Kate Aronoff

Trump’s EPA Is Hurting the Automakers It’s Claiming to Help EPA head Lee Zeldin is touting his agency’s plans to deregulate tailpipe emissions as good for car manufacturers. But fewer rules will actually weaken the U.S. auto industry.

I wrote about the end of the EPA's endangerment finding + limits on cars' GHG emissions, and how Trump is waging war on the US auto industry by giving it too much of what it wants newrepublic.com/article/1985...

Trump’s EPA Is Now Flouting the World’s Highest Court A new ruling from the International Court of Justice means that, at least in theory, the U.S. could be held liable for trashing climate regulations—and made to pay up.

"The trouble with so much climate discourse orbiting around questions of belief and denial is that it can leave actions out of the equation. " newrepublic.com/article/1982...

I wrote about the EPA dismantling greenhouse gas regulations, the International Court of Justice’s climate ruling and the limits of belief newrepublic.com/article/1982...

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a ...

Newsletter: This is the Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble: genAI is nothing like Uber or Amazon Web Services, there are no profitable genAI companies, agents do not and cannot exist, there is no AI SaaS story, and everything rides - and dies - on selling GPUs.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...

"Whether you’re talking about Jeffrey Epstein’s offenses or the reality of climate change, in other words, plenty of damning evidence is already out in the open." @katearonoff.bsky.social

Especially galling how many of the guys claiming climate change is a third rail issue that Democrats can never talk about also spent most of 2024 saying Biden's brain worked really good

Strange quirk of the Democratic strategist and pundit types claiming the party should only shape its messaging around whatever happens to be polling well is that lots of voters also seem to hate disingenuous liars who don't believe in anything they say

The Common Thread Between Epstein Denial and Climate Denial There’s a reason Donald Trump’s claims about the Jeffrey Epstein “hoax” sound so familiar.

👁️ newrepublic.com/article/1980...

It was a pleasure to talk about our research on climate resilience for public transit. Unfortunately, protecting infrastructure, riders, and workers from the threats of climate change was deemed "woke", and our grant was terminated.

How Trump is Ruining Your Subway Commute Republicans’ frantic project to end “woke” climate research has led them to axe funding aimed at helping mass transit cope with extreme weather events.

I wrote about just a few of the ways the Trump administration is making it harder to keep the subways (and everything else) from flooding newrepublic.com/article/1980...

In case you’re curious to know more about David Richardson’s whole deal, I read and reviewed (?) his terrible autofiction newrepublic.com/article/1951...

I wrote about chemtrails, Lee Zeldin, and how his EPA routinely brags about its participation in a conspiracy to let corporations poison us
newrepublic.com/article/1978...

Climate Disasters Are Catnip for Cynical Republicans ​While Democrats are ignoring the climate crisis, the right​ is using ​it as a handy source of chaos they can exploit to advance their own aims.

👉 “Climate politics in the era of Trump 2.0 ought to abandon its reliance on feel-good, far-off promises, and reckon with the actually existing nature of the climate crisis in the United States: a deadly, expensive mess being supercharged by the right.” 👈

newrepublic.com/article/1977...

The answer isn’t better storytelling, but offering tangible ways to make people’s lives more comfortable and affordable as temperatures rise

It’s hard to go from thinking of climate action primarily as charity and/or a great business opportunity, to reckoning with the fact that it’s rapidly destroying lives and municipal budgets

I wrote about the floods in Central Texas, ICE in Los Angeles, and why this moment feels so discordant with the last decade of climate politics in the U.S. newrepublic.com/article/1977...

Howard Lutnick addressed NOAA staff yesterday and began by shedding tears over the Texas tragedy, but quickly pivoted to arguing that NWS and NOAA staff don’t really need to be on the ground and said it was silly that air traffic controllers still sit in towers when all they need is data.

In retrospect seems like a mistake for so much of the climate conversation in the US to have been devoted to appreciating the value of certain asset classes

Democrats should state the obvious: Climate change is killing people and destroying communities across the United States, and Republicans at every level of government are making life here more dangerous.

https://trib.al/uK0SPSZ

Democrats Should​ Say Who’s Really to Blame for the ​Flooding in Texas Republican lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands. Democrats shouldn’t let anyone forget it.

“Democrats should hammer Republicans not just for undermining Texas’s and America’s disaster preparedness and response infrastructure but for having spent decades blocking efforts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. GOP lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands.“

Democrats Should​ Say Who’s Really to Blame for the ​Flooding in Texas Republican lawmakers have Texan children’s blood on their hands. Democrats shouldn’t let anyone forget it.

The more say the Republican Party has over governing a climate-changed world, the more people will die newrepublic.com/article/1976...

www.usatoday.com/story/money/...

Have a little humility!!

Strange inverse of Biden/Harris, from a lot of the same people: defended everything the White House and campaign did until November as Good Policy & Good Politics, and afterward tried to claim that they lost bc it didn’t follow their advice to be less woke or whatever

It’s great for people who were skeptical to embrace Mamdani after he won the primary - welcome aboard! - but it’s extremely silly and transparent for people who loudly criticized the campaign to retroactively claim that he actually did everything they thought he should, and that that’s why he won

Fun fact: Trump’s OSHA Nominee, David Keeling, would take over the workplace safety agency just as it is considering rules to protect against extreme heat. His former employers, UPS and Amazon, have opposed the rules.

America still needs a Green New Deal.

Green-gentry politics have collapsed, as cleantech investors hitch themselves to the data-center techno-Moloch. But eco-socialist climate populism is on the rise.

Yellow Teamsters-branded thermometer showing a temperature around 125F

I spent the week talking to UPS Teamsters from around the country about what it’s like to deliver hundreds of packages in a heatwave, in trucks that still aren’t air conditioned, in a country without federal workplace protections for heat newrepublic.com/article/1972...

Hard to overstate just how taxing and dangerous it is to climb in and out of 130F trucks in 90-100F heat for 10+ hours, all as bosses monitor practically every movement and second of your shift with surveillance technology