How An IPCC Co-chair Takes Climate Action
Dear Reader,
Happy weekend! Here are the top stories on the world’s most pressing health and environmental disparities.
Warmly,
Laasya Shekhar
Managing Editor
🌡️ NEW: ‘Every Day Above 1.5 C is Now Going to Matter’
Selena Liang spoke with Dr. Debra Roberts, an environmental scientist and co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about overshoot, adaptation, nuclear energy, and having reasonable expectations of climate action. Read more here.
See also: Pacific's new climate fund gets $15 million boost but remains far below target (Peter Hobson, Reuters)
"This is the moment to invest," Mark Brown, prime minister of the Cook Islands, told delegates at the meeting. "Your investment buys us time."
🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Guest Essay: I Know Christa Pike’s Medical History. What Tennessee Did Is Unforgivable. (Joel Zivot for The New York Times)
Gov. Bill Lee has said that as far as he knows, the Department of Correction followed its protocol exactly. I take him at his word. That is the problem. Lethal injection failures are not glitches; they are features of the process.
Pity the Next Insurance Commissioner of Oklahoma (soft paywall) (Jeva Lange, Heatmap News)
In most of the state, even at the tiny geographical scale of an individual roof, you have about a one-in-10 chance each year of seeing two-inch or larger hail, Ian Giammanco, a lead research meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, told me. Verisk, a risk assessment firm, also found that over the last four years, nearly 50% of Oklahoma roofs were hit by severe hail — the highest rate nationwide.
NEW ORLEANS — Making the environment beat general assignment reporting hurts those most at-risk from climate change (Adam Mahoney for The Objective)
“I don’t know how much of it was Trump, how much of it was 2020 and the Black Lives Matter uprising, how much of even that excitement was just sort of superficial tokenization,” said [independent climate journalist and editor Yessenia Funes]. “If it was corporate executives thinking this is the hot trend right now, and then as soon as it wasn’t hot, they dropped it.”
Texas agency sues to stop release of data center records that it says could aid terrorists (Alejandra Martinez and Taylor Goldenstein, The Texas Tribune)
Club Med, a Disney Cruise and an Exploding Starship: SpaceX Used Bystander Videos to Track Falling Debris (Heather Vogell and Agnel Philip, ProPublica)
🟠 TRACKING TRUMP
Ex-Trump officials find new jobs in Venezuela’s lucrative oil industry (Samantha Schmidt, Anthony Faiola and Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post)
During his first term, Trump promulgated additional ethics rules for government officials seeking work after leaving public office, including expanding a ban on lobbying a former agency to five years.
The rules were rescinded at the end of Trump’s first term. Since returning to the White House, Trump has not issued a new extra ethics policy.
Trump’s ‘New Era of Animal Welfare’ Excludes Almost All Farm Animals (Jessica Scott-Reid, Sentient)
Read more: The American Livestock Industry’s Main Lobbying Group Treated Climate Change as a PR Problem (Georgina Gustin, Inside Climate News)
“What we found in the archives really reveals the lack of concern about global warming,” Jacquet said, “and yet an incredible concern about the public’s view of the role of livestock in global warming.”
MANGALA, Congo —‘No Help’: Aid Arrived Too Late as Ebola Spread in a Congolese Town (Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Arlette Bashizi and Adina Renner, The New York Times)
“Everywhere is a red zone here,” said Dr. Jacques Savo Bamuhiga, the medical director in Mangala. Five nurses and a doctor have contracted Ebola at the hospital already, and one nurse has died, Dr. Bamuhiga said.
See also: From Yale to the Congo: The mathematician who became one of Africa’s most intrepid reporters (Jessame Calkin, The Telegraph)
“Because in the bleakest places I’ve found the most inspirational human beings and examples of humanity. People who transcend their fears and anxieties – ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances – and become something more than human,” says award winning journalist and author Anjan Sundaram.
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🎧 WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING (AND LISTENING)
The Oil Industry Won’t Stop One of Its Dirtiest Practices, Even After Pledges (Will Evans and Ben Elgin, Bloomberg News and The Examination)
“It’s a deliberate greenwash that establishes a target that’s meaningless,” says Richard Ward, a former Shell sustainability manager who later collaborated with World Bank staff while working for an environmental group. “Those loopholes are so big that they don’t have to do anything.”
Read more:
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA — Chevron Gave $150K to Bay Area Group Accused of Using AI to Fight Heat Pump Rule (Miranda Green, DeSmog)
“It would be an enormous victory to make heat pump water heaters essentially the norm in the Bay Area,” said Sam Fishman, sustainability and resilience policy manager at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. “I think that the air district rules here…if they survive and then succeed, I think that’ll set an enormous precedent for the nation.”
OTTAWA — ‘Knowing our opponents’: how a pro-oil-and-gas group tracks journalists, First Nations and environmentalists (Carl Meyer, The Narwhal)
The document also singled out a government funding program called the Local Journalism Initiative.
It included a screenshot of a story published by The Narwhal, written by journalist Matt Simmons, whose work has been supported by the initiative. The story recounts Simmons’ experience being followed by private security as he reported on a pipeline being built through Wet’suwet’en lands.
Xinjiang’s “Blue Miracle” (Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean Project)
China’s desert fish farming project is actually as much a consequence of self preservation as creative ingenuity. The country is both the world’s largest producer and consumer of seafood. Its extraordinary fleet of fishing vessels – more than 6,500 fishing boats working the world’s oceans, and another 200,000 operating in China’s coastal waters – is the stuff of legend and international alarm. And yet it has not been enough to satisfy the government. Aquaculture, a 2024 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained, is central to Beijing’s efforts “to bolster food security.”
Read more: the other 27(!) stories in The Outlaw Ocean Project’s Food for Feed investigative series
After menopause, ovaries may transform into organs with immune powers (Isabella Backman, Science)
“For me, that was really eye-opening because if this organ is not doing anything, you would predict that there would be no changes across age. It would all look the same,” says [reproductive biologist Francesca] Duncan. “This highlighted to us that there’s something else going on with this organ.”
Fake Caroline (Tom Zeller, Jr. for Columbia Journalism Review)
For her part, the real Caroline Williams told me recently that her impostor had struck again, pitching both Science and the digital magazine Knowable. “Finding myself slightly envious of the rate at which fake me seems to sell ‘her’ wares,” Williams wrote over email. “It’d be so much easier if I didn’t care about what I’m putting out into the world!”
Dying Patients Are Inundated by Misinformation. My Dad Was One of Them. (Trishi Thadani, The New York Times Magazine)
As Envita grew in its early years, the clinic repeatedly came under scrutiny. In 2006, for example, the Food and Drug Administration sent Envita a warning letter for providing a cell therapy that it did not have the approval to perform in the United States.
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