Dear Reader,

If you’ve run into me outside of this newsletter, you’ll know that I’ve depended on my e-bike and public transit to get around town and do my reporting. Yes, even in Atlanta, notoriously one of the most sprawling and car-choked metros in North America.

I believe in putting my money where my mouth is: Experts from the Mason Center for Climate Change Communication stressed to me in our last news webinar that car-free alternatives present some of the lowest-hanging fruit for integrating and advancing climate and health policy.

However, just as cyclists face constant safety threats on the road, journalists like myself are also facing constant threats in the field. To be clear, these hazards do not happen in a vacuum, and we are determined to use our reporting to hold bad actors accountable and spotlight effective solutions. However, we need your help to keep the lights on in 2026.

That’s why we’re trying something new: In collaboration with our friends at Atlanta Social Bike Rides, we are hosting a bike ride fundraiser, with 100% of proceeds going towards supporting our independent reporting!

Taking a page out of our colleague Mia Warren at Feet in 2 Worlds, we will be doing a 13-mile loop, roughly the length of a half-marathon, passing through some of my hometown’s most important and vulnerable global health and environmental landmarks:

• The Carter Center, which lost its namesake in January

• The CDC, which has weathered massive layoffs this year and a deadly shooting in August

• Emory University, which hired the fifth-most H-1B skilled workers in the previous fiscal year, and is now staring down regulatory uncertainty from the Trump administration, and

• Fernbank Museum and Fernbank Science Center, where generations of Atlantans have learned about the world we live in

Flyers are going up around Atlanta. If you find us in the wild, be sure to take a photo of/ with the poster and send it to us!

Our goal is to raise $3,000 and to celebrate the community that has strengthened us. I hope to see you on the evening of 12/1. If you can’t make it, consider sponsoring one of our riders; every donation you make is matched dollar-for-dollar up to $1,000!

Yours sincerely,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor

✨ NEWS BEHIND THE NEWS

• 💸 Since our NewsMatch campaign began on 11/1, we’ve already raised over $4,000 from 49 readers, of whom 21 are first-time supporters! Thank you!

• 🦭 Congrats to Sanket Jain for being named one of 12 SEAL Environmental Journalism Awards winners! “Sanket Jain’s work illuminates the range of invisible effects of pollution on the individual, from hearing loss to neurotoxicity and educational impairment, that strike whole populations,” judges wrote.

• 📸 Congrats to KC for winning the 4th Ori Creative Grant!

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

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THINGS YOU SHOULD READ

🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR

• KERR COUNTY, Texas — Swept Away: A detailed account of how 28 people died in the flooding at Camp Mystic. (The New York Times Staff)

  Mr. Eastland said he was able to talk to his father on the radio, and he heard him struggling in the water.

  “He said, ‘I need help. I can't move,’” Mr. Eastland recalled. “I said, I can’t.”

🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

• National parks in retrograde: Will NPS rewrite US history under Trump? (Heather Richards, E&E News)

  “I think we’re losing a lot,” said Alan Spears, the senior director of cultural resources for the National Parks Conservation Association. “The Park Service has not done a complete job, not a perfect job, but they have put in some serious work … to make the stories that they’re telling more accurate, more inclusive. And we’re seeing that threatened, if not erased at this point.”

• POLA, The Philippines — Are These Clams Key to Climate Adaptation? (Crystal Chow, The Contrapuntal)

  I had expected to see it writhe like every other worm that tends to trigger disgust. Instead, it lies still, the light glinting through its see-through body, a quiet, eerie beauty made visible only when torn from its hidden world.

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Lisa Patel, Executive Director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, and Grace Wickerson, Senior Manager, Climate and Health at the Federation of American Scientists, argue that by ignoring climate change as a threat multiplier, MAHA is missing the forest for the trees and will unnecessarily put the lives of millions of children at risk.

🏠 As EmPower+ Hangs In The Balance, A Reckoning Of New York’s Uneven Efforts To Lower Household Energy Use — And Power Bills

EmPower+, a first-in-the-nation program to reduce power consumption of New Yorkers, especially the underserved, faces implementation and funding challenges — the latter due to policy changes by the Trump administration. Our intern Zhenjia Zhang unpacks how the program performs — the promises, the pitfalls, and the path forward.

🌬️ Lessons on Climate Futures from Wind’s Tempestuous Past: An Interview with Author Simon Winchester

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