Another edition, another summer-disrupting, public health nightmare event in parts of the U.S. that brings climate salience back up: wildfire smoke from one part of a historically parched continent billowing into another.

My brief tour of being a Californian helps me kick into practicalities when this happens. Turn on the air filters, break out the slightly more filtering masks, don’t go outside unless you have to. Having lived directly through a day when the sun did not rise because of wildfire smoke imprinted deeply on me (although strangely enough because of the elevation of how the particles hung in the air, the AQI was relatively better that day).

My friend and former colleague Colleen Hagerty has been on the disaster response beat for years, including wildfire and wildfire smoke. Her newsletter this week is a great round up of both why wildfires burn this way, what’s in that smoke and how to protect yourself. Here’s some other stories I’m reading this week

• After wildfires destroyed 95% of this California tribe’s forests, members uncovered 1,200 ancestral sites (LA Times)

• Phoenix is successfully lowering heat deaths, will they be able to keep it up? (Bloomberg, gift link)

• New York Becomes First State in the Nation to Pause New Hyperscale Data Centers (Inside Climate News)

• A legal challenge to the Trump executive order keeping a Florida coal plant open (Inside Climate News)

• What’s the cost difference between fueling an EV and a gas car state-by-state? (Washington Post)(also worth it for the phrase “hand-me-down Tesla”)

• They were offered free flood protection, why did so few homeowners in this town say yes? (Yale Climate Connections)

If you’re not familar with the subject line this week, this is the backstory.