Molly Taft
Molly Taft is a senior writer at WIRED covering climate change, energy, and the environment. Their reporting concentrates on the collision between climate science, infrastructure, and politics, with a particular focus on the growing footprint of data centers and AI. They bring an accountability-driven approach to the climate beat, shaped by years of investigative work on climate and technology for dedicated climate projects and general-interest magazines. Across WIRED and other outlets, Taft explains complex systems - oceans, electric grids, clouds, and computing - in clear language to show how abstract climate risks become concrete local conflicts.
Power Play: Data Centers, AI, and the US Grid
At WIRED, Taft anchors the “Power Play” column, a recurring series that examines how data centers and AI reshape the US power system and public debate around energy. Week to week, they unpack issues like the voracious electricity demand from AI agents and the strain that new data center build-outs place on aging grids.
Their coverage looks closely at the midterm political season and beyond, tracing how elected officials, regulators, and local communities respond to this surge in energy use. In stories on conflicts such as “It’s Donald Trump Versus MAGA on Data Centers,” Taft highlights the unexpected fractures within political movements over infrastructure siting and environmental impacts.
They return repeatedly to the question of who bears the burdens of data center pollution and grid expansion, including regulatory efforts to narrow public scrutiny of industrial emissions.
Taft’s reporting in this area is distinguished by a willingness to move beyond abstract claims about “AI’s energy use” and instead itemize the physical realities of servers, cooling systems, and transmission lines. They draw on technical estimates about water consumption and power draw to challenge simplistic narratives about AI as either an unalloyed economic boon or an unmanageable environmental disaster.
Their work frequently situates data centers within broader energy policy debates, showing how infrastructure choices intersect with community opposition, climate commitments, and election-year politics.
El Niño, Extreme Weather, and Climate Risks
Taft also covers the changing dynamics of extreme weather, with a particular emphasis on El Niño and its compounding effects on global climate risks. In their WIRED piece on dimming the sun to lower El Niño risks, they explain a new modeling study that explores how marine cloud brightening could cool Pacific sea surface temperatures and moderate the strength of major El Niño events. The story walks through how deflecting solar energy might reduce the magnitude and global impacts of historic El Niño episodes, carefully distinguishing between theoretical benefits and unresolved risks.
They extend this focus in work such as “This ‘Supersized’ El Niño Is Only Just Beginning to Wreak Its Havoc,” documenting how an unusually strong event interacts with existing warming to drive destructive heat, drought, and storms.
Across these pieces, Taft’s coverage of extreme weather is notable for connecting atmospheric and ocean science to social and economic consequences.
They write about summers characterized as potential “perfect storms” of heat and dryness, joining discussions on how climate change, El Niño, and policy decisions combine to shape lived experience. Their reporting treats El Niño not as a curiosity but as a central driver of climate risk, linking it to food systems, public health, and infrastructure resilience.
Climate Tech, Geoengineering, and Environmental Trade-Offs
Taft frequently returns to the theme of climate technologies and interventions, examining both their promise and their trade-offs.
In the WIRED piece about dimming the sun, they explore marine cloud brightening as a form of targeted geoengineering, focusing on how regional interventions might avoid some of the risks associated with global-scale solar radiation management. The story traces how modeling based on Australian bushfire plumes suggests that brightening clouds over the Pacific could have meaningfully reduced past El Niño impacts, while emphasizing the uncertainties and governance questions that remain.
Beyond atmospheric interventions, Taft covers the environmental footprint of digital technologies, including AI’s water use and the broader resource demands of cloud infrastructure. In their public writing on AI’s water footprint, they address common questions about how much water AI uses and argue that the reality is more complicated than headline statistics suggest. They use these topics to illustrate a recurring theme in their work: climate and environmental issues increasingly hinge on choices about technology deployment and infrastructure, not just emissions accounting.
Investigative Climate Accountability Across Outlets
Before joining WIRED, Taft built a track record in investigative climate reporting across multiple outlets, with a particular emphasis on climate accountability. They reported and edited for Drilled, an investigative multimedia project focused on the actions of fossil fuel companies and other powerful actors in driving the climate crisis. Earlier, they wrote about climate change and technology for Gizmodo and served as a contributing editor for The New Republic’s climate vertical. Their freelance work has appeared in publications including The Intercept, The Guardian, The Nation, VICE, BuzzFeed News, Outside Magazine, and Teen Vogue, often centered on the intersections of climate, science, health, and politics.
This background informs how Taft approaches stories at WIRED and elsewhere: they consistently look for responsibility, follow money and power, and foreground communities affected by climate and energy decisions. Whether covering data center pollution, extreme weather, or geoengineering proposals, their reporting treats climate change as a contested political and economic landscape rather than a purely scientific issue. That combination of technical clarity, infrastructure detail, and accountability framing defines their work on the environment beat.
4 more environment journalists.
Alan Halaly
Alan Halaly is a water reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal who treats the Colorado River as a working system, not a backdrop, making its governance, infrastructure and risks central to his beat. He covers how policy decisions and infrastructure projects shape the region’s water future, linking high-level choices on the Colorado River, dams, mining and data centers to everyday consequences under mounting heat and growth pressures. He reports deeply on new laws, lawsuits and regulatory shifts, focusing on on-the-ground impacts. His coverage spans Colorado River cuts, Hoover Dam operations, extreme weather, heat and parks, septic system rules, workplace and public health risks, lithium and gold mines, protected landscapes, data centers, AI infrastructure and public funding. Previously he reported for metropolitan dailies, digital outlets and public media, including the Miami Herald, WUFT, The Daily Beast and Miami New Times, with work recognized by Hearst, ONA and the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Alejandra Borunda
Alejandra Borunda reports on how climate change affects human health for NPR. Her work treats global warming as a direct cause of physical and mental health risks. She covers extreme heat, including undercounted deaths, lost sleep and local efforts to track heat-related fatalities. She also reports on wildfire smoke, hurricanes, disease spread such as dengue fever, trauma, stress and unequal health impacts. Her stories examine how communities protect themselves and recover, as well as practical solutions involving climate-resilient crops, agriculture and diet. Before NPR, she wrote about climate science and environmental issues for National Geographic, including glacier retreat, shade and heat inequity, and shrinking ice-fishing seasons. A former climate scientist, she combines field reporting with scientific data to connect atmospheric research to everyday risks, choices and people’s lived experiences.
Alex Lubben
Alex Lubben is an environment reporter at The Times-Picayune/The Advocate who connects climate risk to policy, industry and community change. He covers Gulf warming, flood protection, coastal restoration, wetlands litigation, industrial projects such as SpaceX’s possible expansion, invasive species and local ecosystems. His reporting tracks how law, politics and corporate decisions shape levees, drainage, marshes and long-term resilience. He also examines climate relocation, housing and labor, showing how hurricanes, floods and wildfires displace vulnerable communities and expose gaps in government systems. He works on a small environment team and brings an investigative background to document work, data analysis, legal and policy research, and field reporting. His work has appeared in VICE News, The Center for Public Integrity, The Nation, Jewish Currents and NBC News.
Alex Wigglesworth
Alex Wigglesworth reports on how climate, land use and public policy shape California communities. She covers the Inland Empire and Mojave Desert for the Los Angeles Times and is part of its environment team. Her beat includes wildfires, megadrought, extreme weather, desert development, conservation, wildlife, industrial hazards, aging infrastructure and regulatory enforcement. She has covered Western Joshua trees, desert tortoises, beaver-led restoration, toxic lead pipes, air-quality concerns after industrial fires and the effects of nuclear war on food systems. Earlier, she was a general assignment reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com. She combines breaking news with detailed reporting grounded in scientific studies, modeling and expert interviews. Her work connects fires, drought and other hazards to climate change, while examining how agencies, companies and land-use decisions affect people and ecosystems.