Cloudbusting

From Wilhelm Reich to the Pritzker family, via Kate Bush

Cloudbusting is a track on Kate Bush’s 1985 album, Hounds of Love. It’s based on A Book of Dreams, Peter Reich’s memoir of life with his father Wilhelm. The official video must be one of the most engaging pop videos ever made. Wilhelm, played by actor Donald Sutherland, and the pre-teenage Peter, played by Bush herself, set up a machine, invented by Wilhelm, to induce a rainstorm. When Wilhelm is arrested and his papers confiscated,, Peter returns to use the machine to successfully bring on the rain. 

Bush’s lyrics convey darkness as well as tenderness in the relationship between father and son, a sense of danger hinted at by the martial drum beat that pulses through most of the track.

You’re like my yo-yo

That glowed in the dark

What made it special 

Made it dangerous

So I bury it

And forget

Wilhelm Reich

The real life Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was a student of Freud who attempted to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism. He was particularly interested in how mental disorders manifested in the physical body, and was the founder of body-oriented psychotherapy. He believed that many illnesses resulted from failure to achieve total body (and heterosexual) orgasm, and that repression of adolescent sexuality was the source of many social ills, including the rise of fascism. 

Reich downplayed how power differences affect sexuality. Claiming he was encouraging the free expression of a “natural spontaneous sexuality” in children, Reich saw little need for children to be protected from abuse by adult male predators.  “Experience clearly teaches us,” he insisted, ”that every hindrance of infantile and adolescent sexuality by parents, teachers, or administrative authorities must be stopped …   the necessity for legal protection of infantile and adolescent sexuality can no longer be doubted.” Safeguarding responsibilities were ignored in his practice as an analyst, too - Reich  had ‘affairs’ with at least two of his teenage female patients. 

After emigrating in 1939 from Europe to the USA, Reich’s work focused on his belief that total body orgasm enabled humans to connect with ‘orgone’, a pulsating energy in the environment similar to the Chinese concept of chi. Orgone, he claimed, ”is capable of charging non-conducting substances”. He believed it could  be accumulated and used to heal a number of physical illnesses, a claim that the US authorities found so threatening that they destroyed his papers and equipment, burned his books, and imprisoned him.

Reich was worried about the spread of radioactivity from atom bomb tests. He believed this could stagnate the orgone energy in the atmosphere, with dire consequences for the living planet. This explains why, as mentioned in Kate Bush’s lyric, Peter had to bury his special yo-yo. It was radium in the luminous paint which made his yo-yo glow in the dark, and his father insisted he bury it to protect them from its radioactivity (it had not been long since the health damage to the 'radium girls' who applied luminous paint to watches had been recognised). 

The Syrian government in 1933 had banned the yo-yo, believing the heavens, displeased by its use, had reacted by creating a drought. Reich’s concern was not with the yo-yo itself, but with its radioactivity. He was convinced that desertification had a human induced physical cause, negative orgone from radioactivity, particularly the radioactive fallout from atomic bomb tests. The cloudbuster was a machine he designed to take orgone energy from flowing water into its copper pipes and inject it into the atmosphere. Reich thought this could counter the deadening effect of radioactivity. Additionally, if focused on clouds, it could release their rain, and counter desertification. Using the clowdbuster had apparently saved a blueberry crop in Maine, and ended a five-year drought in Arizona. Reich and his followers insisted that these were both direct effects of employing the cloudbuster, and not coincidence. 

Reich believed that he was respecting nature, and merely countering the negative effect of radioactivity and other pollutants. “The planet is in trouble”, he wrote in his appeal to the Supreme Court against his prison sentence.. He set out clear rules for using the cloudbuster. One of them was “In cloud engineering you do not ‘create rain’ - you do not ‘destroy clouds’ - briefly, you are not playing God. What you do is solely helping nature on its natural course.” There was more than a hint of arrogance in his ‘cloud engineering’, though, an arrogance that carried over from his earlier psychoanalytic practice.

Behind every cloud …..

Silver Lining is a non-profit NGO in the USA whose rather verbose mission includes a “focus on broadening the portfolio of responses to climate change to address near term challenges”,  while promoting  “rapid aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions as a matter of urgency and a fundamental and essential priority for addressing climate change.” 

Silver Lining’s 2019 report, Ensuring a Safe Climate, placed more emphasis on broadening responses than on cutting emissions. It was sceptical that the net-zero targets agreed at Paris in 2016 could be achieved quickly enough, and argued for emissions reductions to be supplemented by increasing reflection of sunlight back into space. Two alternatives were proposed, replicating the effect of volcanic eruptions  by injecting sulphur dioxide particles from planes into the stratosphere, or injecting sea salt particles from ships into the atmosphere. It acknowledged that there are “numerous risks and uncertainties in atmospheric sunlight reflection”, but argued that “in the next 10 to 30 years it has the potential to constrain warming at a dramatically lower cost than mitigation or greenhouse gas removal.”

Silver Lining’s current Safe Climate Research Initiative concentrates on the atmospheric option. The Marine Cloud Brightening Program (MCBP) it is funding at Washington University is researching whether aerosols (small particles) of sea water can be injected into clouds  to make them more reflective. It’s a response to global warming which bears e striking similarity to Reich’s cloudbusting response to radioactive pollution, seven decades earlier.

MCBP Director Sarah Doherty explains in a TED talk how air pollution (from coal-fired power plants, etc)) damages our health, but cools surface temperatures by absorbing sunlight and reflecting it back into space. She is sceptical that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced fast enough to prevent dramatic rises in surface temperatures, and points out that as we reduce pollution to improve public health, warming is intensified. The research program she directs explores whether natural aerosols, from sea water, can replicate the cooling effects of pollutants, without the damaging effects on health. The program has access to a tool that was not available to Reich, computer modelling.

“When we add tiny sea salt aerosols to the clouds over the ocean in global climate models, we find that brightening just a fraction of the clouds over the ocean does, in fact, rapidly and significantly reduce climate warming from greenhouse gases. So these models indicate it is possible.”

(Sarah Doherty, How aerosols brighten clouds and cool the planet, TED April 2024)

Whether or not the method would work in practice requires more detailed research into how aerosols and clouds interact. As the first stage of this research, the MCBP’s cloudbuster, its ‘cloud aerosol research instrument’,  was this year being tested at Alameda, California, Local opposition, however, soon brought the test to a halt.

(That would not be a problem for prominent climate change denier John Clauser - he claims, against all the evidence, that cloud cover increases to automatically counter rises in temperature. But that’s another story)

Following the money

Following the money back from Silver Lining’s Marine Cloud Brightening Program leads to the Pritzker family - not the Pritzker cousins, committed to the growth of the gender industry, but next-generation siblings Rachel and Roland Pritzker, committed to ecomodernism (employing technology to solve the climate crisis), 

Rachel is President of the Pritzker Innovation Fund, and Roland is its Chair. Their philanthropy is a major source of funding for solar geoengineering, not only in the atmosphere, via Silver Lining, but also in the stratosphere, via the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program (HSGRP) .

The HSGRP’s Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment  (SCoPEx) aimed to explore the impact of injecting a small amount of aerosol from a propelled balloon into the stratosphere above Sweden. This year the experiment was cancelled, following determined opposition from the indigenous Saami people.

“Rather than seeking ways for technological quick fixes to mitigate global climate change, efforts should focus on addressing the root causes - primarily the reduction of carbon emissions and a transition towards sustainable living practices that in just ways promote the preservation and restoration of natural ecosystems and respects the Earth’s resource limitations.”

(Saami Council, Statement on Harvard’s decsion to halt SCoPEx project, 2024)

Given this history, it is not surprising that much of the HSGRP’s current focus is on governance, and the importance of ‘engagement’ (listening to people’s concerns, and reassuring them). Jesse Reynolds, an HSGRP research affiliate, explores how to gain political  support for solar geoengineering. He points out that, just as liberals are being persuaded to support human genetic modification on the grounds that this would extend reproductive choice, conservatives can be persuaded to support solar geoengineering on the grounds that this would avoid the need for controls on fossil fuels. .He is currently involved with a EU-funded project to develop a governance framework for solar geoengineering research and experimentation.

 From Reich to the Pritzkers

 I’ve written about Rachel Pritzker before. She, together with Michael Shellenberger and three other colleagues from the Breakthrough Institute that she chairs, is one of the eighteen signatories of the 2015 Ecomodernist Manifesto, which insists that technology can be changed to allow economic growth to continue with fewer impacts on the natural world.  It’s a stance, I suggested, that suits the super-rich:

“It allows them to put all of the blame for environmental damage on technology, and none on greed, and to be able to salve their consciences without having to cut their living standards. It also appears to offer an escape from the dilemma faced by industrial capitalism - how to maintain the growth on which its profits depend in the face of the limits imposed by nature.”

The Pritzker cousins (with the exception of Linda, Rachel and Roland’s mother, who became a Tibetan Buddhist lama) channeled their philanthropy into the promotion of synthetic sex identities. ”What could possibly explain the abrupt drive of wealthy elites to deconstruct who and what we are and to manipulate children’s se characteristics in clinics now spanning the globe while claiming new rights for those being reconstructed?”, asked Jennifer Bilek in an article about the Pritzker cousins. “Perhaps it is profit. Perhaps it is the human temptation to play God.”

For Rachel and Roland, the same question about motivation arises. One might imagine, given their obvious keenness fo avoid climate breakdown, that their answers would be more virtuous. But their concern often seems more about how capitalist profits and growth are threatened by climate breakdown than about breakdown itself. Rather than curb the human colonisation of nature that is disrupting the climate, they divert onto a sticking plaster solution that requires yet more human colonisation of nature, and further disruption of global weather patterns.

There are echoes of Wilhelm Reich in the obsessions of each generation of the Pritzker family. The cousins’ obsession with fashioning synthetic sex identities for adolescents can be traced back not only to the transhumanism of Julian Huxley but to the erasure of children’s boundaries that was central to Reich’s critique of sexual repression. And the next generation’s promotion of solar geoengineering bears more than a passing resemblance to Reich’s cloudbusting (though Reich would certainly not have shared their enthusiasm for nuclear energy).  

The differences are significant. The Pritzkers are at the heart of the US political establishment, an establishment that earlier burned Reich’s books, imprisoned him, and contributed to his early death. They are committed to controlling biology and nature, with an arrogance that goes far beyond Reich’s belief in “helping nature on its natural course”. Their control is based on dissociation, both from our human biology, and from nature itself.