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Dear Reader,

This Tuesday night, I had the opportunity to join Atlanta Community Press Collective's Election Night Livestream to discuss my past coverage for The Xylom about transit in Atlanta and the two heavily watched Georgia Public Service Commission races. (Apparently, I was referred to as “Atlanta’s Steve Kornacki” by viewers. Lol!)

Alongside trusted colleagues, collaborators, sources, and even PSC-elect Peter Hubbard himself, we witnessed Democratic candidates achieve some of the most emphatic wins the state has seen in decades amidst a nationwide “blue wave”.

Voters have unequivocally spoken: they want lower power bills, more clean energy, increased accountability on the wealthy and powerful, a return to evidence-based policymaking, and compassionate treatment of the most vulnerable.

And it is our job as the only Asian American-run news outlet covering health, climate, and the environment to meet the needs of voters where they are, so we can continue to serve as a resource for you to make informed decisions.

Despite the clear message from voters, Trump 2.0 has not gotten the memo. Instead, there is a chilling effect across the country: We lost a major donor last year and have run a deficit in recent weeks. CBS just gutted its climate team following a conservative takeover; Bill Gates, no longer the wealthiest man in the world, just issued a memo that experts on a rapid response panel discussion hosted by our partners at Covering Climate Now suggest creates a false dichotomy between funding solutions for the climate crisis and global health crises.

(Disclaimer: I was a college intern for Dr. Kim Cobb, who used to lead the Georgia Tech Global Change Program; she has also supported The Xylom’s reporting.)

“There’s an overwhelming consensus among experts that combining climate and health policy is beneficial,” says Dr. Julia Fine, an expert from the Mason Center for Climate Change Communication who joined The Xylom for a moderated discussion on Wednesday. “Even though some avenues are closed off to us right now, many others are still open, depending on the state and local context, as well as internationally,” she added.

Two examples the experts suggested as natural alignments of climate and health policy include car-free transportation and clean energy; those happen to be the two beats I covered leading up to the election and spoke at length during ACPC’s Election Night Livestream!

We still need your help to keep our public service journalism going into 2026. What we may lack in funding from billionaires or corporations, our team has the human decency, cultural competency, and determination to pursue the truth relentlessly. There is no better news outlet for you to support: the CDC and the Carter Center are literally our neighbors, and millions of people depend on our reporting to find their place, take root, and thrive in this fast-changing world.

Yours sincerely,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor

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✨ NEWS BEHIND THE NEWS

• 🧬 Congrats to our contributor Manasvi Verma for defending her Ph.D. in Microbiology this past week!

• 🥈 Congrats to our alum Hanna Webster for winning 2025 Professional Keystone Media Award with her coverage of transgender healthcare and overdose deaths in the Pittsburgh area!

• 📱 ICYMI: Join our WhatsApp channel and help reach users who stay off social media (share this with your aunties and uncles!)

THINGS YOU SHOULD READ

🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR

• KINGFISHER, Okla. — Toxic wastewater from oil fields keeps pouring out of the ground. Oklahoma regulators failed to stop it. (Nick Bowlin, The Frontier)

  “I don’t know if we’re ever going to fix it or not,” said Ray, 72, who resigned in frustration three years later. “They don’t want to listen.”

• TEXAS — In Texas, the nation’s MAHA capital, many are frustrated with the status quo in health care(Isabella Cueto, STAT)

  “A lot of people don’t even complain about it because they don’t feel that anything is ever going to be done,” said Ishmael Harris, mayor of Bastrop, a small city outside of Austin. He is advocating for a regional hospital in his rural area.

• MCCALLA, Ala. — How Alabama Power Kept Bills Up and Opposition Out to Become One of the Most Powerful Utilities in the Country (Dennis Pillion and Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News)

  Rosenboom, who works as a sales professional, said she chooses not to run her air conditioner during much of the day to prevent an untenable power bill. Even that isn’t enough. Often, Rosenboom said she must turn to high-interest credit cards to keep the lights on.
  
  “I’m robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she told Inside Climate News. “It makes me sick.”

🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

• TURKANA, Kenya — As aid dries up in Kenya, millions are threatened by the climate-driven disease kala-azar (Georgia Gee, Grist)

  “The cuts are really tragic,” said James Ekamais, the coordinator for kala-azar and other so-called neglected tropical diseases for Turkana County. “Early detection and the management of patients is now compromised. We will lose them. We anticipate the death rate going up.”

• The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands (Film by Thomas Jennings and Annie Wong;
  Text by Atul Gawande, The New Yorker)

  We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century.

SOME OF OUR RECENT STORIES

🚢 MSC Is Wrecking Ocean Ecosystems And Livelihoods from India to Massachusetts

A deep dive into Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) by our Managing Editor, Laasya Shekhar, shows that the world’s largest container shipping company has a history of accidents and was once fined for illegally dumping bilge waste into the Atlantic Ocean. In one such case, fishermen in Kerala who suffered damages by debris from the capsized Elsa 3 cargo ship remain uncompensated, five months on.

This story was produced by The Quint and republished by The Xylom.

🌧️ Extreme Rainfall Events Pummel the Himalayas and California

Cloudbursts in India and atmospheric rivers in California are distinct weather phenomena, yet both unleash intense rainfall over a relatively short period.

As climate change aggravates these events, there is an urgent need for governments to up their game in weather prediction.

💀 Paraquat, A Banned Toxic Chemical, Is Leaking Into The Global Food Supply Chain

NEW: Nearly two years after Nigeria banned paraquat, the highly toxic herbicide continues to be sold openly, an investigation by The Xylom reveals. If large economies like the United States and Malaysia had strictly enforced the Stockholm Convention against the use of harmful pesticides, could it have brought about change in the country?