| By Olivia Raimonde On Wednesday, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced its so-called “genius grants” for 2025. The annual award honors individuals who “expand the boundaries of knowledge, artistry, and human understanding” and comes with a no-strings-attached prize of $800,000. Two climate experts were among this year’s 22 winners: Ángel Adames-Corraliza, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who investigates the mechanisms underlying tropical weather patterns, and Kristina Douglass, an archaeologist at Columbia University’s Climate School who studies the history of climate adaptation in Madagascar. We spoke with both researchers about their work. Below is one question with Douglass.  Photo courtesy of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation What can the archaeology of Madagascar teach us about climate adaptation?Archaeology has a lot to teach us about climate change because we are effectively looking at this library of human experience. When we look at Madagascar, here is an island that has experienced a lot of climatic variability because of its geographical and geological position in history, and the communities who live on Madagascar have adapted over time to deal with this high degree of variability. There is a lot of unpredictability in the climate of southwest Madagascar. So when we look at the communities that have lived there for many generations, they have developed strategies that revolve around a single idea, which is flexibility. You have to be able to develop a livelihood approach, a social-network approach and a mobility approach that is highly flexible. Read the full interviews with Douglass and Adames-Corraliza. Billionaire developer Rick Caruso spent $107 million of his personal fortune on a run for LA mayor, casting himself as a centrist Democrat who had a businessman’s knack for problem-solving. He lost soundly and seemed to recede from view, a mogul without a public cause to champion. But January’s fires in Los Angeles thrust him back into the spotlight. John Gittelsohn and Patrick Clark profiled Caruso for Businessweek as he weighs a run to be California’s governor next year. You can read an excerpt of their piece below.  Rick Caruso during the Bloomberg Screentime event on Thursday. Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg In early January, a wildfire started smoldering in a tinder-dry part of Southern California where it hadn’t rained in eight months. The Santa Ana winds kicked up, stirring a cyclone of flames that hurled embers the size of sparrows into the Pacific Palisades. The coastal enclave was home to Hollywood celebrities including Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck and Kate Hudson who, up until then, could be forgiven for thinking they’d landed in a particular slice of paradise: a walkable village in the land of freeways, nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. The blaze was unrelenting, engulfing multimillion-dollar homes as it skipped from yard to yard. By the time it was fully contained, two-thirds of the neighborhood had been razed. Between the Palisades fire and another blaze ripping through the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, the January wildfires were the most destructive in LA history. News cameras broadcasting scenes of the wreckage to the rest of the country lingered on one freakish visual: A quaint shopping center called Palisades Village remained perfectly intact, while almost everything around it had burned. Its buildings had been inspired by the old-money main streets of East Hampton and Nantucket, while the shops were a cross between California classics and bougie essentials: a burger joint and an old-timey movie theater coexisting with Saint Laurent and Erewhon. From afar, it seemed like a miracle. But the mall hadn’t been saved by providence. It was still standing because its owner, the real estate billionaire Rick Caruso, had hired private firefighters. Caruso, until that point, was mostly just Southern California famous. He’d amassed a $5.8 billion fortune building open-air malls known for their relentlessly cheerful, Disneyfied aesthetic, with dancing fountains and sightseeing trolleys. He moonlighted in local politics, emerging as a civic fixer for a series of mayors who turned to him when they had a difficult or distasteful task they needed done. The fires thrust Caruso back into the limelight, where he appeared tanned, coiffed, tailored and angry as hell about the city’s inability to handle the disaster. He found a welcome audience for his outrage among those who considered California too regulated, too taxed, too poorly managed, too blue. He created a nonprofit called Steadfast LA to help rebuild what was destroyed in the fires. Steadfast LA, announced less than a month after the disaster, would sit “between the public and private sectors” to speed the rebuilding process. It would pull together a who’s who of prominent names in Caruso’s network, including venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos and executives from Gensler, JPMorgan Chase and McKinsey. It wasn’t lost on anyone that Steadfast would also give Caruso a platform to criticize political rivals or pitch himself to potential voters as the kind of guy who gets things done. Read the full profile.  Greg Jackson, chief executive officer of Octopus Energy Ltd. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg The UK used to be a shining example of how to act on climate change. It created one of the world’s first climate laws in 2008, which bound the government to reduce emissions on tight deadlines. That law used to have cross-party support, but that’s no longer the case with politicians trying to make climate a wedge issue. Greg Jackson, chief executive officer of the UK’s largest energy retailer, Octopus Energy, joins Akshat Rathi on the Zero podcast to discuss his plan to bring down bills and keep the public on the green side. Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday. | 
