Big Tech is saying out loud "You can have a habitable planet or machine generated slop, but you can't have both."

"Affordability" is what it is as a frame (incomplete), but we need to understand that the Big Tech funded neoliberals are suggesting that responding to climate change is inconsistent with an affordability framework. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Excellent new @billmckibben.bsky.social piece explains how fossil fuels are making life more expensive. While planet-heating pollution drives up the cost of living, climate action—e.g., accelerating the transition to clean, cheap energy—puts us on a path toward greater affordability.

He cites a piece we co-authored on "pollution premiums," or the hidden surcharge we pay on insurance bills as a result of climate-wrecking fossil fuels. It's part of @350.org's "Out of Pocket" series on climate/affordability. By Insure Our Future's Risalat Khan and our @kennystancil.bsky.social:

Faced with a slow-motion ecological crisis at an Alaska-sized scale, politicians from Juneau to Washington are stuck in the mud of a tedious old dream: Alaska LNG. @hannahstoryb.bsky.social digs into the failure of imagination (and billions in subsidies) buoying this boondoggle for @prospect.org.

Wondering what we've been up to lately? This week's newsletter takes us from Silicon Valley to Trump's July 4th "vanity cringefest" to the halls of the Supreme Court. The common thread across these disparate stories is elite impunity: powerful people rigging the game without fear of consequences.

It seems somewhat bad that the richest man in the world can use his money to bankrupt individuals or organizations -- including officials who are tasked with holding him accountable -- that accurately point out that his actions plausibly facilitated the deaths of millions.

Dangerous heat is blanketing the United States. People are at greater risk of heat-related illness and death due to the cruel actions of Donald Trump, Russell Vought, and other admin officials. Things are even worse now as White House policy drives up the cost of electricity and other essentials.

Images from the Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi, where police deployed tear gas against residents protesting the police killing of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. Courtesy Action News 5: www.actionnews5.com/2026/06/16/c...

Insurers are some of the world’s biggest complainers about climate damages. So why are they defending Big Oil from accountability for those same climate damages? Follow the money Gift link to my column for @opinion.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

The property & casualty insurance industry's profit spree continued in 2025, new data shows. Underwriting income surged to $69 billion. Meanwhile, the industry raked in $112 billion in investment income, more than double what it saw in 2016. Analysis by @publiccitizen.bsky.social and RDP.

“We cannot afford to continue on our current path, where insurance CEOs cry poverty from their private jets while insurance consumers, saddled with skyrocketing costs, contend with the threat of losing their homes to foreclosure,” said our @kennystancil.bsky.social.

NEW: Oil tycoon Jeffery Hildebrand gave millions to Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign. He is set to reap a financial windfall as the EPA moves to weaken restrictions on wells like his that produce very little energy but release vast amounts of methane. By @alexcuadros.bsky.social

"Previous administrations didn't use the disaster declaration process to settle partisan scores or punish perceived enemies for alleged disloyalty," our @kennystancil.bsky.social told the Chicago Tribune. For more on Trump's weaponization of federal disaster assistance, see our tracker:

We obtained documents detailing the abundance movement's "capital stack." It's $260 million/year, including $100 million from former Microsoft CEO/LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who hadn't been listed as an abundance donor before. The documents show Silicon Valley's role bankrolling the movement.

How many infants did they guy help kill? Take away his medical license.

An new UN investigation warns that AI's water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3 billion people. “We have to think about that very long supply chain that starts with the extraction of critical minerals in the poor areas of the world,” says @kavehmadani.bsky.social, one of the report's authors.

Great piece from @kennystancil.bsky.social revolvingdoorproject.substack.com/p/democrats-...

Prediction markets are finally receiving some real scrutiny. Even a Republican-controlled Congress seems to be wary of some of the industry's more outlandish behavior. So they're turning to people who know how to deal with this pressure: gambling and vape executives. New in @newrepublic.com

OMB Director Russell Vought is waging a war on “wokeism” and “fraud” as a sham justification for freezing, cutting, or withholding federal funding for essential programs like public health to punish Trump’s political enemies, risking the collapse of the entire system.

"This would be the end of American science as we know it," said @colesci.bsky.social, a policy analyst from the group @standupforscience.net who has been organizing to protest the change. "We're gonna make sure that it doesn't fade quietly into the night." www.npr.org/2026/06/03/n...

Here's a detailed summary of what the Trump regime has done to make us more vulnerable to catastrophic hurricane outcomes.

NEW: The Trump administration has relentlessly undermined hurricane readiness and response capacity. When things go wrong, the opposition should make the president and his GOP accomplices pay a political price.

For "tighten" read "enforce" For "political oversight" read "political litmus tests" For "grantmaking" read "science & medical research funding" Put it all together: White House seeks to enforce political litmus tests for science & medical research funding.

Simply damning

John Roberts' Supreme Court is built on the belief that it is legal if powerful people do it. That's been their approach to what had been white collar crime (legalizing it), campaign finance regulations (slashing them), and of course legal ethics (mocking them).

"If data centres were a country, they would be the second-largest destination for gas turbines ordered from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026" New IEA report confirms this isn't a normal industry. It is a fossil-fuelled, high-polluting heavy industry producing socially corrosive products at massive climate cost.

Someday an academic will hit the total button on how many lives have been lost because of MAGA Republicans, and the number will show that Trump is a mass murderer.

NEW: Our latest report breaks down how OMB Director Russell Vought is weaponizing federal funding for disaster aid, education, food, health, transportation, and other essential programs to punish and coerce Trump’s political enemies, hurting millions of people in the process. Read it here⬇️

Another reminder: if there exists *any* class of people who don't have due process rights, then *nobody* actually has due process rights because the government can always just say you're in that class.

"Meetings are held, emails are sent, phone calls are made, and something like 520,000 children die of malnutrition, diarrhea, tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV." prospect.org/2026/05/22/w...

$9-billion taxpayer transfer to a $5 trillion company for US spy agencies to go all in on AI. NYT doesn't include a single critical word from a privacy or civil liberties expert. Just a don't-worry-about-it assurance at the end. Also: Anthropic is not our friend. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/u...

"Most of the domestic carnage of the second Trump administration is inseparable from Vought-led attacks on the non-military federal workforce ... and his unlawful moves to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in socially beneficial funding appropriated by Congress."

"Vought is the connective tissue linking different elements of the MAGA coalition... into a machine for advancing the interests of a small minority of oligarchs." Really hard to overstate how important this point is. talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/democra...

Vought is the one person who is welcome in every faction of the Trumpist coalition. Everyone sees him as "their guy."

It really is political malpractice that Democrats haven't made Vought famous yet. He is the perfect avatar for all the awful things the Trump administration is doing. He can be used to explain the motive, means, and opportunity.

Before OSHA, workers were exposed to toxic chemicals with almost no protection. Tony Mazzocchi helped change that by connecting workplace safety to environmental justice and forcing lawmakers to listen to workers themselves.

The Republican Party is unified behind this, in complete and total support of the corrupt looting of the public purse. Not a single significant voice of opposition.

EXCLUSIVE: Ebola Outbreak Rages After Trump Gutted Global Health Safeguards “The outbreaks of Ebola and hantavirus in the past two weeks show why international threats need an international response.” theintercept.com/2026/05/19/e...

Despite being the nerve center of Trump 2.0, OMB Director Russell Vought continues to fly under the radar. Vought’s lack of notoriety reflects a failure by Democrats to consistently and effectively communicate to the public how he is orchestrating the Trump regime’s assault on the common good. 🧵⬇️

Democrats are failing to foreground Vought as the nucleus of Trumpian chaos. Democratic lawmakers mentioned Vought in just 78 e-newsletters sent between January 20, 2025 and April 30, 2026. Musk, by contrast, was invoked in 858 emails during the same period.

Unlike Musk, Vought is strategically reclusive. This means that Democratic members of Congress must go to far greater lengths to convey to the public how destructive Vought has been and how dangerous he is.

Popular education aimed at exposing the mortal impacts of Voughtism needs to become a priority for federal Democratic lawmakers, who can connect the dots between the OMB director’s actions and their constituents’ preventable suffering.

Because they represent geographically limited areas, House Democrats are especially well-positioned to identify specific Vought victims living in their districts. From there, it should be possible to recruit ordinary people who are willing to talk about how Vought’s policies harmed their lives.

Senate Democrats might elevate the most compelling examples from their states, and they could also assemble statewide and nationwide data to ensure that an individual’s suffering is properly contextualized as part of a broader phenomenon affecting millions of people.

The aforementioned information could form the basis for an incessant stream of congressional letters demanding that Vought answer hard-hitting questions and press conferences exposing OMB’s intransigence.

If Democrats take back one or both chambers in the midterms, they can haul Vought in front of a different committee every week to make him publicly justify his cruelty. After each hearing, they can hold rallies where clips of Vought’s answers are played, interspersed w/ commentary from his victims.

Democrats can write op-eds and talk to news anchors and podcasters, perhaps even alongside affected constituents. They should ensure that all of this material is adapted for and then mass-distributed on every social media channel.

Filing a motion to impeach would give House Democrats an opportunity to outline the case against Vought in a public forum — and force House Republicans to go on record in support of the OMB’s onslaught against the public good.

The purpose of such maneuvers is to shed as much light as possible on Vought’s power grab and make lawmakers pick a side: the people or the man who is single-handedly eviscerating Congress’ power of the purse with devastating effects.