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CNBC spoke with 12 media executives who each anonymously gave one industry-shaking prediction for 2023.
Two executives predicted Netflix will find a merger partner next year.
This is the second annual CNBC media predictions list. Last year’s correctly predicted Bob Iger’s return to Disney as CEO.

Andrew Ross Sorkin speaks with Netflix founder and Co-CEO Reed Hastings during the New York Times DealBook Summit in the Appel Room at the Jazz At Lincoln Center on November 30, 2022 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images

Back by popular demand (OK, fine, I just wanted to do this again), I asked a bunch of past and present media and entertainment executives to give me one significant and/or surprising industry prediction for 2023.
I did this last year, too, and a few came true, or at least partially true. Bob Iger did, in fact, return as Disney’s chief executive. Vice tried to sell itself in pieces (and together). Roku made a bid for a stake in Lionsgate’s Starz (not the studio) but walked away without a deal.

The rest? Not so great. But we’ll try again this year, and in honor of the 12 days of Christmas, I’m bumping the number of predictions from 10 to 12.
Executive 1: Netflix will merge with another company
This one was actually mentioned twice — one executive predicted Netflix would merge with Paramount Global. The other guessed Disney, as Iger’s signature move upon returning to CEO.
Disney seems like a long shot given recent regulatory pushback on Penguin Random House’s attempt to buy Paramount’s Simon & Schuster and Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Disney has a market valuation of about $165 billion. Netflix’s market capitalization is about $130 billion. That would make a merger one of the largest deals in history and would create a streaming giant that dominate the industry — and almost certainly ring all sorts of antitrust alarm bells.
Shari Redstone’s Paramount Global is much smaller, with a market valuation of less than $12 billion. Netflix has sniffed around trying buying Paramount Pictures before. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has long coveted the physical Paramount lot, according to people familiar with the matter.
Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings would likely want nothing to do with Paramount Global’s cable network business, given his long disdain for the legacy pay TV business. But perhaps private equity would take the linear cable business off his hands, giving Netflix the movie studio and CBS, which Hastings and Sarandos could use as an advertising-supported reach-builder for some of Netflix’s biggest hits. Whether Netflix would want to take on paying billions for live sports rights is another story.

A deal with another company would also give Netflix a chance to write off little watched content, a tax benefit of which Warner Bros. Discovery is currently taking full advantage.
Executive 2: An ex-Disney exec returns, with his company
Bob Iger passed over Kevin Mayer for the Disney CEO role in 2020, prompting Mayer to bolt the company and take the CEO job with TikTok. At the time, the choice seemed confusing. Disney’s future appeared to be Disney+ and streaming video, not its decades-old theme park business.
Iger has an opportunity to get a second chance with Mayer if he acquired Candle Media and named Mayer his successor. He could also get another chance with Mayer’s co-founder of Candle Media, Tom Staggs, who also left Disney when it became clear he wasn’t going to be CEO.

Kevin Mayer, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of Candle Media, chairman of DAZN Group, speaks at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore, on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022.
Bryan van der Beek | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Still, Iger said during a Disney town hall last month he isn’t focused on M&A for the time being. Candle Media has acquired intellectual property assets including Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company and Moonbug, which owns the animated kids series “CoComelon.”
Iger’s calling card as CEO is acquiring IP, including Pixar, LucasFilm and Marvel. “CoComelon” could fit well within Disney+.
But choosing Mayer or Staggs would also imply Iger made an error in judgment the first time.
Executive 3: Iger extends his contract
There’s been lots of speculation over who Iger will choose as his successor. History suggests he has a hard time leaving the role of Disney CEO.
So perhaps the most obvious answer as to who he will pick is: no one (at least, not yet).

Robert Iger speaks during the Sandy Hook Promise Benefit in New York City, U.S., December 6, 2022. 
David Dee Delgado | Reuters

Christine M. McCarthy, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer The Walt Disney Company.
Source: The Walt Disney Company

David Zaslav, President and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery talks to the media as he arrives at the Sun Valley Resort for the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 05, 2022 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has spent the past year cutting costs to slim down the merged WarnerMedia-Discovery and service the company’s nearly $50 billion in debt.
Zaslav’s cost cutting moves haven’t yet convinced investors he’s on the right track to returning the company to glory. Warner Bros. Discovery shares have fallen about 60% since the April merger.
Existing investors will lose patience with Zaslav and the board, and will demand changes, said one executive. It’s possible an activist will take a stake in the company, but it’s even more likely long-time shareholders will lose confidence in his strategy when it doesn’t produce a notable valuation bump in 2023, the executive predicted.
Executive 6: The cost of sports rights will peak
Live sports rights have been the lifeblood of the legacy pay TV industry for decades. National Football League games continue to dominate ratings. College football and NBA playoff games frequently draw enormous live audiences compared to almost everything else on cable all year.
But media companies are now focused on building their streaming businesses as replacements for traditional pay TV. Consumers buy these services a la carte, meaning non-sports fans don’t have to buy services that include sports. Limited audiences, combined with a legacy media industry intent on focusing on profits and cost cutting, could end the trend of live sports commanding big rights increases.
The NBA will still command a big increase as legacy pay TV continues to exist — primarily supported by sports. Those rights will likely be renewed in 2023. But in five to seven years, it’s possible traditional TV will be totally eliminated.
That will lead to an environment where there are fewer bidders for sports rights, dropping the price for sports across the board, said this executive. Perhaps the NFL remains an outlier due to its popularity, said the executive. But every other sport’s prospects look bleak, said the person.
Executive 8: Paramount Global will sell, possibly for parts
This is our first repeat from last year.
“I love Shari [Redstone], but ViacomCBS is not long for this world as it stands today,” said a media executive last year.

Shari Redstone
Drew Angerer | Getty Images

The executive was right — sort of. ViacomCBS changed its name in 2022 to Paramount Global.
But Shari Redstone, who controls the company’s voting shares, didn’t sell. Perhaps 2023 will convince her to find a buyer — or buyers. The company has different assets that could be useful to a variety of different companies. As mentioned earlier, Netflix could want Paramount Pictures. A company like Nexstar could want Paramount Global’s owned and operated local stations, CBS could be a good fit for Warner Bros. Discovery, and private equity may want to wind down the cable networks, which still generate cash.
There’s also the possibility Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Redstone reach a deal to merge, but that transaction would be messy.
Executive 9: A big cable operator will shutter its video business
Back in 2013, then-Cablevision CEO James Dolan predicted “there could come a day” when the cable company stopped offering video service, focusing instead of building out and upgrading broadband infrastructure.
Earlier this year, cable operator Cable One announced it would stop offering cable TV for hotels and multidwelling units.
But we’ve yet to see a major cable operator end the business of residential cable TV altogether. That’s coming next year, said one executive, who said cable operators are being pressed for bandwidth to support the growth in streaming video.
Shutting down the declining video business, which generates relatively low profits, is a way to gain network capacity. Wall Street may also cheer the move as capital expenditures will go down and overall margins will improve.
If a cable operator’s stock leapt higher with such a move, it could accelerate other pay-TV providers to make similar decisions, further accelerating the decline of legacy cable TV.
Executive 10: Google’s YouTube will buy the NFL’s ‘Sunday Ticket’ rights
National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell told CNBC in July he planned to announce a “Sunday Ticket” rights winner by the fall.
Well, the last day of autumn is Dec. 21, and the league still hasn’t announced who will own “Sunday Ticket,” the league’s out-of-market Sunday afternoon package, after the 2022-23 season.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell during the NFL Football match between the Miami Dolphins and Indianapolis Colts on October 3rd, 2021 at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, FL.
Andrew Bershaw | Icon Sportswire | Getty Images

Apple and Amazon have been the favorites, with Alphabet’s YouTube TV coming on strong in recent months. Apple has wanted more flexibility with how to distribute the historic package, CNBC reported in October, and has pushed back against the league’s high asking price — more than $2.5 billion per year. Puck reported Friday Apple had dropped out of the bidding.
Amazon already owns the league’s “Thursday Night Football” package as it looks to extend Prime’s reach. Amazon has been interested in “Sunday Ticket” from the beginning of rights negotiations, but now its founder, Jeff Bezos, also may want to own the NFL’s Washington Commanders.
Alphabet’s Google gives the league quite a bit of what it wants: a technology owner with a huge balance sheet and global reach, a large marketing platform in YouTube, and the ability to support bundled legacy TV (where most of the league’s games still air) by pairing “Sunday Ticket” with YouTube TV.
“Sunday Ticket” and YouTube TV — a digital bundle of broadcast and cable networks — is similar to what the NFL has done with DirecTV.
Google also represents a new partner for the league — a plus for the NFL when the next rights renewals are up. The more potential bidders, the better. The rationale for Google over Amazon makes sense. But will it make cents? (I’m so sorry).
Executive 11: Apple will ban TikTok from the App Store
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced bipartisan legislation last week to ban TikTok from operating in the United States. The Senate also voted unanimously to ban TikTok on government phones and devices.
The concern stems from security risks of making U.S. data available to the Chinese government. TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, is a Chinese-based company.
TikTok was nearly banned during the Trump administration, but that fight eventually lost steam and disappeared.
This executive predicted Apple would ban future TikTok downloads from its App Store given the privacy concerns. That wouldn’t help Apple-Chinese relations, which are already showing strains.
Executive 12: Media will show surprising recession resiliency
The first part of the prediction here is the economy will dip into a recession, which isn’t a foregone conclusion.
But if it does, the media industry will actually benefit from several accelerated trends, this executive said.
First, cable cord cutting will accelerate, driving more streaming subscriptions and allaying concerns that streaming growth has plateaued.
Second, past recessions have proved that consumers don’t stop paying for relatively low-priced entertainment during economic downturns, said the executive. This could be good news for an industry that now has more high-quality, low-priced options than ever before.
The advertising market will also bounce back faster than anticipated as brands see that people are supplanting higher-priced entertainment with lower-cost at-home options, said the person.
—CNBC’s Lillian Rizzo contributed to this report.
Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.
WATCH: ‘Halftime Report’ committee members Josh Brown and Jenny Harrington discuss Disney

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American Airlines’ CFO said the final Mesa flight will be on April 3.
The move is a big blow to Mesa, a regional carrier that has struggled with high costs and a shortage of trained pilots.
Like other carriers, Mesa has raised pilot wages to attract and retain aviators.

American Eagle Bombardier CRJ-900ER aircraft seen at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
Alex Tai | SOPA | Getty Images

American Airlines is dropping Mesa Air, citing concerns about its partner’s financial and operational problems, an enormous blow to the regional airline that was struggling with increasing costs and the industry’s pilot shortage.
“As a result, we have concerns about Mesa’s ability to be a reliable partner for American going forward,” Derek Kerr, American’s chief financial officer and the president of American’s regional brand American Eagle, said in a staff note, which was seen by CNBC on Saturday. “American and Mesa agree the best way to address these concerns is to wind down our agreement.”

Large carriers like American, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines routinely contract regional airlines to fly many shorter routes and they account for roughly half of departures, though that number varies by airline.
Mesa had a net loss of about $67 million in the nine months ended June 30, according to a securities filing. Last week, the Phoenix, Arizona-based airline postponed its quarterly earnings report. Mesa didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
American said its agreement with Mesa was mostly tied to its hubs at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
American plans to concentrate its flying with its wholly owned regional subsidiaries like Envoy and PSA, as well as an independent regional carrier SkyWest. Air Wisconsin will also fly for the American Eagle brand, starting its agreement earlier than originally planned, Kerr said.
The final Mesa flight for American will be on April 3 though American is slashing Mesa flights in March, Kerr said in his note.

“The flying previously done by Mesa will be backfilled by these high-quality regional carriers as well as our mainline operation, ensuring we can continue to build and deliver the very best global network for our customers,” Kerr wrote.
Mesa also flies for United, which didn’t immediately comment.

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Growing up, comedy distracted Moses Storm from the fact that he often didn’t have enough to eat and that his father had left him.
In his stand-up special, “Trash White,” he turns his attention back to his difficult childhood and the lasting consequences of poverty.

Moses Storm

Comedian Moses Storm was 16 when he first learned to read and write.
“I have the equivalent of maybe a second-grade education,” he said. For much of his childhood, he lived on a bus with his single mother and five siblings, not knowing where he’d wake up the next day.

During those tumultuous years, Moses, 32, became obsessed with the art of making people laugh. Whenever his family had access to a television, he’d watch Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Comedy was a distraction from the fact that he often didn’t have enough to eat and that his father had left.
Storm’s life has come a long way from then. He’s been an actor on a long list of films and shows, including “This is Us” and “Arrested Development.” Most recently, he debuted in his own comedy special on HBO Max, “Trash White,” produced by his childhood icon, Conan O’Brien.
Yet his special is largely about the persistence of the past, and especially of poverty.
CNBC recently spoke with Moses about how comedy has evolved from a diversion from his painful experiences to the way he now choses to talk about them.
(This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.)

Annie Nova: How did you get the confidence to try to make it as a comedian?
Moses Storm: There was nothing I was walking away from. There was no education; there was no parent to please. But I knew that this was something I loved, and that it could probably make me more money than a minimum wage job.
AN: Financial stress was a constant throughout your childhood. What is it like to worry less about money as an adult?
MS: It never feels like you’re out of poverty. The idea that you could end up there again, that you never have enough, that this could all go away — those feelings don’t change.
AN: A fear you talk about being hard to shake is around location and home. You were never in one place for long as a kid. How does that fact continue to impact you?
MS: I’ve subconsciously chosen a life where I’m always on the road. I don’t know how to live any other way. I start to get a real restlessness if I’m not always moving.

AN: Why do you think that is?
MS: There is a feeling of impermanence that comes at an early age from not knowing where we’re going to be. How long are we going be at this campground before we’re evicted? And so now, if I’m moving, it feels like I’m one step ahead of everything. I can’t be kicked out.
AN: Do you think you could have written this special if you were still living in poverty?
MS: If I was actively living it, ​I wouldn’t have enough distance to transmit it into entertainment for people. And if you’re saying you want the very privileged job of being a comedian, you owe it to your audience to have some perspective. We’re not just sharing about our life. People are putting on Netflix, they’re putting on HBO, to be entertained and to forget about their problems. And so I have to take these things I’ve gone through, and process them and then deliver them in a humorous way. That’s where the art form comes in.
AN: You seem to have so much perspective on your experiences. Have you been to therapy?
MS: In an effort to connect with an audience, you have to have empathy for everyone in that room. You have to ask: Where is everyone coming from? I can’t just go up there and express anger; that’s not interesting to anyone. They’re coming in with their own anger and their own life. Well, then, what is the universal between us? What is the thing that we can all connect on? It is finding these touchpoints that made me less angry. It was not therapy. It was just coming to these shared human experiences.
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AN: In your comedy special, you talk about how your mom shoplifted a lot. Once she was caught stealing vitamins. I found this a surprising detail. Why vitamins?
MS: The stories of her getting kicked out of a Winn-Dixie supermarket and the cops coming are less funny. I don’t think there’s a topic in comedy that’s off limits because it’s too sad. But you better have a joke to pull that audience out of the bummer fact you just delivered because everyone’s coming into that room, the thousands of people that night, with their own trauma and their own fears. I chose vitamins because it was the funniest thing she stole.
AN: What is it hard to pitch a comedy special about poverty?
MS: If you go in like, ‘I’m going to do a hilarious comedy special about the economic and generational poverty in this country,’ people are like, ‘Boooo.’ But what you can do is make people laugh. And in between those moments they’re laughing, what you’re really doing is opening them up. It’s sort of a magic trick in that they’re vulnerable. Then you can sneak those details in.
AN: You say you have a problem with the way poverty is talked about. In your special, you express frustration with the term “food insecure.” You say, “I need carbs and not confidence.” Why does this wording bother you?
MS: We’ve reduced human beings to these statistics and therapy terms, and what that does is relieve of us of any responsibility or guilt for not going into our wallet and personally giving that poor person $5. We can say, ‘Poverty: that’s got to be addressed through social programs! We have to vote in November!’ We want these fixes that take nothing on our part.
AN: You stress that your story is a highly lucky one and that we put too much emphasis on the “rags to riches” stories. Why do you think we romanticize these plots?
MS: It’s awkward to help people out. It’s uncomfortable. If we give money, what if we don’t have enough ourselves? If we let this poor person into our neighborhood, are we inviting danger into our life? What if they’re mentally ill? And so the rags to riches stories are comforting to us because we don’t do anything in that story. We watch someone else work. We watch someone else help themselves.

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ESG Impact Events

Residential solar power can lower a homeowner’s carbon footprint, but crucially, also save money in the long-term.
But a major decision by California’s utility regulator to cut back on net metering, which will reduce the total savings homeowners can make by selling energy to the grid by as much as 60%, changes the economic equation and could have national ramifications.
Storing electricity in a solar-powered battery, as energy storage costs come down, can make up for net metering reductions, but have a decade-long payback period.
Local and state tax credits and the Inflation Reduction Act are shortening the payback period for solar installation costs.

Solar panels create electricity on the roof of a house in Rockport, Massachusetts, U.S., June 6, 2022. Picture taken with a drone. 
Brian Snyder | Reuters

When Josh Hurwitz decided to put solar power on his Connecticut house, he had three big reasons: To cut his carbon footprint, to eventually store electricity in a solar-powered battery in case of blackouts, and – crucially – to save money.
Now he’s on track to pay for his system in six years, then save tens of thousands of dollars in the 15 years after that, while giving himself a hedge against utility-rate inflation. It’s working so well, he’s preparing to add a Tesla-made battery to let him store the power he makes. Central to the deal: Tax credits and other benefits from both the state of Connecticut and from Washington, D.C., he says.

“You have to make the money work,” Hurwitz said. “You can have the best of intentions, but if the numbers don’t work it doesn’t make sense to do it.” 
Hurwitz’s experience points up one benefit of the Inflation Reduction Act that passed in August: Its extension and expansion of tax credits to promote the spread of home-based solar power systems. Adoption is expected to grow 26 percent faster because of the law, which extends tax credits that had been set to expire by 2024 through 2035, says a report by Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industry Association. 
Those credits will cover 30 percent of the cost of the system – and, for the first time, there’s a 30 percent credit for batteries that can store newly-produced power for use when it’s needed.
“The main thing the law does is give the industry, and consumers, assurance that the tax credits will be there today, tomorrow and for the next 10 years,” said Warren Leon, executive director of the Clean Energy States Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of state government energy agencies. “Rooftop solar is still expensive enough to require some subsidies.”
California’s solar energy net metering decision
Certainty has been the thing that’s hard to come by in solar, where frequent policy changes make the market a “solar coaster,” as one industry executive put it. Just as the expanded federal tax credits were taking effect, California on Dec. 15 slashed another big incentive allowing homeowners to sell excess solar energy generated by their systems back to the grid at attractive rates, scrambling the math anew in the largest U.S. state and its biggest solar-power market — though the changes do not take effect until next April.

Put the state and federal changes together, and Wood Mackenzie thinks the California solar market will actually shrink sharply in 2024, down by as much as 39%. Before the Inflation Reduction Act incentives were factored in, the consulting firm forecast a 50% drop with the California policy shift. Residential solar is coming off a historic quarter, with 1.57 GW installed, a 43% increase year over year, and California a little over one-third of the total, according to Wood Mackenzie.

For potential switchers, tax credits can quickly recover part of the up-front cost of going green. Hurwitz took the federal tax credit for his system when he installed it in 2020, and is preparing to add a battery now that it, too, comes with tax credits. Some contractors offer deals where they absorb the upfront cost – and claim the credit – in exchange for agreements to lease back the system. 
Combined with savings on power homeowners don’t  buy from utilities, the tax credits can make rooftop solar systems pay for themselves within as little as five years – and save $25,000 or more, after recovering the initial investment, within two decades.  
“Will this growth have legs? Absolutely,” said Veronica Zhang, portfolio manager of the Van Eck Environmental Sustainability Fund, a green fund not exclusively focused on solar. “With utility rates going up, it’s a good time to move if you were thinking about it in the first place.”
How to calculate installation costs and benefits
Here is how the numbers work.
Nationally, the cost for solar in 2022 ranges from $16,870 to $23,170, after the tax credit, for a 10-kilowatt system, the size for which quotes are sought most often on EnergySage, a Boston-based quote-comparison site for solar panels and batteries. Most households can use a system of six or seven kilowatts, EnergySage spokesman Nick Liberati said. A 10-12 kilowatt battery costs about $13,000 more, he added.
There’s a significant variation in those numbers by region, and by the size and other factors specific to the house, EnergySage CEO Vikram Aggarwal said. In New Jersey, for example, a 7-kilowatt system costs on average $20,510 before the credit and $15,177 after it. In Houston, it’s about $1,000 less. In Chicago, that system is close to $2,000 more than in New Jersey. A more robust 10-kilowatt system costs more than $31,000 before the credit around Chicago, but $26,500 in Tampa, Fla. All of these average prices are as quoted by EnergySage. 
The effectiveness of the system may also vary because of things specific to the house, including the placement of trees on or near the property, as we found out when we asked EnergySage’s online bid-solicitation system to look at specific homes.
The bids for one suburban Chicago house ranged as low as $19,096 after the federal credit and as high as $30,676.

Arrows pointing outwards

Offsetting those costs are electricity savings and state tax breaks that recover the cost of the system in as little as 4.5 years, according to the bids. Contractors claimed that power savings and state incentives could save as much as another $27,625 over 20 years, on top of the capital cost.
Alternatively, consumers can finance the system but still own it themselves – we were quoted interest rates of 2.99 to 8.99 percent. That eliminates consumers’ up-front cost, but cuts into the savings as some of the avoided utility costs go to pay off interest, Aggarwal said. 
The key to maximizing savings is to know the specific regulations in your state – and get help understanding often-complex contracts, said Hurwitz, who is a physician.
Energy storage and excess power
Some states have more generous subsidies than others, and more pro-consumer rules mandating that utilities pay higher prices for excess power that home solar systems create during peak production hours, or even extract from homeowners’ batteries.
California had among the most generous rules of all until this week. But state utility regulators agreed to let utilities pay much less for excess power they are required to buy, after power companies argued that the rates were too high, and raised power prices for other customers.
Wood Mackenzie said the details of California’s decision made it look less onerous than the firm had expected. EnergySage says the payback period for California systems without a battery will be 10 years instead of six after the new rules take effect in April. Savings in the years afterward will be about 60 percent less, the company estimates. Systems with a battery, which pay for themselves after 10 years, will be little affected because their owners keep most of their excess power instead of selling it to the utility, according to EnergySage. 
“The new [California rules] certainly elongate current payback periods for solar and solar-plus-storage, but not by as much as the previous proposal,” Wood Mackenzie said in the Dec. 16 report. “By 2024, the real impacts of the IRA will begin to come to fruition.”
The more expensive power is from a local utility, the more sense home solar will make. And some contractors will back claims about power savings with agreements to pay part of your utility bill if the systems don’t produce as much energy as promised. 
“You have to do your homework before you sign,” Hurwitz said. “But energy costs always go up. That’s another hidden incentive.” More

Whenever there’s a big storm in the American West, pilots are likely flying into the eye, seeding clouds with a substance called silver iodide. The goal is to increase precipitation.
Cloud seeding has been around since the 1940s. It’s become widespread of late as the West battles a drought of historic proportions. States, utility companies and even ski resorts are footing the bill.

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While it was was assumed for decades to be effective, recent studies have helped prove that cloud seeding works, and there’s no evidence that silver iodide is harmful at current levels. Experts say cloud seeding generally yields a 5% to 15% increase in precipitation.
It’s no cure for drought, but cloud seeding can be an important water management tool.
“We can’t make a storm happen and we can’t create conditions in this storm that are ideal. Those happen naturally,” said Jason Carkeet, a utility analyst and hydrologist with the Turlock Irrigation District in central California. Turlock started its cloud-seeding program in 1990.
“What we’re doing is just taking advantage of existing conditions, naturally occurring conditions, and trying to make the storm again more efficient from a water supply perspective,” Carkeet said.

How cloud seeding works

When done aerially, cloud seeding involves loading up a plane with silver iodide. Flares are placed on the wings and fuselage.

The pilot reaches a certain altitude, where temperatures are ideal, and shoots the flares into the cloud. The silver iodide causes individual water droplets within the clouds to freeze together, forming snowflakes that eventually become so heavy that they fall.
Absent the freezing process, the droplets wouldn’t bond together and become large enough to precipitate as either rain or snow.
“The cloud initially is all water,” said Bruce Boe, vice president of meteorology at Weather Modification International, a private company that’s been providing cloud-seeding services since 1961. “Eventually, as it gets toward the summit of the mountain, it may be 50% ice or maybe more than that. But even if it is, there’s still a lot of liquid water left there.”
Boe said there’s a “window of opportunity” to get the precipitation big enough to fall “before it crests the mountain and starts to descend and thus warm.”

Pilot Joel Zimmer, who works for Weather Modification International, affixes silver iodide flares to the bottom of a cloud seeding plane.
Katie Brigham | CNBC

For cloud-seeding pilots like Joel Zimmer, who works with Weather Modification International to seed clouds for the Turlock Irrigation District, flying into the storm can be an exhilarating but intense experience.
“By the time the wheels are up, you’re in cloud,” said Zimmer, whose route involves seeding over the Sierra Nevada mountains. “And we’re in cloud the entire mission until we’re shooting an approach back into an airport and then pop out of the clouds and have a visual on the runway. It feels like you’re a sub commander in the Navy. You don’t see anything.”
From a water supply perspective, it’s most valuable to seed clouds over mountains, where the water is essentially stored as snow until the spring runoff.
“When it’s out on the plains such as North Dakota, it’s still a benefit because it helps recharge soil moisture,” Boe said. “But it can’t be stored and used for a later date.”
While Texas uses cloud seeding to help irrigate fields for farmers, it’s more common in the West, where states like Idaho, California, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming use it to help fill up their rivers and reservoirs. Most programs use planes for cloud seeding, but some use ground-based flares.
“It’s a lot more common than people think,” Carkeet said. “More basins have a seeding program than do not have a seeding program.”

Costs and impact

Boe says the cost is almost always worth it.
“It makes a lot of sense to water managers to go ahead and do it, even if the increase is on the order of a few percentage points,” he said.
Idaho Power spends about $4 million a year on its cloud-seeding program, which yields an 11% or 12% increase in snowpack in some areas, resulting in billions of gallons of additional water at a cost of about $3.50 per acre-foot. That compares with about $20 per acre-foot for other methods of accessing water, such as through a water supply bank.
And though Turlock only sees a 3% to 5% increase in runoff from its program — which has a maximum budget of $475,000 — California will take all the extra water it can get.
“It’s one of the things that makes it so hard to evaluate, is you don’t see a doubling or tripling of the precipitation,” Boe said. “You see an incremental increase, but you add that up over the course of a winter and then it can be significant.”
Watch the video to learn more about what it takes to make it rain.

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Recent polling shows one-third of Americans would be willing to pay for carbon offsets when buying a plane ticket to reduce their carbon footprint, but claims of airline “greenwashing” with carbon credits are one of the reasons more companies are moving away from reliance on this climate approach.
Fliers should read the fine print, from the uses that carbon offsets are being put to, such as planting trees, to the accounting mechanisms to quantify CO2 emissions per flight.
Many climate change experts say airlines should be focused on sustainable jet fuels for net-zero carbon goals without use of offsets, and in fact, airlines from United to JetBlue and Delta are moving in this direction.

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If you are upset that legroom on airplanes is shrinking, you may be relieved to hear that your footprint may be next. Your carbon footprint. Airplane passengers are now given the option to offset the environmental impact of their own flight by paying an extra airfare fee for carbon offsets. Given the rising cost of air travel, adding more to the price of a plane ticket may not be especially appealing, but recent polling data from Morning Consult has shown that more Americans are willing to consider this a price worth paying.
Numerous airlines now offer such programs. American Airlines has a carbon offset plan in partnership with nonprofit Cool Effect, through which customers are provided options for offsetting the carbon emissions associated with their flights. Delta Air Lines has a similar program as part of its net zero initiative.

Etihad Airways recently rolled out a program with partner CarbonClick to allow travelers to offset their flight emissions from a basket of Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) eligible projects that are geographically diverse and offer ways to support communities, climate action and biodiversity. This program also gives passengers the ability to earn rewards through participation in what the airline calls Etihad Guest Conscious Choices.
Southwest Airlines’ “Wanna offset carbon?” program provides a match from the company for every dollar a customer pays to offset carbon and rapid rewards bonus points – 10 points for every dollar spent.
In general, the way such programs work is that the carbon impact of a flight is calculated, and a fee is then determined that can “offset” this impact, minimizing or zeroing out the carbon imprint of a passenger’s flight. Calculating the CO2-equivalent emissions from the flight divided by the number of miles flown and the number of passengers is the basic idea. CO2-equivalent emissions are the emissions of carbon dioxide plus those of other global warming chemicals (e.g, black carbon and methane), each multiplied by their global warming potential (ratio of warming over 20 or 100 years of the chemical per unit mass to that of CO2), explained Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.
“At the moment, there is no alternative to aviation when it comes to long distance and low carbon travel. Carbon offsetting is an immediate, direct and pragmatic means to encourage action to limit climate change impacts, at least in the short-term,” said Mariam Alqubaisi, head of sustainability at Etihad Airways.
That is true, but it is also a reason why many climate experts say the airlines should be more focused on bigger goals related to sustainable aviation fuels and their own net-zero goals, ex-passenger contributions.

Airline sustainability, ex-passenger
Globally, the aviation industry is estimated to be responsible for about 2.1% of CO2 emissions. In the transportation sector, aviation creates about 12% of CO2 emissions, while road transport is attributed to 74%. Those numbers are expected to increase on a relative basis in the decades ahead as air travel increases, and as auto companies make faster progress on transition to electric vehicles.
Most major airlines have sustainability initiatives in place in addition to carbon offsets – many have committed to carbon neutrality by 2050 and are exploring options like sustainable aviation fuels and more efficient aircrafts as climate priorities. United Airlines, for example, has committed to net zero carbon by 2050 without any contribution from traditional carbon offsets. Among its current focuses is corporate partnerships to de-carbonize aviation and venture capital investments.

Within the aviation industry, a few airlines have dropped passenger carbon offset programs, including JetBlue and EasyJet, which ditched the concept to focus more on sustainable airline fuels and more efficient aircrafts. JetBlue achieved carbon neutrality on domestic flights in 2020 and just this month, the airline said in its latest net zero carbon policy statement that lowering carbon emissions from operations will take primacy over any contribution from offsets, and the goal is to “drive down the need for carbon credits as much as possible.”
Aviation ‘greenwashing’
There also remains skepticism about how well the carbon accounting works in practice, and “greenwashing” claims have made carbon offset program including those for passengers a potential liability for the airlines. A recent Washington Post article on aviation carbon claims dinged Delta for its use of carbon offsets, and that led Delta to speak in a different way about the future of offsets. New Delta chief sustainability officer Pam Fletcher told the Post she opposes buying such credits. “It was the best tool at the time,” she said. “So kudos to getting some momentum on climate change. Now we are laser-focused on decarbonization in our company and industry working on the issues within our own four walls.”
“Calculating an individual’s carbon footprint can be as much art as science,” Environmental and Energy Study Institute executive director Daniel Bresette explained in an email.
It might be tempting to buy an offset to ease one’s conscience, Bressette said, but the simplest offset schemes merely calculate an estimate based on how many miles the trip will cover. While that that sounds straightforward, it fails to account for how fuel-efficient the aircraft is, how full it will be, or what the weather conditions will be.
“There are a lot of variables to consider when making an accurate calculation,” Bressette wrote.
Bresette said one factor that goes into the calculation is a mix of science and economics that airlines are expert at: estimating and reducing fuel consumption. Fuel is expensive, after all, making up about a quarter of operating expenses in 2022. “That’s a big share, so airlines are incentivized to know precisely how much fuel a flight will need. That helps them calculate the flight’s carbon footprint, and an individual’s share of it,” he said. 
Questions to ask about carbon offsets
The harder part is figuring out how to calculate its offset. If the offset is funding tree plantings, what kind of tree will be planted and where? If the offset funds renewable energy, what type of energy generation will those projects be replacing? If the offset funds go to energy efficiency, how carbon intensive is the energy otherwise being consumed? These questions can be answered, but only after significant analysis and a lot of information-gathering. That means a lot of fine print from passengers to read.
“Until carbon offsets are better regulated and more transparent, travelers need to exercise due diligence to determine whether they’re worthwhile in terms of costs and benefits. Offsets should be transparent about what climate benefits a traveler is making possible,” Bresette said.
As part of consciousness-raising, it is helpful for people to think in terms of their own carbon footprints and how they can reduce them. But stated preferences can be quite different from actual consumer behavior, which is much harder to change.
“The bright shine on carbon offsets has dimmed,” said Scott Keyes, founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights.
No matter what people say in polls, a vast majority of customers skip past paying an extra fee for carbon offsets when booking their flights, Keyes said. “Maybe they don’t believe the extra dollars will be an effective way to create an impact, or maybe they don’t want to pay an extra fee for an already expensive flight.”
The price point, depending on the length of flight, is not high compared to the overall cost of a plane ticket. American Airlines’ calculator shows a range from under $10 for shorter flights to as high as $25 for flights 13-plus hours. That price is set by the average price per tonne for the American Airlines portfolio of carbon offset projects, which include forest regeneration in Mexico, restoration of peat swamp in Indonesia and construction of improved cookstoves for families in Honduras. Southwest Airlines shows offsets for a New York to Los Angeles flight at $3.59, and says its pricing is based off of “aircraft type, conventional jet fuel consumption, flight distance and assumed load factor.”
Consumer psychology and the environment
It’s not just about the dollar amount of the carbon offset purchase in the consumer psychology.
“It’s something that people are very price sensitive to,” Keyes said. “I think that everybody wants a better environment, everyone would love for flights and planes to emit less carbon, but I think people have shown that they’re not willing to pay extra in order to achieve that.”
He gave the example of grocery stores asking customers if they’d like to round up their total for charity – though a small number of individuals may say yes, a majority will say no for similar reasons, Keyes said, referring to the fact that they are paying a big bill already or don’t understand where the money will really be going.
Keyes cited Lufthansa Group CEO Carsten Spohr, who said in 2020 the airline only saw 1-2% of passengers choose to purchase the cheapest option of carbon offsets, while the more expensive alternative was “used by so few customers that I could greet them all individually with a handshake.”
If airline travelers want to stay environmentally conscious without paying carbon offset fees, Keyes recommends choosing cheaper airlines when traveling. The more expensive an airline, the more culpable for airline emissions as the aircrafts usually have less seats, increasing the amount of carbon emissions per individual. Consistently overpaying for flights also gives airlines more incentive to add additional flights for that route, and that may also increase carbon emissions.
In other words, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint on a flight, the best option might be to reduce your comfort. A tradeoff many fliers are already making when they take to the skies.
“It’s true that we all have a part to play in reducing carbon emissions. But it is unfair to place the burden squarely on individuals,” Bressette said. “When I board a plane, I don’t have a lot of say in how the flight is going to go. Airlines, though, do have a lot of say, which means they have a major responsibility to do right by the climate, including by using sustainable aviation fuels and improving the energy efficiency of their operations.” 
—CNBC’s Barbara Collins contributed to this report. More

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The best-performing industrial stocks so far this year have been Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Deere.
However, Jim Cramer said Friday he likes Caterpillar, Illinois Tool Works and CSX heading into 2023.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Friday identified three industrial stocks that he believes are worth owning next year, saying he expects them to outperform the sector’s top performers in 2022.
The best-performing industrial stocks in the S&P 500 so far this year have been Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Deere — up 36.9%, 35.6% and 25.7%, respectively. Looking ahead, though, Cramer said he’d prefer to own the likes of Caterpillar, Illinois Tool Works and railroad operator CSX.

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Shares of Caterpillar, which reported strong earnings two months ago, have climbed 12.6% year to date. Cramer said he favors Caterpillar over fellow machinery maker Deere.
“CAT has much more exposure to infrastructure, and I think they’ve got a boost from the oil and gas industry coming,” Cramer said. “Definitely worth owning here at 17 times earnings,” he added.
Illinois Tool Works shares are down more than 12% in 2022 because fears of an economic slowdown have trumped the company’s actual results, Cramer contended. “I like it here, of course more [so] on a pullback,” he said. “But I give you my blessing to buy ITW.”
Transports such as CSX — down nearly 16% year to date — are “totally hated” on Wall Street, Cramer acknowledged. However, he said he believes CSX is attractive for investors with extended time horizons.
“For me, it’s a long-term story. I see our East Coast ports getting more business as shipping companies adjust to the fact that our West Coast ports are dysfunctional. In the meantime, CSX is just minting money with coal,” he said. “I think it’s worth buying going into 2023.”

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It’s that time again! “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer rings the lightning round bell, which means he’s giving his answers to callers’ stock questions at rapid speed.

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Brookfield Renewable Partners: “I’ve been skeptical of that one … but I am willing to reopen the books, and see if there isn’t something here we can’t find.”

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Crown Holdings: “[Formerly] Crown Cork, I love those guys. … The stock has come down. I think it’s a great industrial. You’ve got a winner.”

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Lucid Group: “We don’t want to fool around with that. The thing just goes down and down. I see a trend. … I think that one is just too dangerous.”

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Joby Aviation: “Joby Aviation … is like a Jules Verne story. … Let’s leave it like a story and not think of it as a stock.”

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