known money laundering and illicit financing. Now, international financial institutions that operate there need to monitor transactions more carefully. Those risks could bruise the UAE’s robust economy. In response, experts told me that the UAE is trying to implement reforms, to get off the gray list and to improve its standing. A spokesperson for the UAE’s anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing office said in a statement, “The UAE has already adopted a series of tangible measures to expand engagement with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and enact effective national reforms.”
But as Russians flee to the UAE and send their money there, the Biden administration is only drawing the Emirati leadership closer to Washington. During his Middle East trip in July, President Joe Biden invited Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan to the Oval Office. So how is it that the UAE is able to get away with being a destination of choice for Russian cash while maintaining such a tight relationship with the US?
How the Emirati system allows this to happen
The Emirates is a global financial center that is built on freewheeling regulations. “Dubai basically started out as a pirate cove,” Sarah Chayes, author of the book Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, said. Several dozen financial free zones and free trade zones provide havens for foreign money to avoid taxes, and the country’s loose regulations make it a particularly fruitful place for expats and foreign companies. There is no income tax; value-added tax was only introduced in 2018; and its first corporate tax regime is set for 2023.
Dubai has become home to illicit finance and other valuables like gold, art, and, more recently, crypto. Chayes recalled seeing what appeared to be heavy suitcases full of cash arriving in the UAE’s airport from Afghanistan when she was working as an adviser to the Pentagon, and later learned that millions in cash was coming into the UAE from Afghanistan per year.
It’s a center for American and international companies, often their base and port of call for Middle East business. There’s also the golden visa program, where luxury property buyers can get extended Emirati residence permits (which are short of impossible for international laborers to receive).
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Christopher Pike/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A former Treasury official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, explained that the UAE being a conduit for sanctions evasion is nothing new. “The laissez-faire attitude has benefited them economically,” they said. “It’s something that’s pretty openly notorious.” It’s a known risk that strategic consultants advise clients on.
And there are indicators that UAE officials are ignoring corruption. US financial officials file millions of suspicious activity reports annually as they monitor money flows within banking institutions, for example. But Lakshmi Kumar of Global Financial Integrity has noted that the UAE’s free zones, for example, post a suspiciously low number of such reports. She thinks the UAE is not monitoring suspicious activity in a comparable way to similarly sized economies.
“The lack of numbers can tell an evocative and effective story,” she told me. “The reason [the Emirati economy is] allowed to have that freedom and comfort to operate is because there is no stick on the other end.”
The enforcement issue may have to do with leadership. The UAE doesn’t have democratic institutions or independent agencies, and many courts, law enforcement, and executive agencies are run by members of the royal family. “I think that ultimately one other reason why the Emirates really aren’t interested in doing anything about Russian oligarchs is because they have their own oligarchs,” Greenaway said.
Dissent is not tolerated, prison sentences are harsh, and high-tech surveillance is widespread. As Vittori told me, “This is one of the world’s most significant surveillance states as far as we can tell.”
Despite the apparent corruption and the UAE’s implicit support to one of the US’s chief adversaries, the Emirates holds a prominent position in Washington. Experts told me what the UAE brings to bear — in terms of cooperation on counterterrorism and its 2020 accord with Israel after decades without diplomatic relations — is just too important for US policymakers to prioritize accountability on other issues.
“The US has helped bring the UAE and Israel and its neighbors together, but we want to make sure that the US stays at the table,” Michael Greenwald, a former senior Treasury official, told me.
It’s also worth noting that it took more than a decade for the UAE to deal with terrorist financing. That suggests that, even absent the political will needed, it could take time to build up an infrastructure to monitor Russian dark money.
“The entire architecture built up against ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists was not going to be successful in going after Russian oligarchs,” a former senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me. “We built a door to stop horses from escaping, but now we have different animals altogether.”
What could the US do about Russian dirty money in the UAE?
The urgent need to stop corruption was a central tenet of a speech that senior Treasury official Elizabeth Rosenberg delivered to Arab bankers in February this year.
“Nearly every act of corruption flows through the formal financial system, the system we are all a part of, which means all of us have the ability — and the responsibility — to stop it,” she said. Much as the US clamped down on terrorist financing internationally after the September 11, 2001, attacks, she explained, the US would now focus on corruption. But two weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine — and since then, the messaging has shifted.
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UAE Presidential Court/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
When Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo visited the United Arab Emirates and met with bankers in June, the word “corruption” was absent from his remarks. He did tell an Emirati newspaper, however, that he had raised the issue of Russians using the UAE financial sector in his meetings.
“I’m here today to thank those who have cooperated in this effort and to underscore the need for your vigilance and proactive action in combatting Russian sanctions evasion, including in the UAE,” Adeyemo told bankers. (An Emirati delegation visited Washington in early July to discuss cooperation.)
Nothing as strongly worded came out following President Joe Biden’s meeting with the UAE president during his recent Middle East trip. Russia did not appear in a US-UAE joint statement that came out of that conversation, but the document says, “President Biden recognized the UAE’s efforts to strengthen its policies and enforcement mechanisms in the fight against financial crimes and illicit money flows.” Earlier that day, a senior Biden administration official evaded a question on the UAE as a haven for Russian money and emphasized that the UAE voted on the right side of a United Nations General Assembly vote against Russia.
But the Biden administration recognizes that the UAE has become an alternate financial hub for sanctions-busters.
As Barbara Leaf, the State Department’s top Middle East diplomat who served as ambassador to the UAE from 2015 to 2017, put it in a recent congressional hearing, “As far as the UAE, I am not happy, I am not happy at all with the record at this point, and I plan to make this a priority, to drive to a better alignment, shall we say, of effort.”
The question then becomes: What would making it a priority look like?
After being gray-listed, the UAE’s Executive Office of Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Finance promised to initiate new inspections of institutions, “with the aim of achieving full compliance with Financial Action Task Force (FATF)’s international standards.”
The gray-listing was a wake-up call, and Emirati financial authorities are more carefully monitoring daily financial transactions, according to a business consultant based in the Emirates, who would only speak anonymously. “The central bank is really cracking down,” they told me, “because senior financial officials here are actually worried about the reputation.”
“The UAE is actively building on the significant progress made to date,” the spokesperson for the anti-money laundering office said. “Looking ahead, the UAE will continue to develop its ability to detect, investigate and understand money laundering and terrorist financing, and advance financial crime compliance frameworks within the country and around the world.”
This is a start, but anticorruption experts seek a more systemic reckoning. The lack of political will on the Emirati side is the unanimous answer for why so little has been done to reform. And the lack of appetite on the US side helps explain why the US has not put pressure on the Emiratis.
Few countries in the Washington ecosystem have as influential boosters as the Emirates. On the UAE embassy’s social media, for example, former general and Trump administration Defense Secretary James Mattis touts how great the country is.
“The US will probably not take any serious steps to punish the UAE for this,” says Giorgio Cafiero of the consulting firm Gulf State Analytics. “Because the country has a very liberal veneer, and a narrative of being a tolerant country. It also is a country that does a lot of lobbying in Washington, for many reasons, the UAE escapes criticism in the US.”
In fact, the United Arab Emirates was the honored guest of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival this year on Washington’s National Mall. The country is so good at wins, while flouting the rules.
Money from Meta — and the rest of Big Tech — is pouring into Washington publications.
Axios is an against-the-grain success story: a five-year-old media startup, backed by venture capital, that succeeded journalistically and financially. Which is why it has been able to sell itself for more than $500 million to Cox Enterprises.
But there’s something else unusual about Axios, at least compared to most media companies: It owes a significant amount of its success to Meta and other tech giants.
That’s because Meta, Alphabet, and other Big Tech companies looking to repair or burnish their reputation have been pouring ad money into Axios and other digital publishers that focus on Washington, DC. That group includes Politico and Punchbowl News, a startup that focuses on Congress. Publications that would like to be in that group include Puck, the subscription news startup, and Semafor, the publication Ben Smith and Justin Smith will launch this fall.
Tech companies aren’t the only players in the so-called “corporate social responsibility” ad market that has been around for years. If you’ve ever watched a Sunday news show like Meet the Press, you’ve definitely seen examples. They’re often for companies you’re never going to interact with personally — think Cargill or ADM or Lockheed Martin — but that very much want to interact with Congress. And they’ve been a staple for an earlier generation of print-based DC publications, like Congressional Quarterly.
But the ads, which are meant to influence people who might regulate the company paying for the ads, have become particularly important to the new breed of digital-first publications that have been cropping up in DC for the past decade or so, starting with Politico in 2007.
Publishers in the market say the spending has ramped up considerably in recent years, pushed in large part by tech companies trying to deal with new scrutiny. And they say Facebook owner Meta is the biggest player in the game.
“Facebook is a massive net plus for us,” Axios CEO Jim VandeHei told me in 2020, when he was explaining why his company’s ad business was growing ahead of plan. (VandeHei, like many publishers I talked to, declined to speak on the record for this story, as did execs at tech companies I spoke with.)
Just how much money Meta and the rest of big tech are plowing into DC publications — as well as ones that aren’t solely focused on Washington, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and even Vox Media, which owns this site — is a matter of conjecture. But publishers I’ve talked to think the market for corporate responsibility ads in DC pubs may be around $350 million — up perhaps tenfold from the 1990s — with tech companies accounting for perhaps a third of that.
By the standards of tech giants — that is, some of the biggest companies in the world — that’s almost nothing. For context: In the second quarter of 2022, Meta, which has been struggling on multiple fronts, generated $6.7 billion in profits. That’s more than $70 million a day.
But for publishers, even a slice of a slice of tech money is incredibly high-margin and meaningful. Rivals tell me that Axios, for instance, charges $300,000 for a week-long ad campaign that includes multiple placements. Last year, Axios generated a $4 million profit on $87.5 million in sales, and hopes to generate more than $100 million in 2022, the company has told investors.
The money is also material to small marketing agencies that have created a boutique industry placing ads on behalf of corporate clients. Bully Pulpit Interactive, for instance, handles Meta’s DC-based buying, though neither company would confirm that on the record. Meta also isn’t listed as one of Bully Pulpit’s clients on its homepage, which does list the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy funded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
If tracking the total dollars that tech folks are spending in Washington remains murky — unlike lobbying expenditures, they’re not required to file that info anywhere — the rationale for the spending is quite clear: In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, Big Tech has been scrutinized and criticized by Democrats and Republicans, who are lining up to regulate the sector.
“They’re doing so much more in Washington because Washington is doing so much more to them,” says Matt Kaminski, editor-in-chief of Politico. Other active big-tech messengers, publishers tell me, include Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which is currently facing multiple lawsuits from regulators, and Amazon, which may also find itself sued by the federal government before the end of the Biden administration.
Less obviously active is Microsoft, which got a crash course in the perils of Washington in the 1990s, when it fought a long-running antitrust suit. Since then, the company has paid much more attention to policymakers, which may help explain why it has been spared many of the anti-big-tech broadsides of the last few years.
It’s reasonable to ask whether all of that money has any effect on the coverage the DC pubs aim at big tech. Because when they make a concerted messaging push, it’s hard to miss it, as journalist Judd Legum has pointed out.
The DC political newsletters by Politico, Axios and Punchbowl are ALL sponsored by Facebook pic.twitter.com/cPF8xuMnSr
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) January 4, 2021