If you’ve got one of those families—nuclear or extended—in which talking politics at the dinner table brings out the glares and knives, or you just get bored hanging around the in-laws and outlaws of your own little clan on Thanksgiving, perhaps you can turn the whole affair into a language experiment that everybody can participate in. […]
Commentators have attached much comfort and hope to the turnout of young voters in this year’s election. At 27%, youth turnout was the third highest in the 13 midterms since 1974, with peaks at 32% in 1982 and 31% in 2018. They strongly favored Democrats. By Meteor Blades Although there were quite large differences in the overall percentage of turnout among […]
Republicans are planning to make the party even more unpalatable to young voters who cast their ballots massively in favor of Democrats last week. Fitting for the GOP where more than half congressional members (139 out of 271) are outright climate crisis deniers. By Meteor Blades From Ari Natter at Bloomberg: “The climate crisis committee will not […]
Just as I’ve been doing for the past two-and-a-half months, I’ll be working to get out the vote (GOTV) right up to the last minute, knowing full well how a few extra votes in the right place can make the difference. These days that GOTV work is remote, phone banking and texting, as well as writing postcards. It doesn’t […]
“Health at the mercy of fossil fuels” is the headline of the 2022 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change that was released by the renowned medical journal Tuesday. The seventh annual report tracks 43 health and climate indicators, including exposure to extreme heat. This year’s edition is another grim study of how our “fossil fuel addiction” is killing us. By […]
Much environmental reporting the past few years has been a mix of news about the accelerating efforts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources and mitigating the current impacts and expected future impacts of the climate crisis with cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The past week, “disturbing” is a cautious description of that news. […]
For those who missed it, Bret Stephens, deputy editor of the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, posted a sort of mea culpa on climate change today. Without the culpa. By Meteor Blades When @NYTimes hired climate inactivist @BretStephen_NYT, climate folks said "that's it, I'm canceling my subscription". But I pushed back: "Hold on. Times has much to offer […]
Kurtis Alexander writes at the San Francisco Chronicle, “A herd of wild horses just moved into this iconic California destination. No one knows what comes next”. Only over the past few years have the horses become a familiar sight in the eastern Sierra. They’ve pushed west from their historical stomping grounds in and around the White […]
Nearly four years ago, an analysis published in the journal Science found that the oceans were warming 40% faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had reported in its fifth climate assessment in 2014. This week that acceleration was confirmed in a paper published in the journal Nature Reviews. It found that the top 2,000 meters of the oceans have […]
The Biden administration’s America the Beautiful program seeks a “30 by 30” conservation plan, which aims to protect 30% of the nation’s land and water by 2030. National monuments are likely to be a big part of that extremely ambitious program. President Joe Biden quickly restored the boundaries of two national monuments in Utah that Donald Trump shrank during […]
While the unprecedented funding of the Inflation Reduction Act is crucial to spur acceleration of the nascent transformation of our energy system, the folks at the National Priorities Project of the Institute for Policy Studies succinctly explain what numerous climate hawks have been pointing out and why the IRA must be only a foundation to build on. By Meteor Blades Through FY 2022, […]
Anybody who has looked at a 1930s or 1950s copy of Popular Mechanics devoted to showing us what the world would be like 25 or 50 years into the future knows how far off the mark such speculation can be. This is now true more than ever. We’re definitely on the cusp of a great transformation, but how it […]
Over the years, one question I have been asked repeatedly is for a recommendation of a book that comprehensively tells the story of American Indians. In fact, there’s no book that does that because, just like other people who live in the USA, Indians aren’t monolithic. Hundreds of federally recognized tribes, hundreds more that are unrecognized, 29 language groups and […]
You’ve probably heard the news that OPEC Plus is cutting production by 2 million barrels of oil a day. Whether or not Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman personally engineered this in part to make life difficult for the West in general and the Biden administration in particular makes no difference as far as Big Oil’s gains […]
In the fourth edition of Generation180’s report Brighter Future, the clean energy nonprofit’s authors found that the number of U.S. public, independent, and charter K-12 schools getting electricity from on site solar power have doubled since the first report in 2014. By the end of 2021, “solar schools” totaled 8,400 with an enrollment of 6 million of the […]