Here’s your Air Quality Index expressed as number of cigarettes. The climate crisis has turned us all into smokers just as the shit-in-the-food crisis took away our salads

I just want to go for a run and eat raspberries. But I’m a cooked broccoli-eating smoke prisoner

Scientist friends: how many people will die prematurely because of the high levels of particulate matter in the air in North America this week? @climatehuman.bsky.social @ssteingraber1.bsky.social @doctorvive.bsky.social @ultracricket.bsky.social @billmckibben.bsky.social

At what point is it safer to just stop breathing, than to breathe this air? 🤔 #smoke #fire . This is more than 3X the EPA upper scale limit of AQI.

and in fact, the greed to claim other people’s children has warped the word “orphan” in the adopter’s lexicon to such an extent that would-be adopters will refer on social media to the children they desire, who have living parents, as orphans. It’s come to mean “child *I* deserve to have.” 🥚

My daughter’s Girl Scout camp in NJ just cancelled their overnight camping due to poor air quality. Our kids deserve to have fun outdoors, not be punished for grownups’ failures to tackle climate change.

Meanwhile in the EU… www.euronews.com/2026/07/16/s...

This is happening from Minnesota to the east coast. Take precautions and/or rearrange your outdoor activities if you can. You might be able to handle 1 day if you are healthy, but this is likely to go on for a couple of them.

AQI = 500 in Hudson, NY = officially not safe for anyone to breathe, everyone may experience respiratory problems, it’s an emergency, no running errands, no going outside. Your reminder that fine particulate matter from burning forests silts up your heart and your brain. FOSSIL FUELS DID THIS

*blinks once* *blinks twice* *my skull flies open and the ghosts of Tony Mazzocchi, Mother Jones, and Eugene Debs fly out to the opening strains of L’Internationale*

Apparently, today is BOTH #WorldChimpanzeeDay and #WorldOrcaDay! Something female chimps and orcas have in common is they both experience menopause! They also have rich social lives and a reliance on culture to solve ecological problems! Pics are female chimps I studied at the North Carolina Zoo!

New York has become the first US state to enforce a data center moratorium, as governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order today to pause construction for one year.

A minefield is a situation presenting unseen hazards to the person who passively finds themself in one. Corruption is the active abuse of entrusted power for private gain. “The payment illustrates the corruption Mr Trump has created.” Everyone should want this to blow up.

Things that shouldn’t need to be said but need to be said:

Thank you feminism. Thank you @E. Jean Carroll. "The money, which had been held in escrow while Mr. Trump appealed the jury’s 2023 award, was disbursed to Ms. Carroll last week, according to a note added on Tuesday to the online court docket in the case."

P.S. If you are not already a member of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network—join today for free! Keep tabs on what's happening in our watershed and up to date on what we need to do to protect it: delawareriverkeeper.org/join-us/beco...

THANK YOU – it was all the calls that flooded leadership and Rep. Nadler that united opposition to this sneaky attempt to overturn the fracking ban and to dis-empower the DRBC’s ability to take such action that stopped it in its tracks.

More good news! Congressman Scott Perry (R, PA ) has FAILED in his attempt to overturn the fracking ban in the Delaware River Basin after everyone went apeshit and flooded targeted legislators w calls. This only works when the apeshit is organized into citizen rapid response networks which it was:

Keep scrolling 👇 for a detailed exegesis of Hochul’s just released executive order declaring a statewide data center moratorium in NYS versus the bill declaring a statewide data center moratorium that was passed last June by the state legislature and which the governor has, so far, eschewed signing.

In NYC today for a medical appointment and was happy to find this person holding their own rally outside the golden doors of Trump Tower on 5th Ave. Of course I asked permission for a photo and the reply was “please post it all over social media” 🫡

Fuck yes! Proud of my state! (I still believe in #landback because there ain’t no way in hell a data center would go on tribal land without incurring the wrath of its national inhabitants)

I love our work hard rep and it’s true - we do! In this case tho, we haven’t pushed on this (it’s clear there’s been a big push by other great groups we work with). This is our org’s opinion, tho, and we’re considering what to do from here.

Meanwhile in New Mexico…

I love Steingraber's work. You should read this. That said, as Steingraber mentions in their thread, they are not an expert in law, politics, or policy. They're coming at this as an expert in biology with (I think?) particularized knowledge of emissions. So let's talk statute v ExOrder.

Adoption is human trafficking. 🥚

VICTORY (sort of)* in NEW YORK The good news: we have the nation’s 1st statewide data center moratorium Relentless citicism activism backed by science did this! *The caveat: the moratorium is an executive order rather than a much stronger legislative bill. 1/6 www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

🥚 Horrific adoption scandal in Indonesia. Healthcare workers, orphanages, international foundations collaborated to separate babies from impoverished mothers—often via huge medical bills that demanded babies as collateral—and sent them abroad, destroying all records. en.tempo.co/read/2113549...

This happened to my wife. Didn't find out until late teens and then her APs withheld a bunch of her paperwork. She was so panicked and highly stressed until she managed (on her own) to get citizenship much later.APs painted a grim pic of her homeland and constantly threatened to send her back there.

In '17, Trump nominated Dourson to oversee EPA’s chemical safety division but he was forced to withdraw his name after failing to get enough support. I was at that hearing & can't begin to say how freaking disgusted I am. We're all in danger. #PFAS Read both on why 👇 www.news10.com/news/hoosick...

Learning about a U.S. scandal (in my own field) by reading the foreign press: “The Trump administration has stacked a top chemical safety board with industry-aligned scientists who have financial conflicts of interest and stand to profit from deregulations.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Just updated an hour ago. With video footage of protests and rallies in the state today. (Support local journalism. We’d be lost without it.)

This morning in Biddeford, Maine, a 26-year-old man said goodbye to his wife and daughter and left for work. Moments later he was dead, shot in the head by ICE agents, the second man ICE has killed in six days. ICE is killing our neighbors. ICE cannot be reformed. Abolish ICE.

🥚 “As many as 200,000 international adoptees lack citizenship, often BECAUSE THEIR PARENTS NEVER COMPLETED THE NATURALIZATION PROCESS FOR THEM. And even with the right paperwork, many face the THREAT OF RACIAL PROFILING.” [shouting added] Adoption = terror sahanjournal.com/immigration/...

Amazing! ICE kills a man ~7:30 am. 1st news report is an hour later. ~1:30 pm, a group of 𝒔𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝒉𝒖𝒏𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒅 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 marches in Main Street and "storms into the Biddeford office of [U.S.] Sen. Susan Collins." Would be hard to do in NYC. Biddeford pop. = 22,000! www.pressherald.com/2026/07/13/s...

🧪 I read it. Conclusion: “scientists should generally avoid political involvement to preserve institutional credibility and public support for research.” Premise: “I doubt that major political involvement could ever justify getting involved in politics.” Yeah. 🫠 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

This is gendered POV. Getting lost was terrifying for women before GPS and cell phones. I drove alone across the US in 1992 with a dog who puked on my Rand McNally—right on Oklahoma—and made it unreadable. The fear I felt walking into a gas station near Sallisaw, staffed by One Guy, was not trivial🧵

🥚 Investigation into international adoption from Paraguay during the Stroessner dictatorship: “falsified documentation, inadequate verification of biological families, and the possibility that some mothers were pressured into giving up their children.” asunciontimes.com/culture/para...

🥚 “baby farms operating under the appearance of providing shelter to vulnerable women” “children taken from hospitals while brokers arranged separations between mothers and infants” “visa applications processed before mothers granted consent” adoption=trafficking slguardian.org/stolen-ident...

Sure Lindsey Graham was a monster for trying to genocide the entire Middle East & pushing the world to fascism But let’s not forget he also monstrously killed a climate bill he co-wrote, for no reason other than he got attention for writing it & then got more attention for killing it @volts.wtf

Somebody catch me up I walked into the middle of the movie 🧪

Teen pregnancy used to be one of the right's top bogeymen. It's now fascinating to watch how their nativism - falling birth rates which now can't be solved by allowing foreigners to join us as Americans- has led them to bemoaning its decline. They're now shifting policies to help teens get pregnant.

Using an image, show a movie you are sure you have watched more than 10 times. [Hypothesis: only the parents of grown kids are sobbing rn.]

Vaccines are miraculous. It was a miracle that they figured out the Covid vaccine so quickly. RFK and the anti-vaxx crowd are depraved. people.com/the-last-us-...

The brutal forces of silencing that serve the few against the many, I should have said. This is our country in a nutshell. So much for protecting girls, someone remarked. Good to hear people in the crowd shouting for her rights.

This is the secret main essential true 250th anniversary event: the brave voice of democracy and justice; the brutal forces of silencing; it's all here.

This is the eulogy:

…they lobby to block clean-energy development and push for expansion of fossil fuels, while they all (including oil and gas) circulate “discourses of climate delay” and other forms of fossil-fuel propaganda so as to mislead, politicize climate, and foment ideological opposition to decarbonization.

In my work, the work of Amy Westervelt, De Smog, CAAD, Ben Franta, Naomi Oreskes, and many others, it is documented that individual oil and gas companies claim to support certain kinds of climate policies while their trade groups, like API, and associated think tanks, like AEI, continue to lobby to…

Friends, we have outlived Lindsey Graham. GIFT link: Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, Dies at 71 www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/u...

I was willing to overlook the loaded word “abundance” but when the “I’d add nuance” turns out to be advocating for the fraudulent, unworkable, dangerous, failed technology favored by the oil industry called carbon capture and storage, I quit reading. I prefer my @billmckibben.bsky.social unnuanced.