I've come to believe that waste and contamination are *the* key salient issue when it comes to fossil fuels. I mean that practically, in that these substances are inescapably toxic and often cancer-causing. But also politically. No one wants to live near them, once they understand what they are.

My broher @saulelbein.bsky.social -- environmental journalist extraordinaire -- is on Heated!

I don’t think I’d ever really gotten War of the Worlds until I read this piece

she’s got balls I’ll give her that

Wait this wilderness sounds great

If you’re wondering how the patriarchy is doing my 3 year old just called me Mr Mom

@gonebabygone.bsky.social swung by Heat Death today for a great piece about connecting the experience of the Ramadan fast to the history of hunger strikes in Ireland, and what it means to deprive yourself to make a statement for justice. Super proud to run it.

The scams also run on oil.

This is a good idea except all the water will drain out

If we drill down from the US, we'll hit it eventually from the bottom, right?

Honestly, morning v night people seems like a more intuitive way to polarize the country

This country rules

Gonna start using this

just a normal idiocy fanboy

”world historic midwit” is a good insult

Really pulling out all the "look over there" stops but also this rules www.newsnationnow.com/politics/tru...

This is, uh, really something

"The thing you have to understand about PFAS, or forever chemicals, is that they go against nature. Not morally — but functionally. That's why they're so dangerous." Today in Heat Death: why these zombie chemicals are so popular and powerful and will f you up heat-death.ghost.io/undead-chemi...

This is a really interesting approach: go after fossil fuels as a criminal racket that used their market power to quash cheaper competitors.

What’s crazy is how pervasive this language is

As I say here, there is no scientific justification to revoke the engagement finding. In fact, over the last 15+ yrs, the evidence of how climate change affects our health has only grown. Higher risk of allergies, dementia, fertility, heart disease, and death: that’s what’s on the line. @nature.org

It’s worth noting that there’s really no other industry that gets to do this. You don’t get to build a house and leave all the trash in the backyard. Restaurants don’t dump. They’re spent cooking oil in the gutters. If somebody paints your house, they don’t get to dump the extra paint on your floor

The way to think about the endangerment finding, like the story I published yesterday about the school built on fracking waste, is that the principle saga of American economic life is the oil and gas industry going to greater and greater lengths to avoid cleaning up or even acknowledging its mess

"That money helped entrench a political movement openly hostile to democratic norms. This was not an accident. Authoritarians are better for fossil fuel business...The fossil fuel industry...[i]s actively underwriting democratic decay." - @emorwee.bsky.social heated.world/p/actually-i...

One thing to add here: in Texas particularly, fracking cash — spent by new-money paleocon oilmen like Tim Dunn — explicitly underwrote the rise of the far right. It really is a different beast than, and funded even harsher politics, than prior “Big Oil” donors

PSA for freelance climate journalists: I'm taking pitches for HEATED These are the types of stories I'm interested in. Particularly looking for stories in categories 2 and 3.

The brutal PFAS stories coming hard and pfast these days www.propublica.org/article/fore...

@txsharon.bsky.social warned people about this as early as 2010

The thing that has to be said here is that (1) this is still going on and (2) it’s actually getting worse, because the industry is producing ever more waste per barrel of oil or MMBTU of gas, because the easily accessible stuff is long gone.

For decades, Texas let drillers spread staggering amounts of radioactive and PFAS-ridden waste on the fringes of the nation’s fourth largest metro area — while making it virtually impossible for the public to know where. Absolutely fucking insane story from @saulelbein.bsky.social today

thebarbedwire.com/2026/02/11/a... The take-home message here is that there are likely tens of millions of tons of radioactive and forever chemical laid in waves spread across the fourth largest metro area in the United States and no one knows where it is.

I’ve been thinking about what it would look like to talk about the fossil age not in a technical register, but in a moral or religious one

Today, on Heat Death! @saulelbein.bsky.social gives the fossil fuel industry and its underworld kings a bracing dose of that old-time religion.

The Butlerian Jihad will be planned on 3x5 notecards

all-seeing eye dog

Try Heat Death, a newsletter that's a melting pot of connections between nature, history and culture, run by @saulelbein.bsky.social and myself. Issues feature either our writing or incredible commissioned guest pieces, which most of the money we make goes to pay for!

And we could not have asked for a better managing editor

Austin weather right now is insane

Never not thinking about the out-of-work British mill workers who agitated *against* the UK intervening on the side of the South and getting their jobs back because they fucking hated slavery

In 1862, @saulelbein.bsky.social writes, suffering textile workers streamed into a Manchester meeting hall. At stake: whether Britain should join the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Proponents of "kitchen table politics" can learn a lot from what happened next. New, on Heat Death!

This is a really sobering read.

Come for the prophesized doom of the suburbs, but also come for the first published account of the time @asherelbein.bsky.social almost gave our mother a heart attack by means of a snapping turtle heat-death.ghost.io/the-suburbs-...

I've been covering forests and fire for more than a decade and until we were pitched this piece, the connection between the federal crusade against fire and the sterility of the suburbs had never occurred to me.

Sure sure but what if also he shaved his head

Worth also thinking about this nonsense in the context of @saulelbein.bsky.social’s piece on antisemitism — people can will themselves to believe that we are always on the precipice of pogrom (one mayor away!) if that is a useful ideological notion for your politics. bsky.app/profile/ashe...

This really is the divide I’m pointing to, which is above all a divide within the Jewish community: Cuomo arguing that Jews need him to protect them from other non-Jews. heat-death.ghost.io/the-myths-of...

If there’s any great lesson from the AI age it’s that liberal arts may have been the smarter thing to study than tech

By which I mean: the specific kind of antisemitism we now face is a specific tic of post-19th C blood and soil nationalism. It is *new and contingent,* not timeless, and that has to inform the strategy for confronting it.

Connecting the dots here is not hard.

This article was amazing. Highly recommend you read it