With the election of Donald Trump, we’re in for a climate catastrophe.

We know because we’re in that crisis now, already. We just don’t talk about it all that much, mostly because we don’t like to admit what it means.

Many of us recognize on some level that we’ve moved into a world of superstorms and rising seas; droughts and failed crops; deluges and floods; megafires and orange skies full of gagging smoke; life-threatening heat waves and blackouts; invasive insects spreading infectious diseases, and the loss of native ecosystems. We may try to tune it out, but we know it’s bad.

But what hasn’t sunk in is that we built this country for physical conditions that no longer exist. We’ve experienced a discontinuity with the past, a threshold where what used to work no longer does, and what we used to know no longer makes much sense. Once-sturdy systems will break more frequently. Once-safe places will find themselves disaster zones. No aspect of our lives will go untouched. And while it’s true some places are safer than others, nowhere is immune, and even communities like Asheville, North Carolina, can find themselves walloped by extreme weather.

Hundreds of millions of Americans are about to have a collision with planetary reality. We’re already seeing the impact on insurance and finance. Insurance depends on the ability to accurately price risk, to accurately measure future value. And the truth is, a big chunk of America is way riskier than we thought it was, and seriously overvalued.

A conservative estimate of the homeowner insurance gap is $1.6 trillion in uncovered risks. That’s mostly being borne by people who are relatively poor or live in acknowledged flood and fire zones. Everyone in the insurance industry expects that gap to grow, as risks metastasize and are priced into policies. Insurance eventually becomes too expensive for many to afford, if it’s even still available. For homeowners, skyrocketing premiums are too high. But insurers worry they can’t charge enough to keep up with increasing risk. The climate crisis is already rendering entire communities and even regions uninsurable.

Uninsurable properties are also often unlendable. Typically, getting a mortgage depends on the bank agreeing that the house it’s loaning you money to buy will hold its value for 30 years. Millions of American homes won’t. Homes you can buy only with cash (or with shady commercial loans) are homes that are also set to see a huge drop in value. This is as true in mountain towns surrounded by flammable timber as in cities on the floodplains of the Mississippi or beachside communities on the Gulf.

The Trump crowd doesn’t see climate chaos as a problem—they see it as an opportunity.

This pricing of unacknowledged risk into our communities will be a watershed event that extends into nearly every kind of real estate and local industry. Ignored climate brittleness—the quality of being easily broken by weather extremes but hard to fix—is being exposed. And brittleness revealed means value lost.

A 2023 study in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the overvaluation of homes measured only by their exposure to floods alone was as high as $237 billion. When we factor in all of the combinations of risks that communities face, we could easily be talking trillions of dollars. The scale of known risks, magnified by future uncertainties, is so massive that a Treasury council called it a “threat to the financial stability of the United States.”

Sooner or later the brittleness shoe will drop. Both destruction and discontinuity will erode the ability of many communities and local governments to respond to these challenges, creating a spiral of risk, loss, and partial recovery—until there’s not much left of value in the most vulnerable places.

Already, some folks are realizing they have no option but to leave. Some will be directly displaced by fire or flood (as we’ve seen in California and Texas). Many more will simply find life in a declining community untenable. Others are getting out while the market still slumbers. There is some evidence that rising home prices in the safer ­communities­ in the Great Lakes and ­Northwest are starting to be driven by (largely wealthier) newcomers relocating away from climate change.

If millions of Americans do start to flow out of the most battered places, we may well see a climate squeeze on housing in relatively safe communities. Rising costs could trigger secondary dislocation, where less advantaged locals find themselves pushed out, victims of climate displacement. The only thing that might check that new housing crisis is construction on a scale we haven’t seen in a generation.

I don’t believe America still has the option of an orderly transition. We’re going to have to fight like hell for rapid decarbonization while we reckon with the challenges of a climate-changed America and continue to contend with intergenerational problems of poverty and oppression. The next decade was always going to be messy.

The next president could declare a climate emergency and launch a national climate response. We could invest heavily in climate science, foresight capacities, and worker upskilling. We could forge a national insurability strategy—one that combines tax breaks for household adaptation measures with local disaster readiness and a major investment in stabilizing insurance costs in places that are still insurable. We could undertake wartime-scale efforts to build out clean energy, harden critical infrastructure, and defend relatively safe places from their worst demonstrated threats. We could invest in widespread managed retreat (especially on the coasts) with supported mass relocation for those living in the communities we cannot possibly save. We could lay the groundwork for equitable growth, making sure those moving away from climate chaos find places to live, with functioning roads and water systems and with schools, hospitals, and social services ready to meet a great increase in need. We could go all in, and make this catastrophe the spur for building the stronger bones of a better country.

That is not what we’re in for now that Donald Trump has been elected.

The Trump crowd has already shown they don’t see acceleration of the climate chaos as a problem—they see it as an opportunity.

Yes, there’s still rabid climate denial in the Republican Party, but that’s not the real driver here. Trump is backed by domestic Big Oil and Russian petro-­dictator Vladimir Putin. Climate policy will be set by the people profiting off perpetuating the problem. Dirty industries will realize hundreds of billions in profits they would have forgone if America had made an honest effort not to melt the ice caps.

Trumpists’ ambition is fueled by extending the predatory delay that’s been so profitable for polluting interests to what we might now think of as predatory reaction. As the New York Times’ Jennifer Szalai wrote, gop donors like Charles Koch have “learned to treat the Trump presidency like a natural disaster: an eruption of volatility to prepare for and exploit.”

The risk is so massive that a Treasury council called it a “threat to the financial stability of the United States.”

The first thing we’ll see—if we can rip our attention away from the promised concentration camps and military tribunals—is our existing climate capabilities spraying out of the back chute of a wood chipper.

Pulling out of the Paris climate accords, as he did the last time around, will only be the beginning. Every oily-fingered fossil fuel executive, cash-in-a-bag sprawl developer, and corner-­cutting factory owner in America is lining up for a jamboree of lawlessness and impunity. Project 2025 has identified hundreds of regulatory and administrative targets to destroy. A society crashing from one incompetently managed disaster to another offers ample opportunities for corruption, graft, and profiteering. Corrupt incompetence remains the one deliverable Trump has actually reliably produced.

Any effective climate response demands three basics: evidence-based decision-making, capable institutions, and public trust. You have to know what to do, have the means to do it, and be able to cooperate with the masses to get it done effectively.

Trump already came for all three in his first stay in the White House. With the power of the presidency unchecked, a submissive Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, and an army of acolytes in governors’ mansions and state legislatures, Trump will be in a position to do far, far worse this time around.

Don’t expect a national media that has lagged far behind in its climate reporting to suddenly make clear the growing peril we’re in. MAGA pundits already have a well-developed strategy for preventing accurate coverage of reality—as Steve Bannon said, “to flood the zone with shit.”

Forget nationally funded climate science and research on solutions, too. Universities will be under extreme pressure to toe the line or face defunding. Instead, look for all sorts of major institutions to decide that climate work is no longer essential. Even before the election was called, many were already showing signs of being willing to, as historian Timothy Snyder puts it, “obey in advance.”

Trump will be in a position to eviscerate federal regulations all across the board, punish uncooperative bureaucrats, withhold support to resistant states, block public access to information, and spew official disinformation at the American people.

A main goal will be to further destroy public trust in institutions through induced hopelessness. As Lincoln Steffens quoted a corrupt politician saying more than a century ago, “We know that public despair is possible and that that is good politics.” And of course, they didn’t have Truth Social, YouTube, or 8kun in the 1920s. Getting people to give up is easier than it looks.

Disaster victims are, of course, even more easily manipulated. Antisemitic weather control conspiracy theories? Rumored FEMA shakedowns of local communities? Warnings that disaster first responders are looting and robbing? People whose brains are broken by loss and fear of exploitation are often ready to believe crazy things. The irony is that by believing these things, they’ll be ready to be exploited on a whole new level.

There are fortunes to be made from corrupt disaster relief and recovery, shoddy infrastructure repair and utility privatization, scammy insurance and exploitative credit offers. If you liked the privatization of prisons, you’ll love the privatization of disaster response under a second Trump administration. Imagine a vast new climate response apparatus, but one rife with denial, implemented by political appointees, executed through corrupt deals, and only nominally held accountable. How many billions can be siphoned off? I shudder to think.

The scams won’t stop there. Parasites thrive in muddy water, and there will be plenty of chances to leech away whatever money is left in hard-hit communities, before a process of unofficial abandonment takes hold. In collapsing places, corporations can grift via security contracts and private emergency services.

A broken and paranoid America—splintered by the incapacity to agree on observable facts, or trust the institutions we depend on to solve major problems—tumbling into the worst version of a climate catastrophe: That’s a future almost too grim to contemplate.

It may be the future we face.

Elon Musk’s calls for a so-called “efficient” US government—including wanting to end the already endangered right to work from home, a disability accommodation for many—are less surprising when you view him as a techno-eugenicist.

The eugenicists of the early 20th century used medical violence like forced hysterectomies in a pseudoscientific campaign to prevent “inferior” immigrants from entering the US, and push certain groups —especially disabled, non-white, and otherwise marginalized people—out of the gene pool.

Big Tech successors like Musk and PayPal billionaire-turned-arms dealer Peter Thiel have overtly promoted fraudulent race science, with Musk amplifying users on X who argue that people of European descent are biologically superior. In response to another user’s deleted post suggesting that students at historically Black institutions have lower IQs, Musk posted, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE”—diversity, equity, and inclusion, misspelled. In 2016, Thiel buddied up to a prominent white nationalist, and, the same year, was said by a Stanford dorm-mate to have complimented South Africa’s “economically sound” system of racial apartheid.

Data was “deployed by eugenic researchers…to not just track and surveil the poor, [but] to argue for their segregation.”

In her new book Predatory Data, from the University of California Press, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences and media studies professor Anita Say Chan looks at the history and current use of data in devaluing human beings along eugenicist lines.

I spoke to Chan about the history of predatory data in the United States, why the moral and ethical implications of data collection remain a crucial subject, and how we can fight against its misuse.

Can you share a bit about how data has been used, historically, to cast many disabled people, immigrants, and people of color as being part of the “undeserving poor”—and how that continues today?

For large parts of history, poverty was seen as a largely inevitable phenomenon brought about from a general condition of scarcity. While a “soft” version of poverty as individual failure might have attributed poverty to laziness or immoral behavior, eugenics introduced a “harder” version of a biologically determined undeserving poor as a central object of data collection.

Eugenic researchers labored, and grew a global disinformation movement, across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to demonstrate poverty not as the result of scarcity or structural exploitations, as labor reformers then argued, but as the result of inherited deficiencies that directly limited intellectual potential, encoded harmful and immoral personal proclivities, and circumscribed economic achievement. In the US, varied datafication methods—from IQ exams and immigrant literacy tests, to criminal databases, biometric archives—were deployed by eugenic researchers in an effort to not just track and surveil the poor, and to argue for their segregation from so-called “fit” populations, but to collect data that eugenicists insisted would prove the higher incidences of moral, physical and mental “unfitness” among the poor.

Our contemporary datafication systems continue to do this today—not only by allowing their growth to be fueled by the expansion of online platforms and social media systems that minimize protections for minoritized users, but by enabling the amplification of political violence against minorities in the interest of protecting their profits.

The incoming Trump administration is very anti-immigrant—not that this country has ever been purely pro-immigration. To go back about a century, how did interpretations of intelligence lead to a dramatic increase in rejections at Ellis Island?

The Immigration Act of 1924 was a historic gain [for eugenicists] that is remembered for imposing a severe national quota system designed to keep non-Anglo-European immigrants out of the United States. Its passage allowed immigration from northern Europe to increase significantly, while Jewish immigration fell from 190,000 in 1920 to 7,000 in 1926, with immigration from Asia—already severely restricted from the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1870s onward—almost completely cut off until the 1950s. But the historic passage of the 1924 act came as a result of direct lobbying from US eugenicists.

Eugenics introduced a “harder” concept of a biologically determined,
undeserving poor as a central object of data collection.

The US psychologist and eugenicist Henry Goddard played an especially critical role. He first introduced the term “moron” in medicine to establish a multi-tiered classification for the “feeble-minded”. With fellow eugenicists, he strove to prove low intelligence as the primary indicator of deficient self-control, criminality, alcoholism, laziness, prostitution, and even political dissent. He advocated intelligence testing for all US immigrants to exclude so-called “unfit” arrivals. In 1913 he began an infamous study on immigrant intelligence that included as assessment questions that he delivered in English to respondents: “What is Crisco?”—the US-made cooking product introduced just two years earlier as an alternative to butter, and “Who is Christy Mathewson?”—an American [baseball] player.

Based on responses to such questions, he classified over 80 percent of his respondents as feebleminded—confirming, as Goddard wrote when the study was published in 1917, “that a surprisingly large percentage of immigrants are of relatively low mentality.” Goddard ended the article by proudly sharing the dramatic expansion in deportations of mentally defective populations from Ellis Island—by 350 percent and 570 percent in 1913 and 1914, respectively—that his study had triggered.

Data has also been used in imagining what a future can look like, such as with the Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. How did America’s embrace of eugenics lead to a smart city design being envisioned with only non-disabled people in mind?

The Futurama was General Motors’ celebrated “smart city” exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. It was also a homage to how streamlining principles, channeled into urban planning and design, could yield enthusiasm and awe for eugenic utopias. This was the sublime perfection that could scale when designers and engineers controlled growth and design to ensure perfection—not only over how the future city functioned, but over the eugenic social future it helped evolve. It’s no accident then, that a 1939 Life Magazine article reveled in the unabashedly fit, tanned, heteronormative, ableist masculinity standardized at the center of the streamlined society when it covered the Futurama.

This was a future utopia where the benefits of intelligent planning and evolutionary progress were driven by eradication of problems of excess, uncertainty, and wasteful heterogeneity—not only in technology but in society at scale. And it drew in an unprecedented audience of some forty-four million visitors—the most of any World’s Fair until the time—with such a promise.

Even during the rise of the eugenics movement in North America, data has also been used as a tool of resistance. Can you talk about the pioneering work at Chicago’s Hull House, and how that can serve as a model today? 

Although it’s largely overlooked today, Hull House was broadly recognized at the turn of the century for its leadership in the nineteenth-century urban settlement movement that helped grow more than 400 other settlements in the US, and that played a key role in the passage of key legal reforms from the eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, and the elimination of child labor and workplace safety laws. It was also committed to building research communities and to advancing community-centered data methods.

Intelligence tests for would-be immigrants demanded answers about Crisco—then a brand-new product—and baseball star Christy Mathewson.

Volumes it published, and that were written by women and immigrant authors, like the Hull House Maps & Papers of 1895, not only documented the impacts of sweatshop labor on the largely immigrant families of Chicago’s West Side, but quickly placed them at the forefront of new social science techniques by showcasing the use of innovative data methods from social surveys to color-coded neighborhood wage maps. Such methods later helped establish standard data collection methods for social science professions. Its approach helped to shift the public’s understanding of poverty by emphasizing poverty’s roots in labor exploitation, and political disenfranchisement.

But Hull House’s unique success was importantly grounded in its commitment to developing social coalitions, and its numerous collaborations with labor associations, civic groups, working families and immigrants where it was based in Chicago’s 19th Ward. It’s a reminder of not only of what can be achieved when predatory forms of eugenic data practice are explicitly refused but of the power of alternative data traditions that have long been rooted in justice-based coalition work.

With figures like Elon Musk playing major roles in the upcoming Trump administration, do you think conversations about how data is used have become more important? 

I’ve already seen an uptick in communities working to get new laws passed at the local level to require greater public oversight over the acquisition of new surveillance technologies by police and city authorities. My community in Urbana, Illinois, currently has an ordinance [now tabled] before the city council to this end.

These have been commonsense approaches to maintaining public transparency and protecting civil rights, civil liberties, and due process. But they also emerge from a growing awareness that even in normal conditions, it would not be unthinkable to imagine that data collected on targeted individuals by public agencies with the initial intent to promote safety and health could be repurposed for malicious and discriminatory use.

Dozens of US cities began passing laws to prevent facial recognition data capture after 2019 reports revealed that hundreds of millions of driver’s license photos stored in states’ Department of Motor Vehicles databases were being used by ICE to search for immigrants of interest.

Many universities, including my own, refuse to keep records on such data points as which students have DACA status, to prevent undue risks to students and to the educational environment writ large. And, of course, there’s a long history of US eugenic researchers leveraging data pools they were allowed to collect by using public institutions to help monitor populations to pass varied anti-immigration and pro-forced sterilization laws targeting “the unfit” in the name of public health and safety.

I’m heartened to see conversations already re-energized around the political implications of data collection and to see new coalition-making around what resources we might be able to protectively leverage at the local level. This kind of solidarity-making across diverse constituencies, and drawing from traditions in justice-based coalition-making, is what we’re going to need to become well-practiced at.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It didn’t feel right to leave without a proper goodbye.

I mean, I spent the last 10 years obsessing about you. Not in a creepy way! It was all part of the job: connecting our journalism, our nonprofit story, and what’s happening in the world to you in a meaningful way that respects your intelligence. Pulling together upward of 1,200 emails, working with Monika, our CEO, on somewhere near 100 columns, and trying to make each and every one worth reading.

This is the last one. 

And I’ll mention this up top before I get all sappy: We’ve got a very generous matching gift, so your year-end donation will be doubled through our December 31 deadline, which is also my last day working here. Believe me, I know how much your support is needed right now.

It’s been an awesome run, and I’ve got some final thoughts to share with you, but I want to start here: THANK YOU SO FREAKING MUCH.

Each time you read one of these posts is a gift. Your time and mental capacity are gifts. Your passion and energy and drive. Your feedback. Huge gifts. I have learned so much from you over the years—your touching stories, your big concerns, why you value our work: You have made me a better marketer and person. Do me a favor: Keep making the time for updates from Monika and the team here at Mother Jones, will ya?

Why am I sharing this with you? Because there are probably a lot of you who might need to take a break of some sort, big or small, in the months and years ahead.

Do you remember 2014?

I had to refresh myself, but about the time I started here, a terrorist group called ISIS started conquering territory across Iraq and Syria, Michael Brown had been killed over the summer, and a scary disease, Ebola, made it to the US. And I was thrilled to join the team, because I remember picking up my first issue of Mother Jones at a Barnes & Noble in suburban Dayton, Ohio—as an impressionable and curious teenager—and it blew my mind. It helped set me on my path. Journalism as a cause connected all of the issues I cared about.  

When I came aboard in 2014, journalism was facing some big economic headwinds, and I was hoping my fundraising and organizing experience could help. It sounded like an exciting challenge. I liked how Mother Jones and its readers have always been just a little different. Unafraid to go against convention when it seems worth doing. I also liked knowing I could use profanity in copy from time to time.

But holy shit. I did not see that—Donald Trump and the disinformation explosion, the social media rollercoaster, or the utter collapse of journalism—coming our way. It’s astonishing how much you all, and Mother Jones, stepped up to the challenge.

There are some other things I haven’t been seeing.

The last time I wrote to you, in August, I was quite quickly going on medical leave to deal with some eye issues. I’m all good now! I’ve been back at work since Election Day. And I’m in awe of my very smart and now very tired colleagues, who covered for me and still are. While I was on leave for a few months, some intense months, I didn’t pay attention to screens or the news much, and I mostly used my phone for ridiculously large-fonted texts and calls with friends.

I liked it.

And I’m not ready to go back to my job in January. The Mother Jones part? Love it. The connecting with you part? So rewarding. The third piece, what’s happening in the world that makes our work matter so much? It’s the cumulative effect of it all—needing to be very online, immersed in the 24/7 news cycle and the brutal economics of journalism, plus the stress any fundraiser feels—that makes it so I can’t dive back into it right now. I need a break from this particular grind—and a new job.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because there are probably a lot of you who might need to take a break of some sort, big or small, in the months and years ahead. Do it. It’s okay. You might even need to take a big leap or make a big scary change—such as stepping away from a job without another one lined up. I needed to hear a lot of encouragement from others, and hearing it from unexpected people often lands better for me.    

IF YOU NEED TO TAKE A BREAK, DO IT.

IF YOU CAN’T, ASK SOMEONE FOR HELP.

When I could barely see, I had to ask for help a lot. It brought me closer to my friends. Instead of “It’s good to see you,” since I really couldn’t, I started saying, “It’s good to be with you.” That felt different—and led to time better spent. It also brought me closer to friends from farther away or further back: “I’ve got a lot of time on my hands, please give me a call when you can!” And even with strangers: navigating airports, trying to shop for groceries, using stairs, I found that “Excuse me, can you help me with…?” was always answered in the affirmative. And even though my vision was terrible, I learned how you can feel a smile just as much as you can see it. People love to help. It feels good to help.

Will you help Mother Jones?

I didn’t sit down to write an advice column or even to make a hard sell for donations (though we need them and all gifts are being matched, so help twice as much, until December 31.)

I sat down because I wanted to say goodbye to y’all. I respect the hell out of you, especially right now—people who are grinding away for democracy and justice day after day when I can’t right now, people who care about our work enough to read these posts and deserve my real effort. It’s weird to have an emotional connection to you and hundreds of thousands other strangers, I know, but this is Mother Jones; we’re different in our own ways. Also: I’m definitely not tearing up right now.

I better wrap this up.

I kept thinking I’d get around to recapping some of the highlights of working with you and Monika over the last 10 years to keep this awesome operation afloat—we’ve unpacked some fascinating, some infuriating, big issues in politics and media and tech. I’m not going to get to that. But one particular excerpt, from Monika, five years ago this month, way at the bottom of this piece, seems like the perfect note to end this post and job on.

Just before the holidays I said goodbye to a man I’ve often thought of as one of Mother Jones’ many owners. Bob Rose was a retired teacher in Minneapolis. I met him there when he was the feisty president of the teachers union, a transformational presence in the lives of thousands of kids at Roosevelt High. I sat in on one of his classes as the teens, most of them African American and Native American, lit up with a debate on the tactics of civil rights movements. When I moved to California to work at Mother Jones, I learned that Bob was a subscriber and donor, and when I’ve had tough decisions to make here, I’ve often thought of how he would want his money used.

A couple of years ago, when we visited for the holidays, Bob gave each of my kids a small stone turtle from a collection he’d amassed over the years. It came with a card he’d printed up: “Behold the turtle. It only makes progress when it sticks its neck out.”

Behold the turtle.

Long live Mother Jones.

Thank you for everything.

So much of this year felt like a fever dream: The attempted assassination of Donald Trump. A career-ending presidential debate. The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Abortion bans. Presidential immunity. The Alaska Airlines door fiasco. Diddy’s arrest. Raygun. Baldoni-Gate. Tradwives!

I, personally, am tired.

Which is why, this year, I’m leaning into my nerdish tendencies and rounding up some good, interesting, or inspiring news stories from the science world—promising discoveries, exciting new data, historic events, and unsung heroes.

In the hope of providing relief from the hell that has been 2024, here’s a non-comprehensive list of the year’s coolest science stories, both big and small:

Possibly the first-ever photo of a newborn great white shark

Wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and University of California, Riverside, PhD student Phillip Sternes spotted what appears to be a baby great white shark off the coast of California last year. In January, the team published the photos in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes.

“Where white sharks give birth is one of the holy grails of shark science. No one has ever been able to pinpoint where they are born, nor has anyone seen a newborn baby shark alive,” Gauna said in a UC Riverside press release. “There have been dead white sharks found inside deceased pregnant mothers. But nothing like this.”

A powerful microorganism named “Chonkus”

From the carbon-dioxide–rich waters near Vulcano, a volcanic island just north of Sicily, researchers isolated a new microorganism, cyanobacterium UTEX 3222, nicknamed “Chonkus,” for its ability to consume carbon dioxide, Grist reports. When grown in the lab, it’s notably dense, as one scientist described it, like “green peanut butter.”

“If scientists can figure out how to genetically engineer it,” Grist‘s Sachi Kitajima Mulkey writes, “this single-celled organism’s natural quirks could become supercharged into a low-waste carbon capture system” to fight climate change. (That may be easier said than done. Read more about Chonkus here.)

Water on asteroids

For the first time, scientists detected water on the surface of an asteroid: two asteroids, in fact, Space.com‘s Samantha Mathewson reported in February, named Iris (124 miles in diameter) and Massalia (84 miles). That’s significant because scientists theorize that Earth’s water—which you and I and every other living thing on this planet need to live—originally came from asteroids. The finding backs up that theory.

And it could help spawn new theories about life outside of Earth. “Understanding of the distribution of water through space will help researchers better assess where to search for other forms of potential life,” Mathewson writes, “both in our solar system and beyond.”

Meat-eating squirrels

Honestly, ground squirrels were always a little suspect. (Are they really that different from rats?) But now, researchers have uncovered unsettling new information about their diets. Beyond consuming nuts, seeds, and acorns, a new study shows, squirrels in California also hunt and eat voles, which are small rodents—a behavior pattern the authors say had never been documented before.

“I could barely believe my eyes,” Sonja Wild, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Davis, and an author of the study, said in a press release. “From then, we saw that behavior almost every day. Once we started looking, we saw it everywhere.” The squirrels’ vole-hunting habits coincided with a boom in the state’s vole population, the researchers said, but it’s unclear what exactly sparked the change.

And yes, there’s video.

The historic, dual emergence of two cicada broods

This year, two groups of cicadas—the Great Southern Brood and the Northern Illinois Brood—emerged to breed after more than a decade burrowed in the ground, the first such dual event since 1803. As the New York Times put it, “The last time the Northern Illinois Brood’s 17-year cycle aligned with the Great Southern Brood’s 13-year period, Thomas Jefferson was president.”

If you caught this year’s event, consider yourself lucky. It’ll be another 221 years until the next time the broods emerge simultaneously.

This photo of a “bizarre” blob-headed fish

Just look at this thing.

Although it’s technically a species “new to science,” as Mongabay reports, this bristlemouth armored catfish was well-known to the Indigenous Awajun people in Peru who worked with scientists at Conservation International to identify the species in 2022.

In a report released this month, the nonprofit organization officially announced the “bizarre” fish and 26 other new species.

An injectable, long-lasting HIV drug

An effective HIV vaccine has eluded scientists for decades. But now, a new drug could be what the journal Science calls “the next best thing“: an injectable that offers protection from infection for six months.

Here’s Science, which recently named the drug its 2024 Breakthrough of the Year:

A large efficacy trial in African adolescent girls and young women reported in June that these shots reduced HIV infections to zero—an astonishing 100% efficacy. Any doubts about the finding disappeared 3 months later when a similar trial, conducted across four continents, reported 99.9% efficacy in gender diverse people who have sex with men.

Many HIV/AIDS researchers are now hopeful that the drug, lenacapavir, will powerfully drive down global infection rates when used as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). “It has the potential, if we can do it right, which means going big and getting it out there,” says Linda-Gail Bekker, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Cape Town who led one of the two efficacy trials for the drug’s maker, Gilead Sciences.

The vulnerability of meteorologist John Morales

If there’s a good news story about climate communication to come out of this year, it’s that of John Morales. In October, the veteran Miami meteorologist went viral for his emotional weather briefing on Hurricane Milton, as the storm approached central Florida from the Gulf of Mexico.

As I reported at the time, Morales initially hesitated to share a video of the briefing, during which he teared up, on X. “I was just kind of embarrassed,” he told me. “I was like, how can I lose it like that on TV?”

But to me (and many others, apparently), Morales was just the right messenger for the moment. His briefing has since been shared thousands of times, and his interview with Mother Jones was among our most-read environmental stories this year.

For decades, he said, people knew him as a “just-the-facts” kind of guy. “But the truth is that with climate-driven extremes putting us in a place that we haven’t been before, it’s very difficult to stay cool, calm, and collected.”

I debated whether to share this. I did apologize on the air. But I invite you to read my introspection on @BulletinAtomic of how extreme weather driven by global warming has changed me. Frankly, YOU should be shaken too, and demand #ClimateActionNow. https://t.co/09vxgabSmX https://t.co/GzQbDglsBG

— John Morales (@JohnMoralesTV) October 7, 2024

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

Food delivery drivers can be a menace: On scooters or e-bikes, they weave in and out of traffic, run red lights, and terrorize pedestrians on the sidewalks. When they’re in cars, they can make illegal U-turns, block bike lanes, and double-park. Nearly everyone, even delivery drivers, hates delivery drivers. Major cities like New York and Boston have been trying to crack down on the chaos. The city council in Washington, DC, just passed legislation to try to regulate them, and city residents have called for better—let’s make that any—traffic regulation to restore order to the streets.

It’s an uphill battle. The delivery companies’ high-powered lobbyists have fought regulation, which is complicated by genuine concerns for the low-income immigrants exploited by the delivery app companies. Rarely discussed in all the furor, however, are the real monsters: the customers!

People who frequently use services like DoorDash and Uber Eats are like the single-occupancy commuter on the Beltway, the Amtrak passenger who piles his luggage on the adjacent seat on a crowded train, or the driver who blocks the intersection. They’re exemplars of American individualism, where one person’s immediate gratification comes at the expense of an entire city’s ability to use the crosswalks.

Delivery services can be legitimate lifelines for people with disabilities, new parents, the elderly, or people battling an illness. But the couriers clogging the roads and dominating sidewalks today aren’t delivering a week’s worth of groceries. They’re often delivering a single meal to a single person in already-congested urban areas where food offerings are abundant and close at hand. If that all sounds too theoretical, consider that DoorDash enjoys its highest market saturation in San Francisco, a walkable city with more than 13,000 restaurants—one for every 60 or so residents.

Food delivery is bad for city traffic and pedestrian safety, but it’s even worse for people doing the deliveries, whose occupation has become deadly. Yet customers seem largely oblivious to the wreckage they cause. In the first quarter of 2024, DoorDash fielded 650 million orders, up 21 percent from the previous year. And what sort of food is so important that it’s worth dispatching a low-paid delivery guy on a dangerous dash through traffic to retrieve it before it gets cold? According to DoorDash’s own data, the top food item it delivered in 2023 was: french fries, followed closely by chicken quesadillas.

“I would be taking a hit with the crackdown on them. I order a lot of Uber Eats, DoorDash.”

Food-delivery dependence can scramble the brain. In June, for instance, the Associated Press interviewed some people in Boston griping about the scourge of delivery drivers. Jaia Samuel, a 25-year-old hospital worker, agreed that delivery drivers on scooters can be dangerous. At the same time, she wasn’t in favor of getting rid of them. “I would be taking a hit with the crackdown on them,” she admitted. “I order a lot of Uber Eats, DoorDash.”

People have been ordering takeout Chinese and pizza for decades. But the app-based, on-demand delivery system has made it possible for people to order just about any food item, however small, anytime, anywhere. The use of these services skyrocketed during the pandemic, and over the past two years, the growth of e-bike and scooter delivery has contributed to the roadway pandemonium.

During the pandemic, many customers claimed they were helping struggling local restaurants by ordering takeout deliveries, while of course letting the drivers take all the risk of getting sick. Today, people order deliveries of $3 breakfast sandwiches from McDonald’s just because they are too lazy to fry an egg. Indeed, DoorDash, whose revenue has quadrupled since 2020, reports that this year, one customer ordered a 53 cent banana; another dialed up a 10-cent container of McDonald’s creamy ranch, plus a single straw. On-demand food delivery is a habit Americans acquired during the pandemic, and now it’s one they need to break.

DoorDash, which accounts for nearly 70 percent of the American food delivery market, unsurprisingly, does not agree. “This story is as wrong as it is offensive,” DoorDash spokesperson Julian Crowley told me in an email. “This out-of-touch and paternalistic critique, which stereotypes people as ignorant or lazy, doesn’t reflect the truth: millions of people—from big cities to small towns—choose DoorDash because it works. It helps them earn on their own terms, grow their business, and spend their time on what they value most.”

It’s worth considering that the CEO of DoorDash made $400 million in his 2021 pay package. It seems unlikely that he earned that much money solely from the nation’s sick and disabled who may rely on these services. (DoorDash told me that as many as 50 percent of people with disabilities had used their service to buy something they couldn’t buy themselves. But so did 44 percent of all the other customers.)

Data shows that the vast majority of food delivery customers skew young, like the twentysomething finance bro who used to live across the street from me. He got meals delivered almost every single day, and his neighbors grew weary of having to field all the food that got dropped at the wrong address.

But wait! If people didn’t Uber Eat, or DoorDash, or Caviar, or Grubhub, or whatever, they’d just congest the roads by driving to get their food, right? Perhaps some would. But it’s more likely that most people would scrounge something out of the fridge or—gasp!—pack a lunch or walk to Chipotle, the way they did before 2020. The most compelling evidence for this theory? High school students, better known as the DoorDash generation.

I first realized how bad this dynamic had become a few years ago when a delivery guy showed up at my house with a milkshake and a small bag of food. The delivery turned out to be for the 15-year-old next door. According to his parents, he was a star athlete, but apparently he was unable to manage the 350-yard walk to the Shake Shack he’d ordered from. Even worse, though, is how many kids are having meals delivered directly to school every day.

DC’s largest public high school doesn’t allow food deliveries. (“DoorDash is for lazy butts,” one student there told me.) But some of the private schools have no such rule. One day this month, I staked out a small, progressive private school in the Northwest section of DC, and one I know well because one of my children went there (and admittedly, occasionally ordered in).

The school is surrounded by many walkable food options, not to mention those offered inside the building. But during lunchtime, I clocked one food delivery every four minutes. Only one of those was picked up by a teacher. One thing I hadn’t expected to see: a traffic jam on the school’s quiet, tree-lined street from all the food delivery vehicles that weren’t even going to the school, but instead, to people’s houses. I watched with amazement as a Chick-fil-A car passed by and returned a minute or two later. A Chick-fil-A was a five-minute walk away. 

One former student, who sheepishly admits to having been a regular DoorDasher, said there were limits to how much money he’d waste on food deliveries—unlike one classmate. “It’s a new low when you’re delivering Starbucks to school,” he told me. (DoorDash recently established a partnership so customers can order delivery straight from the Starbucks app.)

The school’s delivery traffic seemed modest compared with that of a bigger private DC school that also allows students to leave campus at lunchtime. It too is surrounded by walkable lunch spots, but one recent grad told me that her fellow students ordered food deliveries from 7:30 a.m. until 7 at night. What were they ordering? Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ Donuts mostly, she said, both less than a 10-minute stroll from the school. “I guess people didn’t want to walk,” she suggested.

The delivery traffic last year got so bad, she said, that the school had to set up a new security table to handle all the food dropoffs. She said so many students were getting food delivered during carpool that parents couldn’t get into the driveway to drop off or pick up their kids. The school eventually restricted the deliveries to a window between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. (The high school principal confirmed that the school did indeed limit the delivery hours.)   

That school has about 500 high school students. If even 10 percent of them are ordering a delivery every day, that could mean an additional 50 vehicles on the road gumming up traffic or terrorizing pedestrians and cyclists, all to bring a Frappuccino to a teenager with too much disposable income. This is not an immigration problem or a traffic enforcement issue or even really the result of corporate greed. It’s a demand problem, which means that the best solution is the most obvious one: Get your own damn food.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

The appointees for the incoming administration are a mix of woefully uncredentialed and downright dangerous. Several, including the president-elect himself, share another common denominator: They stand accused of sexual misconduct.

But this trend is not limited to those who seek to serve Donald Trump. In New York, Andrew Cuomo and Anthony Weiner, two politicos forced to resign over their own sexual misconduct scandals, apparently believe that 2025 is the year they return to the public arena. The positions Cuomo and Weiner reportedly seek? Cuomo is thirsting for the New York City mayorship, a post already engulfed in controversy after the current monster, Eric Adams, was indicted on a slew of federal corruption charges. As for Weiner, he’s registered as a candidate for a New York City Council seat.

So is something in the water? What could compel two disreputable men, bona fide sex pests, to believe that they are the leaders New York needs?

Cuomo, who has not formally announced his bid to replace Adams, would mark a political comeback for the books following his 2021 resignation as New York governor after a string of damning sexual harassment allegations. A federal Justice Department investigation later concluded that he indeed sexually harassed 13 women who worked for the state. The same report found that Cuomo and his staff frequently retaliated against his accusers. He has since echoed Trumpian talking points, blaming “coup” forces and so-called “cancel culture” for his spectacular demise. (Remember, this is a guy once widely considered as a potential, if not inevitable, contender for Democratic presidential nominee.)

Weiner, of course, served 18 months in prison after sending explicit photos to a 15-year-old girl. That investigation into the former New York congressman and ex-husband to Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide, led the FBI to stumble upon those Clinton emails; many in Clinton-world blame Weiner for her 2016 presidential collapse. But Weiner’s sordid sexual history goes even further back. He has an extensive record of sending sexually explicit photos, many while married and some of which were sent using the now-infamous alias Carlos Danger. Following his conviction, Weiner was forced to register as a sex offender.

The downfalls of these men were never the result of one-off mistakes or fleeting errors of judgment that could justify the case for a second chance. Instead, Cuomo and Weiner—and, perhaps more crucially, their reported interests in returning to government—are symptomatic of what ails many men: a refusal to be held accountable, with barely a concern given to those left hurt. We see this play out all the time. The denials of Gisèle Pelicot’s humanity. The manosphere. “Your body, my choice.” As for the public, most folks are happy to settle into comfy amnesia should the occasion benefit them, whether that’s because the circumstances are entertaining—after all, everyone loves a comeback story—or whatever reason you could explain Trump’s return to power.

But perhaps most of all, it’s entitlement. That unshakeable belief in your own promise, no matter how poorly you’ve behaved or how much hurt you’ve imparted. Here’s to hoping New Yorkers reject any efforts to reward such a humiliating delusion.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When I listened to Chase Strangio, the co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, become the first transgender lawyer to argue in the US Supreme Court, the moment was surreal. Here I was, wearing pajamas about 2,800 miles away from where he was making history. 

In United States v. Skrmetti, Strangio argued on behalf of the petitioner that banning medications like puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for transgender, but not cisgender, youth is a case of sex-based discrimination. Experts argue that the ruling could affect not just trans health care but legal access to birth control, IVF, and abortion. 

While the Supreme Court is meant to determine specifically whether sex-based discrimination took place, every step of the case and its arguments was steeped in the question of the treatment and its efficacy. Strangio could not help but embody this argument, writing in a New York Times op-ed, “My presence at the Supreme Court as a transgender lawyer will have been possible because I have had access to the very medical treatment at the center of the case.”

“My presence at the Supreme Court as a transgender lawyer will have been possible because I have had access to the very medical treatment at the center of the case.”

I can’t pinpoint with certainty the moment I first heard about Strangio. When I was a teen, still donning the pleated skirt of my all-girls school, I didn’t understand why it all felt so deeply uncomfortable. (Spoiler alert: the reason was transness.) I suspect that was around the same time when he was first thrust into the national spotlight as a lawyer in multiple landmark trans rights cases back in 2017. But I can say with certainty that Strangio was the first trans man I knew about specifically. While Laverne Cox and Jazz Jennings were figures I had seen for years, trans men only seemed to exist in an abstract, blurry background. Strangio was in sharp focus every time he spoke about his clients. With that energy, he has always made his height of 5-foot-4 seem imposing. 

Born 42 years ago into a Jewish family outside of Boston, he transitioned during law school, embarking on a career amid highly gendered expectations. Ultimately, he wrote, “I found peace in my body, which allowed me to find peace in the world.” Now, he is a father and lives in New York City. Last fall he stood up to make his kid’s school district safer when Moms for Liberty tried to encroach.

Raised on the uplifting stories of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall, I was primed by my lawyer mother to find revolutionary attorneys heroic and compelling. That may be part of why I was so taken by Strangio as a teen. But while his lawyering is obviously impressive, the essence of Strangio’s heroism always has been his bravery in being an openly and prominent trans man, and his feeling of personal responsibility in lifting others toward living their truth.

A Mother Jones 2017 profile of him does not follow him in court but at a tailor’s fitting with teen client Gavin Grimm. At the time, Grimm, a trans man, was seeking access to the men’s restroom at his high school. He sued his school, and the case nearly made it to the Supreme Court—which was the reason for a visit to the tailors—before it was sent back to a lower court, which ruled in 2020 that the school had violated his constitutional rights.

It is no exaggeration to say that Strangio has been involved with pretty much every monumental LGBTQ case of the last decade. He was lead counsel for Chelsea Manning, the WikiLeaks whistleblower who petitioned for access to gender-affirming health care in military custody. He also was counsel in the ACLU’s challenges to North Carolina’s bathroom ban and Trump’s trans military ban. This was Strangio’s first time presenting oral arguments to the Supreme Court, but it wasn’t his first time in the court. He was one of the lawyers involved in the 2018 case, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, which led to the historic SCOTUS ruling finding that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on sex discrimination in employment extended to discrimination against LGBTQ workers. So it was only natural that when it came time for an attorney to argue the Skrmetti case, he would be selected. As Cecillia Wang, ACLU legal director, said, “Chase Strangio is our nation’s leading legal expert on the rights of transgender people, bar none.”

Journalist Evan Urquhart was one of a handful of trans people in the court on December 4, 2024, for the arguments. As he watched, he wrote, “Trans stories, and the lives of ordinary trans people, kept coming back to my mind, as I listened to nine cisgender justices debate with two cis lawyers and Chase Strangio about the finer points of what does and does not constitute a law that makes sex-based classifications.”

Those “ordinary trans people” gathered virtually and in person to watch Strangio make history and assess the potential outcome of a case that will have lasting consequences on both transgender and sex-based discrimination. Outside the court, trans people and advocates were bundled tight and practically huddled together to protect themselves against the bitter cold.

After the arguments ended, Strangio left the court and told hundreds of trans folks and allies, “I know we have been the subject of relentless and unjustified attack. But here is the thing, we are in it together.” I watched this clip much later, after an exhausting day of reporting and speaking on trans rights. And even though I am proudly out and surrounded and supported by my trans community, my work in covering the attacks on trans rights—much like being a lawyer championing these issues—can be draining. 

No matter how the case is resolved—which looks bleak amid a conservative majority—Strangio bravely living his truth remains one of the most powerful aspects of the day in and outside the Supreme Court. “If nothing else, I’ve lived this health care. It has enabled me to stand before them at that lectern,” he told New York magazine before the arguments. “So that is a truth that is undeniable, that will be present in the courtroom, that certainly the other trans people who will be present in the courtroom will understand.” 

As we await the assaults on our identity that are sure to come, knowing he’s around offers me the same reassurance as when I was a teenager. Strangio just makes me feel braver. “I love being trans,” he said to the crowd outside the Supreme Court. “I love being with you. And we are going to take care of each other.”

On Monday, a federal appeals court tossed out Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the verdict against him in the 2023 civil suit filed by writer E. Jean Carroll.

“We conclude that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” the ruling said. “Further, he has not carried his burden to show that any claimed error or combination of claimed errors affected his substantial rights as required to warrant a new trial.”

In March of last year, a federal jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse after Carroll alleged that he had raped her at Bergdorf Goodman in 1996. The jury also found that Trump had defamed her with his repeated denials. Trump was subsequently ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages, a ruling that he has been fighting since September.

Since challenging the verdict, Trump has only repeated similarly defamatory comments about Carroll. During one press conference, he accused her of stealing her story from an episode of Law & Order and calling a photo of the two of them “AI-generated.”

Those attacks have continued. Earlier this week, Trump reposted a photo of Carroll with the caption “Should a woman go to jail for falsely accusing a man of rape? Retruth if you want justice for Trump,” hinting once again that he’s hoping to prosecute his perceived enemies upon returning to office.

Correction, December 30: This post has been updated to note that a civil court in the 2023 case found Trump liable.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The climate crisis caused an additional six weeks of dangerously hot days in 2024 for the average person, supercharging the fatal impact of heat waves around the world.

The effects of human-caused global heating were far worse for some people, an analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA) and Climate Central has shown. Those in the Caribbean and Pacific island states were the hardest hit. Many endured about 150 more days of dangerous heat than they would have done without global heating, almost half the year.

Nearly half the world’s countries endured at least two months of high-risk temperatures. Even in the least affected places, such as the UK, US, and Australia, the carbon pollution from fossil fuel burning has led to an extra three weeks of elevated temperatures.

Worsened heatwaves are the deadliest consequence of the climate emergency. An end to coal, oil, and gas burning was vital to stopping the effects from getting even worse, the scientists said, with 2024 forecast to be the hottest year on record with record-high carbon emissions.

The researchers called for deaths from heatwaves to be reported in real time, with current data being a “very gross underestimate” because of the lack of monitoring. It is possible that uncounted millions of people have died as a result of human-caused global heating in recent decades.

“In most countries there is no reporting on heatwaves at all, which means the numbers we have are always a very gross underestimate.”

“The impacts of fossil fuel warming have never been clearer or more devastating than in 2024 and caused unrelenting suffering,” said Dr Friederike Otto, of Imperial College London and the co-lead of WWA. “The floods in Spain, hurricanes in the US, drought in the Amazon, and floods across Africa are just a few examples. We know exactly what we need to do to stop things from getting worse: stop burning fossil fuels.”

Joseph Giguere, a research technician at Climate Central, said, “Almost everywhere on Earth, daily temperatures hot enough to threaten human health have become more common because of climate change.”

The Guardian revealed in November that the climate crisis had caused dozens of previously impossible heatwaves, as well as making hundreds of other extreme weather events more severe or more likely to happen.

The new analysis identified local “dangerous heat days” by calculating the threshold temperature for the hottest 10 percent of days from 1991-2020. These days are associated with increased health risks.

The researchers then compared the number of days exceeding this threshold in 2024 to those in a scenario without global heating to calculate how many extra hot days were caused by the climate crisis.

They found the average person was exposed to a further 41 days of dangerous heat, highlighting how the climate crisis was exposing millions more people to dangerous temperatures for longer periods of the year.

Indonesia, home to 280 million people, experienced 122 days of additional dangerous heat, as did Singapore and many Central American states.

In the Middle East, people in Saudi Arabia endured 70 additional hot days, in a year when at least 1,300 hajj pilgrims died during extreme heat.

Brazil and Bangladesh endured about 50 extra hot days, while Spain, Norway, and the Balkan countries had an additional month of high temperatures.

Five billion people, almost two-thirds of the global population, experienced raised temperatures made at least twice as likely by global heating on 21 July, one of the hottest days of the year.

Hurricanes were also supercharged by the climate crisis in 2024. Kristina Dahl, the vice president for science at Climate Central, said: “Our analyses have shown that every Atlantic hurricane this year was made stronger by climate change, and that hurricanes Beryl and Milton, which were both category five storms, would not have reached that level were it not for climate change.”

Recent WWA analysis showed that an extraordinary sequence of six typhoons in the Philippines in 30 days, which affected 13 million people, was made more likely and more severe by global heating.

Julie Arrighi, the programs director at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said, “Another devastating year of extreme weather has shown that we are not well prepared for life at [the current level] of warming. In 2025, it’s crucial that every country accelerates efforts to adapt to climate change and that funds are provided by rich nations to help developing countries become more resilient.”

Measures should include better early warning systems, which saved lives, and the reporting of heat deaths, the researchers said.

“In most countries, there is no reporting on heatwaves at all, which means the numbers we have are always a very gross underestimate,” Otto said. “If we can’t communicate convincingly that actually lots of people are dying, it’s much harder to raise awareness that heatwaves are by far the deadliest extreme events, and they are the extreme events where climate change is a real game changer.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A conspiracy theory that airplanes are leaving nefarious “chemtrails” in their wake due to a sinister government plot has been given fresh impetus in the US amid a swirl of concerns and confusion about proposals to geoengineer a response to the climate crisis.

State legislation to ban what some lawmakers call chemtrails has been pushed forward in Tennessee and, most recently, Florida. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has expressed interest in the conspiracy theory on social media and his podcast, is set to be at the heart of Donald Trump’s new administration following his nomination as health secretary.

“We are going to stop this crime,” Kennedy, who is known for his contrarian stances on vaccines and offshore wind farms, wrote about chemtrails on X in August. The former Democrat turned Trump ally said on his podcast last year that it was “kind of frightening to think that somebody may be putting large amounts of bioavailable aluminum into the environment, spraying it in microscopic particulates from airplanes.”

Believers of the chemtrails conspiracy theory contend that the white lines traced in the sky behind aircraft contain toxic chemicals that are released to achieve a devious end, such as mass sterilization or mind control.

“There’s a detachment from facts and rational analysis.”

This theory, which has no evidence to support it, has been put forward at various times since the 1990s despite being repeatedly debunked. Now, scientists are faced with a resurgent focus on chemtrails amid a related, more substantive, debate over whether actual modifications to the Earth’s atmosphere should be made in a desperate attempt to slow global heating.

Interest in chemtrails “bubbles up every once in a while and the hurricanes and weather modification kind of brings it up to the floor again,” said David Fahey, director of the chemical sciences laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in reference to two recent major hurricanes—Helene and Milton—that some figures, including Republicans, claimed were somehow steered by the federal government’s meddling with the weather.

“The misinformation is abundant,” said Fahey, who has spent several decades, on and off, fielding questions about chemtrails. There was no orchestrated weather modification conducted by NOAA, Fahey said, and even experimenting with such a thing would be a “big step for our agency and one that we are not quite prepared to do at the moment, and maybe our agency shouldn’t do it.”

Are chemtrails real?

No. The white plumes seen from the rear of aircraft are more aptly called condensation trails, or contrails. They are essentially condensed water vapor from a plane’s exhaust that, in cold air temperatures at high altitudes, form as ice crystals that look like visible clouds.

A survey of leading atmospheric scientists in 2016 found there was no evidence of a secret spraying program that would form these contrails. This research led to backlash from conspiracy theorists, with Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist who led the study, saying that he received death threats.

“I felt like it was a risk to my personal safety,” he said. “People have bought into this false narrative. We’re now seeing a worrying resurgence of conspiracy theories in general, from chemtrails to vaccines. There’s a detachment from facts and rational analysis.”

In fact, contrails do contribute to a form of “weather modification”—just not the sort envisioned by the conspiracy-minded. The plumes often grow into hazy cirrus clouds that trap heat and add to the greenhouse effect that is warming up the world, mostly via the burning of fossil fuels.

“As with many conspiracy theories, there is some truth to it in that aircraft are releasing particles and affecting the Earth’s climate system,” said Caldeira, who is involved in an effort to get airlines to reduce their contrail output. “But this is because of unintended consequences of the fossil fuel airline system, rather than some nefarious secret reason.”

Are any other weather modifications being conducted?

There is a confusing stew of different processes, or just theories, with different goals that have been variously called weather modification, solar geoengineering, or solar radiation management.

These often get mixed up and mistaken for secret government conspiracies. Cloud seeding, for example, involves dispersing tiny particles into clouds to spur the formation of ice crystals that trigger rain or snow. Utah routinely does this to increase snowfall rates and authorities there have had to point out that this is not connected to chemtrails.

A separate debate has stirred in recent years as to whether governments, or even wealthy individuals, should intervene to slow dangerous global heating by spraying reflective substances such as sulphur into the stratosphere in order to deflect sunlight from further warming the Earth.

Noaa is setting up a system to monitor the stratosphere that could act as an “early warning” system for such activities. A US startup has offered “credits” for people to buy to help cool the world’s fever but as yet there has been no activity detected on a significant scale that would alter the climate.

“There are some demonstration projects,” said Fahey. “But in terms of large-scale airplanes taking material to the stratosphere, I’m not aware of anything, certainly in our country.”

Can solar engineering help solve the climate crisis?

This year is set to be the hottest ever recorded globally, the latest in a string of hot years that are pushing the average temperature to the point it looks certain to breach the internationally agreed threshold designed to avoid catastrophic heatwaves, droughts, floods, and other worsening climatic disasters.

The failure of governments to stem this crisis has led to calls for more drastic interventions, like solar geoengineering, to curb the global temperature rise. Last year, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on how a research program into solar geoengineering would work.

Such plans are highly controversial, however, with some scientists and environmental groups warning that meddling with the Earth’s thermostat could have unintended consequences such as altering monsoon seasons.

There are also concerns about the lack of global governance around adding substances to our shared atmosphere, the potential for a huge temperature whiplash should the continual addition of sulphur via planes stop for any reason, and the danger that geoengineering would distract from the primary task of cutting planet-heating emissions. Efforts by some researchers to run experiments on solar modification have been met with protests.

As the world continues to heat up, though, the conversation around solar geoengineering, and related conspiracies, is unlikely to abate. “I think it’s increasingly on the agenda of people who are wondering where is our climate going and how might we influence where it’s going,” said Fahey.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

There’s a lot that can scare off the newbie fly fisher. First, the gear: the rod and reel, of course, but also the fly line, the leader, the tippet, the waders, the boots, and—above all—the flies, the infinite permutations of size and color and material and hook. Then there’s the cast: a seemingly endless pursuit of the right rhythm, the correct accelerate-to-a-stop, pause, accelerate-to-a-stop that stretches the line out in front of you and lands the fly gently on the water. There’s also learning to read your local streams: Even drifting the right fly at the correct depth won’t matter if nobody’s home. And finally, entomology: You can catch trout without knowing the life cycles and behaviors of mayflies and caddisflies and stoneflies, but you’ll land far more if you know which hatch to match and how.

Randy Betz Jr. understands this. He knows you’re confused and frustrated and more than a little intimidated, but he just wants you to net some fish and have a good time on the water. So, in his @flyfishdelawhere videos on TikTok (421,000 followers) and Instagram (91,000), the 45-year-old owner of a spinal implant company from Wilmington, Delaware, is the fishing buddy you never knew you needed, happy to offer some tips and cheer you on, and, more than anything, make fly fishing more friendly and less daunting.

“If you want to learn to fly fish, this page is a great page to at least get started,” Betz told me earlier this month. “It’s a great page for someone who says: ‘I wanna get into fly fishing. I don’t know the basics. I don’t know what I should use. I don’t know how to even approach a stream or what rigs to use or what flies to use.’”

Satisfyingly, he caught a trout, and then another, and then another, rainbows and brookies and brownies and tigers all brought to his net for snapshots before being gently released back into the water.

The first time I saw one of Betz’s Reels, I was deep in a frenzy brought on by my tween son’s almost overnight obsession with largemouth bass. I had never fished growing up, save for the one time as a kid when some guy’s back cast hooked my thumb, but suddenly I was sneaking off to a nearby pond with my spinning gear every chance I got. My Insta Explore page was full of dudes catching bass, pike, and muskies on all manner of lures and soft plastics. Fly fishing—long my father-in-law’s main hobby—was way off my radar.

And yet, Betz instantly, erm, reeled me in. There he was streamside, narrating a GoPro-filmed video about why trout like the tailouts of pools and telling you before he cast his exact setup, in case you wanted to try the whole thing at your own river. He flipped over rocks to scope out the bug life, and he talked through the different challenges of streamers, nymphs, and dry flies in a way that made sense…and made it seem kind of fun? And then, satisfyingly, he caught a trout, and then another, and then another, rainbows and brookies and brownies and tigers all brought to his net for snapshots before being gently released back into the water.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Randal Betz Jr (@flyfishdelawhere)

So before I knew it, I was fly fishing almost every week during the winter in frigid water, snow piled up on the banks. I got caught in trees and on the bottom and lost countless flies and accidentally snapped my rod (multiple times, actually) but kept going out there as the seasons changed and the action heated up.

It wasn’t exactly A River Runs Through It. But as I toured central Connecticut’s streams and rivers—filled with a mix of stocked trout and some holdovers and wild fish, too—I became a bit of a walking cliché: communing with nature, learning on the water, the whole bit.

“You know, anyone that can take something away from one of my videos and use it to catch fish? There you go, that’s the reason I do it.”

I read books and studiously followed the fly shop’s twice-weekly river report and bought more gear and started watching an enormous amount of online fly-fishing content: everything from the grandfatherly ruminations of Orvis OG Tom Rosenbauer to the broseph stylings of @funky_fly_guy to the masterful competence of Troutbitten’s Domenick Swentosky and the clever casting lessons of @troutpsychology. But I kept coming back to Betz. Anytime I got skunked, anytime I was puzzled by new water conditions, I’d scroll through his posts and find something useful, and oddly comforting.

Betz, who first picked up a fly rod with his grandfather and later honed his craft as an undergrad at Penn State, says he fishes five to six times a week, often between work appointments and rarely more than two hours at a time. That can yield weeks worth of content—and provoke a flood of comments from followers who just caught their first trout on the fly and wanted to thank him. “You know, anyone that can take something away from one of my videos and use it to catch fish? There you go, that’s the reason I do it,” he told me.

I’ve now been out on the water dozens of times this year, and I’ve caught and released dozens of fish. I’m not good (that’s years, maybe decades, away?), but I’m also no longer bad. Thanks to Randy Betz Jr. and my other fly-fishing influencer-instructors, I’ve got an actual chance out there—just in time to fool some stocked Atlantic salmon this winter.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

My cellphone’s apps serve as my alarm clock, meteorologist, GPS, and e-reader. FaceTime is the portal to my nieces who live 500 miles away. Chase Mobile is the reason I seldom deposit checks at a physical bank. Hinge has provided me with an overabundance of dating horror stories and—after copious swiping—an incredible partner.

Let me declare at the onset, these apps are useful—even pretty good! This screed is not about them.

My grievance focuses on every company in the world believing its products either should or must be accessed through a standalone app. Want to buy a single Major League Baseball ticket on your smartphone? Add that app to your already chaotic home screen! Need to charge your electric-powered rental car? Hah! Don’t think that only one app will do. Each of the various charging companies uses a different app.

My app annoyance blossomed into sheer disdain after a recent trip through a McDonald’s drive-thru for a medium Diet Coke and a small order of fries—a passing indulgence before RFK Jr. tries to pry them from my salty fingertips. “Will you be using the McDonald’s app for your purchase?” the innocent associate asked on her headset. “No,” I thought to myself, “I’m using the drive-thru for my purchase.” Like a normal person, I used my credit card for the routine transaction. My order tasted just as good—maybe even better—than it would have had I taken the additional step of involving technology.

Some of the tens of millions of McDonald’s app users will tell you that the app is useful; by downloading it, they can reap the rewards of 50-cent double cheeseburgers and the occasional free Happy Meal. Here’s where I become the resident buzzkill and remind you, reader, that if a corporation is offering you a product for free, it’s because it appreciates the fact that you are the product. When you download an app and enter your email address, phone number, and physical location, you are effectively gift-wrapping your personal information and handing it over to corporate megalords for exploitation. At best, they’ll use your purchase history and contact information to market to you even more strategically and relentlessly. At worst, they’ll sell it or lose it in a hack.

This theft of our information—and our phone storage space—is not just potentially ruinous, it’s also exclusionary. About 10 percent of Americans don’t own smartphones, according to the Pew Research Center. Perhaps they can’t afford one or don’t know how to use the technology. I’d wager that the average unhoused person or grandma on a fixed income needs the app-exclusive coupons more than the upper-middle-class teen with the latest iPhone model. Instead, these folks are charged a premium for ordering burgers the old-fashioned way. In at least some McDonald’s locations, customers may not even be able to see a full menu without downloading the app.

The everything-has-an-app culture is exasperating to me and apparently to many others. People wrote to me complaining about apps connected to their ovens, coffee-mug warmers, laundry machines, grocery stores, and even toothbrushes. I’m not a frequent Reddit user but found even more excessive-app gripes there. And amid the grievances, still another piece of evidence for how out of control this all is: On the third webpage I tapped, a prompt popped up, blocked a third of my phone screen, and suggested I download the Reddit app to keep reading. Lord, give me strength. Or maybe a meditation app.

Homelessness in America reached the highest level on record last year, according to new data released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development—and it will likely only get worse, in light of both a Supreme Court decision issued in June and President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency.

The annual report—which estimates the number of people staying in shelters, temporary housing, and on the streets on a single night—found more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night this past January, up 18 percent from a night in January 2023. The increase in the rate of families experiencing homelessness was even steeper, rising 39 percent from 2023 to 2024. And there was a 33 percent increase in children experiencing homelessness, bringing the amount recorded earlier this year to nearly 150,000 kids. (Experts say the numbers are likely an undercount.)

HUD attributes this rise to “significant increases in rental costs, as a result of the pandemic and nearly decades of under-building of housing,” as well as natural disasters—such as the deadly August 2023 Maui wildfires—that destroyed housing. Other factors include “rising inflation, stagnating wages among
middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism [that] have stretched homelessness services systems to their limits,” the report says. (Black people remain overrepresented, accounting for 12 percent of the US population but 32 percent of those experiencing homelessness, according to the report.) California and New York had the highest numbers of people experiencing homelessness.

Some of the nationwide increase, the report notes, was also due to “a result of [communities’] work to shelter a rising number of asylum seekers.” In New York City, for example, asylum seekers accounted for almost 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness. HUD points out that the counts were conducted after Republicans in Congress blocked a bipartisan Senate deal that would have funded border security and before President Joe Biden’s border crackdown via executive action—a reference Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) aimed to use to his advantage.

Biden administration admits #BidenBorderCrisis resulted in more homelessness.

Migrants and End of Covid Restrictions Fuel Jump in Homelessness https://t.co/zyslrZau2j

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) December 28, 2024

Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, responded on X that this was a “misdiagnosis of its causes,” adding that he has a report forthcoming on “this easy scapegoating of migrants for the homelessness crisis.”

Despite the bleakness of the data, there were some signs of progress: Homelessness among veterans dropped to the lowest number on record: 32,882—an 8 percent decrease from 2023. The report also spotlights a few places (Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chester County, Pennsylvania) that saw significant decreases in people experiencing homelessness thanks to targeted efforts to increase the availability of housing and other supportive services.

Still, it’s hard not to see the data as an indictment of one of the world’s wealthiest nations, where basic necessities—housing, food, and healthcare—are out of reach to many low- and middle-income families. And, as the report intimates, it is likely that people experiencing homelessness will face even greater challenges in light of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the June Supreme Court decision that essentially greenlit the criminalization of homelessness. (As I have reported, domestic violence prevention advocates expect the ruling will be catastrophic for survivors, given the role abusive relationships can play in driving victims to homelessness.)

Ann Olivia, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a statement she hopes the data will spur lawmakers “to advance evidence-based solutions to this crisis.” (Vice President Kamala Harris made new housing construction a key part of her campaign.) Some Democrats agree that politicians have to act—and fast:

This is the richest country on earth.

770,000 Americans should not be homeless, and 20 million more should not be spending over half their incomes on rent or a mortgage.

We need to invest in affordable housing, not Trump’s massive tax breaks for billionaires. https://t.co/MOiMOZHthw

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 27, 2024

“As housing prices increase, homelessness increases,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) posted in response to the same AP article. “Homelessness is a housing problem.”

But don’t hold your breath: Trump’s acolytes have signaled their desires to slash the social safety net and enact mass deportations of undocumented people, which experts have said will likely exacerbate the housing crisis given the role immigrants play in the construction industry. The closest his budding administration has come to offering a solution is VP-elect JD Vance’s claim that mass deportations will solve the housing shortage by freeing up units.

A news clip making the rounds Sunday morning had CNN’s Dana Bash talking with Chris Sununu, New Hampshire’s Republican governor, about Elon Musk’s potential conflicts of interest. Here, after all, we have a hecto-billionaire with massive federal contracts via SpaceX—and whose carmaker, Tesla, likely wouldn’t have survived without generous state and federal subsidies—serving as an advisor to an incoming president on how the government should be spending its money, or not.

Sununu told Bash he liked that Musk is an “outsider”—an interesting choice of words—who is “not looking for anything.” When she challenged that notion, he responded, “The guy is worth $450 billion” and therefore is “so rich he’s removed from the potential financial influence.”

“I don’t think he’s doing it for the money,” Sununu said. “He’s doing it for the bigger project and the bigger vision of America.” The exchange is worth a listen:

BASH: One of the concerns is that Elon Musk has billions tied up in govt contracts. You don't see a conflict of interest?CHRIS SUNUNU: Everyone has a conflict of interestBASH: But that's a pretty big oneSUNUNU: He's so rich he's removed from the potential financial influence

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2024-12-29T14:47:39.372Z

What this tells me is that Sununu doesn’t understand the mentality of excessive wealth and he probably shouldn’t be on the air talking about it. He’s correct, in one sense, that Musk is not doing it for the money. I mean, the guy could probably afford to buy Greenland. But “the greater project and the bigger vision”? That’s the sort of nonsense Col. Potter from the old TV series M.A.S.H. would have called “horse hockey”—among other things.

Musk is doing this for the power—the opportunity to dominate his peers. Let’s not forget that joining forces with Trump put Musk’s wealth, at least on paper, on a very steep upward trajectory. I haven’t done the math, but I’m pretty sure he’s now the richest person who has ever lived on our planet. He doesn’t need money to buy stuff. He needs it to nourish his narcissism.

I interviewed quite a few super-rich folks, and people in their close orbits, while researching my 2021 book, Jackpot, and we talked a lot about these kinds of matters. It became clear that, once a person attains a certain level of wealth, any further accumulation of assets is like a game. It’s all about score-keeping and social comparisons—and also maintaining one’s dynastic position by creating trusts to circumvent gift and estate taxes and pushing to maintain stupid loopholes like the discounted tax rate on carried interest, which even one private equity guy admitted to me was “bullshit,” though he was part of a group that made an annual pilgrimage to DC to lobby for it.

Here’s a abridged snippet from one of my interviews with Richard Watts, an attorney in Southern California who serves as a consigliere for some of America’s wealthiest families. Here he was talking about a conference he’d just spoken at—an annual shindig hosted by Mitt Romney and attended by loads of Fortune 500 CEOs and billionaires with names you’d know, in addition to former presidents and senators and other power players.

“I’m very well off, so I certainly don’t need to be working and doing all that stuff, and I’ve got a beautiful home down by the ocean. But when I spend the weekend with people that probably have a minimum net worth of $500 million, at some point I just have to leave, because you can feel in the discussion the measure is how big you are…

In those situations it’s always about what spectacular thing have you done, invented, created: What do you do? “Well, I own 35 mobile home parks free and clear, and we built them, and we’re going green with all of them. And it’s really been a great, wonderful thing.” And the guy’s 40 years old, and that’s a true story…

Now, if you’re Jamie Dimon, everybody kind of wants to see what you’re thinking and you know, “Hey, that’s a good guy. I want to be around him.” And then if it’s the governor of Maine, or let’s say it’s Mitt or it’s Paul Ryan, these are really interesting people. And the interesting thing is they kind of don’t want to have that discussion, but everyone has it with them. So, it’s like, “Hey Paul, since you’ve been out of the Speaker of the House, what is it you’re doing this year?” “Oh my god, I’m on the board of Fox News.” (And of course Murdoch was there lecturing as well.)

And it’s just this feeling that the only measure in the room—I don’t mean that they always stay this way, I’m just saying when they group together—it’s about who’s got the biggest boat, and I can say that in a lot of different ways that are nasty, but the biggest boat is pretty quickly identified.

One month prior to the election, Elon Musk’s estimated net worth was about $263 billion. Now, at year’s end, it is $437 billion. The “biggest boat” has been identified. It’s Elon and it ain’t even close. Musk would like to keep it that way. and his relationship with Trump helps him do that. So Sununu can spare us the “greater project” nonsense.

This is a dick-measuring contest, no more, no less.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The angry Alaskans gathered in Fairbanks to burn the president’s effigy. It was early December 1978 and President Jimmy Carter was that unpopular in Alaska. A few days earlier Carter had issued an unusual executive order, designating 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness as a national monument. He did so unilaterally, using a little known 1906 Antiquities Act that ostensibly gave the president the executive power to designate buildings or small plots of historical sites on federal land as national monuments. No previous president had ever used the obscure act to create a vast wilderness area. But Congress was refusing to pass the necessary legislation, so Carter, who passed away Sunday at the age of 100, decided to act alone.

The Alaskan political establishment was flabbergasted. Despite the unpopularity of the unusual sequestration order, Carter announced that it would stand until Congress agreed to pass its own legislation. For the next two years Carter stubbornly held his ground, explaining that he wasn’t opposed to oil and gas development, but that he would not accept any bill that jeopardized the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the calving grounds and migratory route for one of the world’s last great caribou herds.

Finally, Alaska’s senior politician, Republican Senator Ted Stevens agreed in late 1980 to break the impasse. At one point in their wrangling over what became known as the Alaska Lands Act, Senator Stevens argued that one small region should be excluded from the proposed wilderness refuge. “Well, let’s check that,” Carter said. The president then rolled out an oversized map on the floor of the Oval Office. Stevens was astonished to see the president on his hands and knees, inspecting the area in question. “No, I don’t think you are right,” Carter observed. “You see, this little watershed here doesn’t actually go into that one. It comes over here.” The senator had to concede the point, and on the car ride back to Capitol Hill he turned to his aide and remarked, “He knows more about Alaska than I do.”

That was vintage Carter, the president who always paid attention to details. But it also illustrates Carter’s legacy as a president devoted to protecting the environment. Carter was still negotiating with Senator Stevens weeks after his defeat in the November 1980 election. But on December 2, 1980, this now lame-duck president signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, creating more than 157 million acres of wilderness area, national wildlife refuges, and national parks—tripling the size of the nation’s Wilderness Preservation System and doubling the size of the National Park System. It was, and still is, the largest single expansion of protected lands in American history.

More than four decades later, before he entered hospice care in his simple Plains, Georgia home in February, Carter signed an amicus brief, appealing to the courts and President Joe Biden, not to permit the building of a gravel road through one small portion of the designated wilderness area. It was his last act in the public arena. And it succeeded: On March 14, 2023, the Interior Department canceled a plan that would have allowed the road’s construction.

Carter was always annoyed when pundits proclaimed him a “model” ex-president, but a failed president. And he was right to be annoyed because his was actually a quite consequential presidency, and no more so than on questions of conservation and the environment.

Early in his presidency, in the spring of 1977, he famously vetoed a slew of water projects, mostly small dams and river diversion facilities, in dozens of congressional districts around the country. Federal funding of such projects was often a waste of taxpayer funds. And these boondoggles, always encouraged by the US Army Corps of Engineers, often harmed the rivers’ natural habitat. Carter knew he was doing the right thing—even though it eroded his support in a Democratic-controlled Congress.

Carter’s instincts for conservation had been evident earlier when, as governor of Georgia, he had opposed unbridled commercial development, favored tough regulations to protect the state’s coastal wetlands, and endorsed the creation of two major seashores and river parks.

But when Carter got to the White House, he shocked many observers by appointing James Gustave Speth, age 35, to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. Speth was regarded by the Washington establishment as a radical on environmental issues. A Yale-trained lawyer and Rhodes Scholar, he had co-founded in 1970 the Natural Resources Defense Council, a tough advocacy group on environmental issues. Speth, who later served as dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, used his position in the administration to educate Carter about the dangers of acid rain, carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, and the likely extinction of 100,000 species during the next quarter century.

Just before leaving office, Carter released a prophetic report, largely written by Speth, that predicted “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if humanity continued to rely on fossil fuels. The Global 2000 Report to the President became an early clarion call for scientists studying climate change.

History will judge Carter as a president ahead of his time. He set a goal of producing 20 percent of the nation’s energy from renewable sources by 2000. In an age of soaring energy prices and stagflation, he famously wore a cardigan on national television during a fireside chat in which he urged Americans to lower their thermostats and conserve energy. He put solar water heating panels on the roof of the White House, telling reporters, “A generation from now this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” Ironically, while Carter put federal money into solar energy research, a few years later his successor Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House roof—and a few are still displayed in museums.

Carter spent much of his time in office trying to deal with energy issues. He proposed a 283-page National Energy Act (NEA) that included a tax on oversized, gas-guzzling cars, tax credits for home insulation, and investments in solar and wind technologies. Carter insisted that his energy bill was the “moral equivalent of war.” In response, The Wall Street Journal labeled it with the sarcastic acronym MEOW. Republican Party chairman Bill Brock charged that the president was “driving people out of their family cars.” Michigan Democratic Congressman John Dingell told Carter aides that it was an “asinine bill.” The legislation nevertheless passed the House, but then encountered much more opposition in the Senate. Carter complained in a private White House diary, “The influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable, and it’s impossible to arouse the public to protect themselves.”

The final bill, passed in October 1978, was a complicated compromise—but it did impose penalties on gas-guzzling cars, required higher efficiency standards for home appliances, and provided tax incentives to develop wind and solar technologies. But environmentalists would criticize it for also providing incentives to mine domestic coal and produce corn-based gasohol. Carter’s goal here was to lessen the country’s dependence on imported Arab oil—and in this he was marginally successful, leading to a decline in oil imports during his term in office. But in an unintended consequence, environmentalists would complain that a part of the bill required that any new power plants be fired with fuels other than oil or natural gas. In practice, that meant coal received a major boost.

In retrospect, the most consequential part of the energy bill was the phased decontrol of natural gas prices. This deregulation eventually stimulated exploration for natural gas in the United States and created the market conditions decades later for the innovative fracking technology that would make the country a major supplier of liquefied natural gas.

Politically speaking, Carter’s energy policies were criticized by both sides. He was faulted by liberals for enacting too much deregulation, while conservatives perceived him as an enemy of the oil and gas industry.

If environmentalists should remember one thing about the Carter presidency it should be his so-called “malaise speech” in July 1979. It was an extraordinary sermon about America’s limits—a most un-American idea for a people constantly fed on the manna of manifest destiny. “We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” he said. “Our people are losing that faith…In a nation that was once proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

Taking a page straight from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (which Carter had recently read), Carter observed, “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

This was the born-again Southern Baptist in Jimmy Carter speaking, the Southern populist, warning his people about the need to be aware of our environment’s fragility and limitations. It was not a message most Americans wanted to hear. But it remains a key part of his presidential legacy.

Homelessness in America reached the highest level on record last year, according to new data released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development—and it will likely only get worse, in light of both a Supreme Court decision issued in June and President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency.

The annual report—which estimates the number of people staying in shelters, temporary housing, and on the streets on a single night—found more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night this past January, up 18 percent from a night in January 2023. The increase in the rate of families experiencing homelessness was even steeper, rising 39 percent from 2023 to 2024. And there was a 33 percent increase in children experiencing homelessness, bringing the amount recorded earlier this year to nearly 150,000 kids. (Experts say the numbers are likely an undercount.)

HUD attributes this rise to “significant increases in rental costs, as a result of the pandemic and nearly decades of under-building of housing,” as well as natural disasters—such as the deadly August 2023 Maui wildfires—that destroyed housing. Other factors include “rising inflation, stagnating wages among
middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism [that] have stretched homelessness services systems to their limits,” the report says. (Black people remain overrepresented, accounting for 12 percent of the US population but 32 percent of those experiencing homelessness, according to the report.) California and New York had the highest numbers of people experiencing homelessness.

Some of the nationwide increase, the report notes, was also due to “a result of [communities’] work to shelter a rising number of asylum seekers.” In New York City, for example, asylum seekers accounted for almost 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness. HUD points out that the counts were conducted after Republicans in Congress blocked a bipartisan Senate deal that would have funded border security and before President Joe Biden’s border crackdown via executive action—a reference Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) aimed to use to his advantage.

https://twitter.com/JohnCornyn/status/1872996093543522435

Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, responded on X that this was a “misdiagnosis of its causes,” adding that he has a report forthcoming on “this easy scapegoating of migrants for the homelessness crisis.”

Despite the bleakness of the data, there were some signs of progress: Homelessness among veterans dropped to the lowest number on record: 32,882—an 8 percent decrease from 2023. The report also spotlights a few places (Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chester County, Pennsylvania) that saw significant decreases in people experiencing homelessness thanks to targeted efforts to increase the availability of housing and other supportive services.

Still, it’s hard not to see the data as an indictment of one of the world’s wealthiest nations, where basic necessities—housing, food, and healthcare—are out of reach to many low- and middle-income families. And, as the report intimates, it is likely that people experiencing homelessness will face even greater challenges in light of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the June Supreme Court decision that essentially greenlit the criminalization of homelessness. (As I have reported, domestic violence prevention advocates expect the ruling will be catastrophic for survivors, given the role abusive relationships can play in driving victims to homelessness.)

Ann Olivia, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a statement she hopes the data will spur lawmakers “to advance evidence-based solutions to this crisis.” (Vice President Kamala Harris made new housing construction a key part of her campaign.) Some Democrats agree that politicians have to act—and fast:

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1872743695721828828

“As housing prices increase, homelessness increases,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) posted in response to the same AP article. “Homelessness is a housing problem.”

But don’t hold your breath: Trump’s acolytes have signaled their desires to slash the social safety net and enact mass deportations of undocumented people, which experts have said will likely exacerbate the housing crisis given the role immigrants play in the construction industry. The closest his budding administration has come to offering a solution is VP-elect JD Vance’s claim that mass deportations will solve the housing shortage by freeing up units.

A news clip making the rounds Sunday morning had CNN’s Dana Bash talking with Chris Sununu, New Hampshire’s Republican governor, about Elon Musk’s potential conflicts of interest. Here, after all, we have a hecto-billionaire with massive federal contracts via SpaceX—and whose carmaker, Tesla, likely wouldn’t have survived without generous state and federal subsidies—serving as an advisor to an incoming president on how the government should be spending its money, or not.

Sununu told Bash he liked that Musk is an “outsider”—an interesting choice of words—who is “not looking for anything.” When she challenged that notion, he responded, “The guy is worth $450 billion” and therefore is “so rich he’s removed from the potential financial influence.”

“I don’t think he’s doing it for the money,” Sununu said. “He’s doing it for the bigger project and the bigger vision of America.” The exchange is worth a listen:

BASH: One of the concerns is that Elon Musk has billions tied up in govt contracts. You don't see a conflict of interest?CHRIS SUNUNU: Everyone has a conflict of interestBASH: But that's a pretty big oneSUNUNU: He's so rich he's removed from the potential financial influence

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2024-12-29T14:47:39.372Z

What this tells me is that Sununu doesn’t understand the mentality of excessive wealth and he probably shouldn’t be on the air talking about it. He’s correct, in one sense, that Musk is not doing it for the money. I mean, the guy could probably afford to buy Greenland. But “the greater project and the bigger vision”? That’s the sort of nonsense Col. Potter from the old TV series M.A.S.H. would have called “horse hockey”—among other things.

Musk is doing this for the power—the opportunity to dominate his peers. Let’s not forget that joining forces with Trump put Musk’s wealth, at least on paper, on a very steep upward trajectory. I haven’t done the math, but I’m pretty sure he’s now the richest person who has ever lived on our planet. He doesn’t need money to buy stuff. He needs it to nourish his narcissism.

I interviewed quite a few super-rich folks, and people in their close orbits, while researching my 2021 book, Jackpot, and we talked a lot about these kinds of matters. It became clear that, once a person attains a certain level of wealth, any further accumulation of assets is like a game. It’s all about score-keeping and social comparisons—and also maintaining one’s dynastic position by creating trusts to circumvent gift and estate taxes and pushing to maintain stupid loopholes like the discounted tax rate on carried interest, which even one private equity guy admitted to me was “bullshit,” though he was part of a group that made an annual pilgrimage to DC to lobby for it.

Here’s a abridged snippet from one of my interviews with Richard Watts, an attorney in Southern California who serves as a consigliere for some of America’s wealthiest families. Here he was talking about a conference he’d just spoken at—an annual shindig hosted by Mitt Romney and attended by loads of Fortune 500 CEOs and billionaires with names you’d know, in addition to former presidents and senators and other power players.

“I’m very well off, so I certainly don’t need to be working and doing all that stuff, and I’ve got a beautiful home down by the ocean. But when I spend the weekend with people that probably have a minimum net worth of $500 million, at some point I just have to leave, because you can feel in the discussion the measure is how big you are…

In those situations it’s always about what spectacular thing have you done, invented, created: What do you do? “Well, I own 35 mobile home parks free and clear, and we built them, and we’re going green with all of them. And it’s really been a great, wonderful thing.” And the guy’s 40 years old, and that’s a true story…

Now, if you’re Jamie Dimon, everybody kind of wants to see what you’re thinking and you know, “Hey, that’s a good guy. I want to be around him.” And then if it’s the governor of Maine, or let’s say it’s Mitt or it’s Paul Ryan, these are really interesting people. And the interesting thing is they kind of don’t want to have that discussion, but everyone has it with them. So, it’s like, “Hey Paul, since you’ve been out of the Speaker of the House, what is it you’re doing this year?” “Oh my god, I’m on the board of Fox News.” (And of course Murdoch was there lecturing as well.)

And it’s just this feeling that the only measure in the room—I don’t mean that they always stay this way, I’m just saying when they group together—it’s about who’s got the biggest boat, and I can say that in a lot of different ways that are nasty, but the biggest boat is pretty quickly identified.

One month prior to the election, Elon Musk’s estimated net worth was about $263 billion. Now, at year’s end, it is $437 billion. The “biggest boat” has been identified. It’s Elon and it ain’t even close. Musk would like to keep it that way. and his relationship with Trump helps him do that. So Sununu can spare us the “greater project” nonsense.

This is a dick-measuring contest, no more, no less.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The angry Alaskans gathered in Fairbanks to burn the president’s effigy. It was early December 1978 and President Jimmy Carter was that unpopular in Alaska. A few days earlier Carter had issued an unusual executive order, designating 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness as a national monument. He did so unilaterally, using a little known 1906 Antiquities Act that ostensibly gave the president the executive power to designate buildings or small plots of historical sites on federal land as national monuments. No previous president had ever used the obscure act to create a vast wilderness area. But Congress was refusing to pass the necessary legislation, so Carter, who passed away Sunday at the age of 100, decided to act alone.

The Alaskan political establishment was flabbergasted. Despite the unpopularity of the unusual sequestration order, Carter announced that it would stand until Congress agreed to pass its own legislation. For the next two years Carter stubbornly held his ground, explaining that he wasn’t opposed to oil and gas development, but that he would not accept any bill that jeopardized the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the calving grounds and migratory route for one of the world’s last great caribou herds.

Finally, Alaska’s senior politician, Republican Senator Ted Stevens agreed in late 1980 to break the impasse. At one point in their wrangling over what became known as the Alaska Lands Act, Senator Stevens argued that one small region should be excluded from the proposed wilderness refuge. “Well, let’s check that,” Carter said. The president then rolled out an oversized map on the floor of the Oval Office. Stevens was astonished to see the president on his hands and knees, inspecting the area in question. “No, I don’t think you are right,” Carter observed. “You see, this little watershed here doesn’t actually go into that one. It comes over here.” The senator had to concede the point, and on the car ride back to Capitol Hill he turned to his aide and remarked, “He knows more about Alaska than I do.”

That was vintage Carter, the president who always paid attention to details. But it also illustrates Carter’s legacy as a president devoted to protecting the environment. Carter was still negotiating with Senator Stevens weeks after his defeat in the November 1980 election. But on December 2, 1980, this now lame-duck president signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, creating more than 157 million acres of wilderness area, national wildlife refuges, and national parks—tripling the size of the nation’s Wilderness Preservation System and doubling the size of the National Park System. It was, and still is, the largest single expansion of protected lands in American history.

More than four decades later, before he entered hospice care in his simple Plains, Georgia home in February, Carter signed an amicus brief, appealing to the courts and President Joe Biden, not to permit the building of a gravel road through one small portion of the designated wilderness area. It was his last act in the public arena. And it succeeded: On March 14, 2023, the Interior Department canceled a plan that would have allowed the road’s construction.

Carter was always annoyed when pundits proclaimed him a “model” ex-president, but a failed president. And he was right to be annoyed because his was actually a quite consequential presidency, and no more so than on questions of conservation and the environment.

Early in his presidency, in the spring of 1977, he famously vetoed a slew of water projects, mostly small dams and river diversion facilities, in dozens of congressional districts around the country. Federal funding of such projects was often a waste of taxpayer funds. And these boondoggles, always encouraged by the US Army Corps of Engineers, often harmed the rivers’ natural habitat. Carter knew he was doing the right thing—even though it eroded his support in a Democratic-controlled Congress.

Carter’s instincts for conservation had been evident earlier when, as governor of Georgia, he had opposed unbridled commercial development, favored tough regulations to protect the state’s coastal wetlands, and endorsed the creation of two major seashores and river parks.

But when Carter got to the White House, he shocked many observers by appointing James Gustave Speth, age 35, to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. Speth was regarded by the Washington establishment as a radical on environmental issues. A Yale-trained lawyer and Rhodes Scholar, he had co-founded in 1970 the Natural Resources Defense Council, a tough advocacy group on environmental issues. Speth, who later served as dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, used his position in the administration to educate Carter about the dangers of acid rain, carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, and the likely extinction of 100,000 species during the next quarter century.

Just before leaving office, Carter released a prophetic report, largely written by Speth, that predicted “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if humanity continued to rely on fossil fuels. The Global 2000 Report to the President became an early clarion call for scientists studying climate change.

History will judge Carter as a president ahead of his time. He set a goal of producing 20 percent of the nation’s energy from renewable sources by 2000. In an age of soaring energy prices and stagflation, he famously wore a cardigan on national television during a fireside chat in which he urged Americans to lower their thermostats and conserve energy. He put solar water heating panels on the roof of the White House, telling reporters, “A generation from now this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” Ironically, while Carter put federal money into solar energy research, a few years later his successor Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House roof—and a few are still displayed in museums.

Carter spent much of his time in office trying to deal with energy issues. He proposed a 283-page National Energy Act (NEA) that included a tax on oversized, gas-guzzling cars, tax credits for home insulation, and investments in solar and wind technologies. Carter insisted that his energy bill was the “moral equivalent of war.” In response, The Wall Street Journal labeled it with the sarcastic acronym MEOW. Republican Party chairman Bill Brock charged that the president was “driving people out of their family cars.” Michigan Democratic Congressman John Dingell told Carter aides that it was an “asinine bill.” The legislation nevertheless passed the House, but then encountered much more opposition in the Senate. Carter complained in a private White House diary, “The influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable, and it’s impossible to arouse the public to protect themselves.”

The final bill, passed in October 1978, was a complicated compromise—but it did impose penalties on gas-guzzling cars, required higher efficiency standards for home appliances, and provided tax incentives to develop wind and solar technologies. But environmentalists would criticize it for also providing incentives to mine domestic coal and produce corn-based gasohol. Carter’s goal here was to lessen the country’s dependence on imported Arab oil—and in this he was marginally successful, leading to a decline in oil imports during his term in office. But in an unintended consequence, environmentalists would complain that a part of the bill required that any new power plants be fired with fuels other than oil or natural gas. In practice, that meant coal received a major boost.

In retrospect, the most consequential part of the energy bill was the phased decontrol of natural gas prices. This deregulation eventually stimulated exploration for natural gas in the United States and created the market conditions decades later for the innovative fracking technology that would make the country a major supplier of liquefied natural gas.

Politically speaking, Carter’s energy policies were criticized by both sides. He was faulted by liberals for enacting too much deregulation, while conservatives perceived him as an enemy of the oil and gas industry.

If environmentalists should remember one thing about the Carter presidency it should be his so-called “malaise speech” in July 1979. It was an extraordinary sermon about America’s limits—a most un-American idea for a people constantly fed on the manna of manifest destiny. “We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” he said. “Our people are losing that faith…In a nation that was once proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

Taking a page straight from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (which Carter had recently read), Carter observed, “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

This was the born-again Southern Baptist in Jimmy Carter speaking, the Southern populist, warning his people about the need to be aware of our environment’s fragility and limitations. It was not a message most Americans wanted to hear. But it remains a key part of his presidential legacy.

Elon Musk is nothing if not shameless.

He proved that again this weekend, when he published an op-ed in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, Die Welt, doubling down on his earlier support for the racist, far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD).

In the op-ed—reportedly published online Saturday and in print Sunday—Musk writes that the AfD is “the last spark of hope for this country” and, essentially, that his vast wealth makes his politics a matter of public interest.

“As someone who has made significant investments in Germany’s industrial and technological landscape, I believe I have the right to speak openly about its political orientation,” Musk writes, according to a Google translation of the text. As the country approaches a snap election on February 23, following the November collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, AfD is polling second, at 19 percent, behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany.

Musk outlines five areas in which he claims AfD reigns supreme:

• “Economic revival” — Musk praises the party’s focus on de-regulation, writing, “Its approach of reducing government over-regulation, cutting taxes, and deregulating the market reflects the principles that made Tesla and SpaceX successful.”
• “Immigration and national identity” — Here Musk calls for “the preservation of German culture and security” in the face of globalization and immigration.
• “Energy and independence” — Musk lambastes the current German government’s decision to “phase out nuclear power and instead rely heavily on coal and imported gas, as well as volatile wind and solar power.”
• “Political realism” — Musk lauds the party for eschewing “the political correctness that often obscures the truth” (sound familiar?) and argues that the AfD can’t possibly be far-right because its leader, Alice Weidel, “has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” (Yes, he actually wrote this.)
• “Innovation and the future” — Musk claims AfD “advocates for educational reforms that encourage critical thinking instead of indoctrination and supports the technology industries that represent the future of global economic leadership.”

His op-ed was published alongside a rebuttal from editor Jan Philipp Burgard, who writes that “Musk’s diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach that only the AfD can save Germany is fatally wrong.”

Burgard notes that the AfD wants to remove Germany from the EU, which he says would be a “catastrophe” given the nation’s reliance on exports and the reliance of German citizens on the EU single market. He further argues that AfD’s isolationist focus could harm its relationship with the US in particular—and “doesn’t Elon Musk want to see many Teslas rolling along Germany’s highways in the future?” And, Burgard points out, Musk’s claims that the party isn’t so bad ignore the reality that Björn Höcke, another AfD leader, has been convicted—twice—of using banned Nazi slogans.

The publication of Musk’s op-ed elicited immediate internal backlash. Die Welt‘s opinion editor, Eva Marie Kogel, announced on X on Saturday that she’d resigned after it posted online.

Musk’s piece was meant to expand upon Musk’s December 20 X post that “only the AfD can save Germany.” (The party thanked him with a public video from party leader Weidel.) But as my colleague Alex Nguyen wrote, AfD is even controversial among Europe’s nationalists.

In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitler’s paramilitary organization. 

When you dig more into the priorities of AfD leaders, it makes sense that they’re on an island of their own—and why Musk is trying to court them. Some party officials, like Trump, have been clear about their desire to carry out mass deportations. As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote recently:

The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.

“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones. 

As Burgard put it in his Musk rebuttal: “Even a genius can be wrong.”