B Reathing in wildfire smoke Aggressive diarrhea Ticks everywhere Brat summer is back 🍏🔥

Right-wingers yelping about being told (as in past heatwaves!) to set their AC to 78—so a grid that serves >8.5 million people doesn't shut down—really illustrating what AFAIK is a pretty US-specific pathology: being militantly proud of your extreme sensitivity to mild discomfort

"Our societies are navigating a climate-changed world with last century’s infrastructure. That’s not the result of some surplus of climate policies but of a profound lack of them." newrepublic.com/article/2125...

I wrote about heat waves, the bizarre culture wars around air conditioning in Europe, and why Democrats shouldn't let Republicans be the only ones talking about all the suffering the climate crisis is doling out newrepublic.com/article/2125...

" If left-of-center politicians and ostensibly fact-based news organizations aren’t willing to accurately interpret our climate-changed reality, however, the right will be more than happy to do it for them." newrepublic.com/article/2125...

Genuinely nauseating how much discourse about the European heat wave on X is people in the US blaming cultural preferences, emissions concerns, degrowth etc for Europeans not having AC. Whipped-up culture war sociopathy seemingly designed to blame a whole continent for their own suffering & death

I wrote about the irony of Trump going to war with the Reflecting Pool algal bloom as his administration tries (again) to defund the institutions that keep people, pets and economies safe from harmful algal blooms newrepublic.com/article/2122...

Would love to know the origins of liberal politicians referring to multilateral funding commitments as "reparations," which has been a longtime favorite jab from the US at the UNFCCC. Moynihan?

UN climate negotiations watchers will be shocked to learn that signing a Plan to establish a Fund that will raise a certain amount of Dollars within a certain Timeframe means that one government will pay that entire amount

Huh!

A little confused about the line among Dems that $300 bn for reconstruction is the thing to focus on. It’ll obviously be an unaccountable slush fund for Trump’s friends but does seem like the US should pay to rebuild a country it’s bombed for many months

I wrote about their AI aesthetics last year, just how *weird* the vibes seemed at the Detroit conference. Decided not to tune in this year... but the contradictions are all very funny advaitcore.substack.com/p/a-really-b...

One of the weirder right-wing subcultures are they guys claiming they're gonna "reindustrialize" the US by spending piles of government money using AI to make bloated drones that perform half as well as the ones guys in Ukraine make in their basement

I wrote about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who may or may not believe all the scary things he says but definitely wants you to think he is special despite doing a lot of very ordinary CEO stuff newrepublic.com/article/2117...

Feel a bit crazed hearing the popularism set argue that major private investments will actually be well-liked and create public goods this time. 1. That was a major premise of Bidenomics, and most people didn’t know it happened…

Something really of the moment about the resume of the far-right conspiracy theorist who just won his primary for a seat on the the Texas Railroad Commission, which has nothing to do with railroads and is actually an oil and gas regulator newrepublic.com/article/2111...

“De La Espriella has proposed opening 10 ‘mega-prisons’ and said he wants to foster closer ties to the U.S. and Israel. He plans to slash 700,000 government employee and contractor jobs, ‘put God back into our children’s classes,’ and build a ‘Miracle Homeland.’”

"For the fossil fuel interests that backed Wright, the question now is whether they’ll support an inexperienced extremist for the sake of keeping a Democrat from regulating them." My guess is yes. newrepublic.com/article/2111...

I wrote about the presidential election in Colombia, where Trump has endorsed a guy who’s talked about building 10 mega-prisons and blowing up cats newrepublic.com/article/2112...

It’s true that in some hermetically sealed theoretical world AI data center development *could* deliver some broader public goods, but in that world we would already have the things people say those data centers could, theoretically, deliver. Extremely circular, fantastical thinking

“Although the experts I spoke to agreed that the specific emissions in RCP8.5 look implausible, the world could still experience RCP8.5-like climate impacts.” newrepublic.com/article/2108...

I went deep on RCP8.5, and how a climate scenario that's well over a decade old became the subject of a ridiculously bad-faith culture war newrepublic.com/article/2108...

No it the fuck was not.

Anyone even vaguely left of center spending time online blaming "the Left" for why the US is bad at this point have lost the plot

Slice of life as a climate writer: in the middle of talking to someone on the phone last night about the RCP8.5 debate I had to go check if my basement had flooded after 10 minutes of rain (it had)

Seems like a Democrat who could tap into not really liking the party brand, MAHA-adjacent public/environmental health issues and data center backlash could do numbers

I wrote about Elon Musk losing his case against OpenAI, and why Musk, Sam Altman and Trump have similar visions for the future: minority rule, and unlimited wealth accumulation newrepublic.com/article/2106...

"Democrats—who mostly aren’t talking about climate change—are continuing to debate whether they should talk about climate change." great lede for smart piece by @katearonoff.bsky.social

As always, just a bloody great @katearonoff.bsky.social piece in @newrepublic.com about the weirdness of the DO NOT MENTION CLIMATE CHANGE debate among American democrats newrepublic.com/article/2103...

"Democrats—who mostly aren’t talking about climate change—are continuing to debate whether they should talk about climate change." Good stuff from @katearonoff.bsky.social.

I’ve written more than most people on the failures of the U.S. climate politics over the last decade-plus. Plenty of room for more self-reflection, but the primary Groups responsible for killing the momentum on climate over the last few years were the GOP and the fossil fuel industry

this is the only good piece that's been written about this stupid "debate" (and def dovetails with my previous takes on how the climate *is* the economy)

As always @katearonoff.bsky.social nails it. And check out the linked polling data from @dataforprogress.org based on our agenda for green economic populism @cplusc.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2103...

Another banger from Kate Aronoff, this time on the (unending) debate about whether Dems should talk about climate change.

Amazing how much “NIMBY“ is used as a stand-in for “the incentives baked into private property ownership”

Nice to see someone write about this issue whose brain hasn’t been melted by petty online grievances

I wrote about the debate over whether Democrats should talk about “climate,” which is kind of a nonsensical question, and how it’s sort of like a debate over whether to talk about capitalism newrepublic.com/article/2103...

Certain strains of AI millenarianism are just redirected climate despair

arguably Not Good that Democrats have opted to ignore climate and environmental politics, which are structural components of the right's long-running crusade against democracy newrepublic.com/article/2093...

IMO talking about climate change as a matter of inflating green asset values didn’t resonate with voters and the Democrats talked relatively little about climate change itself during the Biden administration

I think it’d be great to stop equating a rapid proliferation of renewable energy with an energy transition, which means something else

I wrote about the Republican climate plans in Louisiana newrepublic.com/article/2100...

While ​local lawmakers obsess over how to keep Democrats in majority-Black districts from governing, their state is literally shrinking. “Between the chronic stress of land loss and sea level rise, New Orleans’s days are numbered." trib.al/zgcvHnx

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and it isn’t poised to open anytime soon. Trump signaled Wednesday that he intends to keep the U.S. blockade in place until Iran cries “uncle” and says, “We give up.” The longer the strait stays closed, the less likely any sort of return to normalcy gets. 🧵

Spirit Airlines: another victim of Donald Trump’s global carbon tax newrepublic.com/article/2098...

Really seems like a huge thrust of centrist politics over the last few years has been trying to run 1980s right-wing talking points about the “New Class” back against climate activism, and cast activism more broadly as an inherently out of touch PMC activity

I wrote about this exchange, and why Zeldin and co. are trying to downplay their administration’s efforts to protect a German chemicals and pharmaceuticals company from cancer patients newrepublic.com/article/2096...

I went long on Waymo and robotaxis, which are not silver bullets for making the United States’ abysmally dangerous roads safer newrepublic.com/article/2094...

As far as I can tell Centrist Dems on X are yelling at Jia Tolentino over a New York Times podcast because otherwise swing voters will think they’re soft on crime (??)

Real chicken or the egg question as to whether a certain strain of Silicon Valley-style Rationalist thinking attracts or cultivates insufferable personalities