More cities, NGOs, even HOAs are getting disaster insurance. 'Parametric' plans pay out at key triggers: hurricane hits cat 5, wildfire crosses line, etc. Now, some of those plans are rewarding climate adaptation with big discounts. with @jojofoshosho.bsky.social for @kneedeeptimes.bsky.social !

The insurance industry is broken, especially in wildfire-prone states like California that have been hit hard by climate change. Could a community-based risk reduction model be the solution? Proud to have gotten to co-write this story for @kneedeeptimes.bsky.social with @megduff.com 🌎🧪

As global heating produces more wildfires, "Americans have increasingly been bombarded by toxic smoke." 41K people in the US now die from this smoke each year, "one of the most costly and important climate impacts.” www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

#ColorADay | #RedWed “Memories of Autumn Past” alternate title “Roll Out the Red Carpet” #Photography 📸 #WestCoastKin #PNW #Oregon #PhotographersOfBluesky #PhotographersUnited #BlueskyPhotography #ArtistsOfBluesky #BlueskyArt #Landscape #Nature

reminder: Jimmy Kimmel is enough of a mensch that he devised a segment on which actors who are just short of having enough work to qualify for union healthcare come on his show and deliver a single line of dialogue deadline.com/2024/07/jimm...

A bee is here

A new study led by @clairbarnes.bsky.social shows that human-caused global warming tripled heat wave deaths in European cities this summer to 24,400. These 16,500 people would still be alive if we weren't burning fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow.

hey just an FYI: we're not yet at the part where AI companies and the state are so closely intertwined that disclosing energy usage would constitute a threat to national security or some other such bullshit, making transparency into the environmental impact of data centers all but impossible

It bears repeating: choosing to double down and accelerate our burning of fossil fuels will kill off a substantial proportion of humanity That is something we want to avoid - and can choose to avoid www.theguardian.com/environment/...

"Putin appears to have gained the upper hand...[He] was treated as an equal on U.S. soil, managed to sidestep any potential American sanctions for now and announced no battlefield concessions. Trump, who vowed...to end the war on his first day in office, failed to secure even a temporary cease-fire"

Eyeopening walkthrough of DC by this creator. If you aren’t in DC, worth a watch all the way to the end—

Remarkably, NASA is looking for partners (wealthy individuals, philanthropic orgs, companies etc.) to keep crucial climate satellite missions like the Orbiting Carbon Observatory going. Whether they make such a deal before $$ runs out remains to be seen... www.cnn.com/2025/08/13/c...

"“I ain’t ever bought no prostitutes. I ain’t never raped nobody. I ain’t never paid anybody off. None of that stuff,” said G, a resident from one of the photographed tents. “He’s much more of a criminal than I am”" streetsensemedia.org/article/home...

This is a wonderful read.

Once again, if you know anything about who is behind the DHS or ICE social media accounts, particularly on X, I'm very interested in talking to you. [email protected] or 334-315-8634 on Signal.

Good Peter Baker article ⤴️ on Trump's brutish abuse of power in service of narrative. But words matter. When is a behavior an "echo" of something in the past, and when is it that thing incarnate?... 1/2

Well done, New York! The state's building code now requires most new buildings to be all-electric. This makes good economic sense: It's cheaper to install a two-way heat pump to both heat and cool, vs a one-way AC plus a one-way furnace. Outgrowing indoor combustion also benefits climate and health.

In the past when I sat down to write about Israel, I’ve had a moment where I take a deep breath and accept that, as a Jewish woman, it’s going to be difficult. This time, there was no such moment. I wrote about the intentional starvation of Gaza by Israel/US, and the moral imperative to say enough:

Alex de Waal has worked on humanitarian causes across the globe for over 40 years. “There is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.”

WGBH building in Boston today

Pilot over the intercom: uhhhhhhh we are all just flesh. We exist so briefly.

👀 Scoop: Trump and Republicans want USPS to sell off its brand new EVs and chargers. That would mean literally **ripping up post office parking lots** to auction off assets with no private-sector value. It’s buried in the Senate’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

"About a fifth of the coal miners in Central Appalachia have black lung." "And from 1970 to 2016, more than 75,000 died." "It comes down to how much is a life worth. You want more coal, but you don't care about the coal miners." #WestVirginia #USA #Healthcare

When I started reporting this story for @capitalandmain.bsky.social, 90% of NIOSH staff had received layoff notices. Now, the situation is more complicated. 🧵1/7 capitalandmain.com/a-coal-miner...

Must-read by @megduff.com on @capitalandmain.bsky.social: “It comes down to how much is a life worth,” Wolfe said. “You want more coal, but you don’t care about the coal miners and what’s happening to them.” capitalandmain.com/a-coal-miner...

RFK Jr. said multiple times during his house and senate hearings today that no scientists have been fired from federal agencies. Our reporting has shown that hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists have been let go from NIH/CDC/FDA

I for one welcome our new orca overlords

The next orca attack will be very different.

Impossible to communicate to people that once you decide that a group more vulnerable than you can be sacrificed in the name of your own safety or interests that you have already entered into an tacit agreement that you can also be sacrificed in the interests of a group less vulnerable than you.

I wrote to one of the best government climate scientists I know, and jokingly asked if he's been fired. The fact that our best scientists, even if they haven't been fired, cannot focus on work due to mental strain, hurts us all.

The most likely place one of the US scientists fired by a 19 year old will end up isn't in some other country's version of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, but like, McDonalds or Doordash. The brain drain will be mostly into shitty gig jobs, not picking up that research elsewhere.

In @highcountrynews.org, @shaun505.bsky.social writes brilliantly about what trucks can do, and how they can bring people together, and how the Cybertruck is just a baking sheet on wheels for dysfunctional men. www.hcn.org/issues/57-5/...

This Day in Labor History: April 21, 1894. Bituminous coal miners went on strike. This early attempt to fight against employer oppression and the low wages of the mines failed pretty badly, in the face of overwhelming state violence, employer intransigence, and the deep poverty of the miners!!

Twelve of them! They got Zuck too

Calling solar geoengineering a "solution" now establishes the conversation on totally unwarranted assumptions, as if we already knew whether it was going to work in a systemic way or not. We do not know this yet. 6/n

Inside you there are two wolves. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

Professional update! I just started a new job reporting on chemical regulations for Chemical Watch News & Insights. Work at the EPA? Work in chemicals policy or compliance? I have lots to learn, so please reach out! You can find me here or on signal: megduff.11

If you think this can’t happen, remember that of the 125,000 Japanese Americans who were interned during WWII for years without charge or trial, two-thirds were U.S. citizens. Including me.

It’s 9am TFT time here, and citizens are already gathering to protest Tariffs by the United States. Our plain clothes Officer Penguins are attempting to maintain calm, but unfortunately we keep losing them in the crowd.

Re-upping this now that Trump has announced 10% tariffs on Brazil and Columbia, plus a whopping 46% tariff on Vietnam -- the top 3 coffee producing countries.

NEW: The entire CDC #FOIA office — nearly two dozen people — received RIF notices. FOIA personnel at FDA and NIH were also dismissed. The CDC has seen a massive uptick in FOIA requests this year. It’s the second busiest year since Covid. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

NYU canceled a planned speech by the former president of Doctors Without Borders because she planned to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and cuts to US AID. This is what actual campus censorship looks like.

This is why we have to keep raising hell.

Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace DAY 14: Today Greenpeace Inc. called its final witness: Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer’s chairman (video depo) When asked if he was aware that there is currently no valid easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline, Warren replied “I did not know that.” Seems weird. 1/

This is a corporate attempt to put an end to climate protest and *particularly* to Indigenous led climate protest. Massive 1A assault. Pretty shocking that our little outlet was one of maybe 3 or 4 that had a reporter there every day of the trial (one of the others was a fake newspaper 🙃)

So uhh…sorry for the nightmare fuel, but I wrote about how microplastics seem to be messing with photosynthesis. 🌏🧪

A good part of my job is to read extremely concerning studies in order to compose cross-sectional view of What's At Stake and work out ways to engage stakeholders This is, without hyperbole, the most concerning thing I have read in a long time www.scientificamerican.com/article/micr...

Scoop: ~33% of NWS offices no longer have sufficient staffing to safely keep 24/7 operations. Critically understaffed @nws.noaa.gov offices now include: Boston Miami Houston Omaha Wichita Kansas City Marquette, MI Sioux Falls, SD Rapid City, SD Cheyenne, WY www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...