Climate journalist and author Nathaniel Rich‘s new book “Cloudthief” is about an off-the-grid hacker and a struggling climate journalist who team up to rob a data center in Oklahoma.
Host Indira Lakshmanan speaks with Rich about the book and why a data center could be such a tempting target.
Book excerpt: ‘Cloudthief’
By Nathaniel Rich
The state sign—WELCOME TO PENNSYLVANIA: LET FREEDOM RIGH—had a liberating effect on Virginia. We’d escaped, at last, the mini storage’s event horizon. There had been no freedom in New York or New Jersey but it rang loudly in Pennsylvania. We had broken through to an unfamiliar world, a country of rime-crusted farmland and a succession of bleak old crummy villages: Grimville, Fogelsville, Krumville . . .
“Will the farms survive?” asked Virginia. “Probably, but not the same crops.” “Will there be snow?”
“There might be a lot more,” I said. “Or a lot less.” “The forests?”
“They’ll burn eventually. Though maybe if the farms fail, the forests will spread. Until there’s a drought.”
We passed a sign for Dryville. I noticed that, though I had taken over the wheel, Virginia continued to monitor the rear-view mirrors, as if to confirm that nothing had pursued us from New York. I wondered if she was looking for Manny.
“Remind me again,” she said, “how you came to write about this stuff.”
“I don’t really know . . . I think I was just looking for the biggest story.”
“Not to inspire people to act?”
“No. That’s not how it works.”
“To gather evidence for some future trial of the oil and gas industry? To deepen the public understanding of the damage being done? To chronicle the foolishness of our age for an alien anthropologist some millennia from now?”
“Nah. None of those things.”
“What do you think you’ve accomplished, then? With all your articles?”
My articles . . . I had gravitated to stories about desperate hypocrites in trouble of their own making. A Chinese cement magnate in Vail concerned that his ski resort would run out of snow. A conservationist mauled by a Florida panther he’d re-introduced into the Everglades. A Louisiana oil-and-gas lobbyist whose swampland manor was swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a collapsed natural gas well. My articles had changed nothing about the world, apart from helping a few of my subjects—the do-gooders, the crusaders, the whistleblowers—get jobs and speaking gigs.
There was at this time a phrase boomeranging around my professional world—the world of people professionally committed to saving the world, and those, like me, who pursued them like fleas. After two decades of warnings, the activist rhetoric had begun to shift. Sacrifice and austerity: out. Profit: in. Thanks to technological progress and government subsidies, environmental policy had become lucrative (or would be, soon). Saving the world was not just good ethics. It was good business. At last it had become possible to “do well by doing good.”
Even the most rapacious corporations, even the oil-and-gas behemoths, sang along. “Serving the interests of the natural world, frontline communities, and the global environment is not necessarily at odds with the imperative of profit,” ran a typical investment statement. “Sometimes it’s possible to have it both ways. Sometimes, in fact, it is essential.”
It was not only the publicly traded corporations, which had to fend off boycotts and hostile shareholder campaigns, that issued these press releases. They were joined by politicians eager for a
popular message and activists concerned by market research indicating that their bleak projections had failed to galvanize public support. All the bad news had been counterproductive, leading to fatalism and apathy. Instead of projecting doom, their strategists advised, focus on hope. Show that the Collapse wasn’t inevitable—that a safer, healthier, more equitable world was possible.
I don’t want to sound too cynical. I think most people who said such things really believed them. They believed there was money to be made in the Transition. They believed they would do well by doing good.
I wanted to believe too. It was an attractive premise: the pendulum had reached its apex and had begun to fall back-ward. The logic was unimpeachable, provided you zoomed out far enough. If a society valued its own survival, it would price out suicidal behavior.
I began to grow suspicious, however, when I noticed that do-well-by-doing-good had been adopted, without irony, by the activists and policy wonks I regularly interviewed. I think of the director of the nonprofit energy watchdog who accepted an offer from her former antagonist—a coal-powered utility—to build its renewable energy portfolio. Sure, the corporate job would pay three times her salary, but the social impact might be thirty times greater. Or the wunderkind political strategist who left the White House to found a media conglomerate, backed by millions of tech dollars, to promote the virtues of a green economy. Or the graduates from elite law schools who accepted sinecures in the pharmaceutical or cryptocurrency or artificial intelligence industries, believing that they could funnel their wealth to tax-exempt organizations that installed solar panels on inner-city churches. The more good you did, the more you made. The more you made, the more good you could do. In short, everyone I knew seemed to be doing well by doing good. Everyone except me. By doing good I was doing rather badly. And greenhouse gas emissions continued to accelerate.
Decades of wildfires and droughts and sinkholes stretched before me, an interminable succession of tragedy and wishful thinking and regret. I guess you could say I had burned out (or sunk into a hole). I couldn’t go on. But I couldn’t afford to stop. My sister needed money or she’d go blind. I needed money or I wouldn’t have an apartment. Yes, I might have applied for a comms job, regurgitating the same press releases I received daily, but I’d rather roughneck on a rig in the Gulf. I needed . . . what, exactly? Glory? Love? Fulfillment? Yes, each of these things, along with a hundred other inscrutable feelings threaded together in a mysterious totality, the shape and heft of which I had only begun to sense.
During our weeks of preparation, as we had devised our scheme in a state of uninhibited frenzy—the planning sessions assuming the properties of an erotic game, and our wanton interludes sealing our dedication to the plan—I became sure of only one thing. Instead of doing well by doing good, I would do well by doing bad.
“What is it?” said Virginia. “You got distracted thinking up a new story idea?”
“Oh I got one already.”
“It’s a good one, isn’t it? A big one? A life-changing one.”
“Oh yes. It’s so good it’s my last.”
Virginia laughed. “I like it when you talk dirty to me.” She popped off her seat belt and, as we passed Shartlesville at sixty-five miles per hour, interposed herself between me and the windshield and kissed me on the mouth.
“Cloudtheif” by Nathaniel Rich. Published by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 14, 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Nathaniel Rich. All rights reserved.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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