Meg Duff

More cities, NGOs, even HOAs are getting disaster insurance.

'Parametric' plans pay out at key triggers: hurricane hits cat 5, wildfire crosses line, etc.

Now, some of those plans are rewarding climate adaptation with big discounts.

with @jojofoshosho.bsky.social for @kneedeeptimes.bsky.social !

Insurance Innovations Reward Communities Reducing Climate Risk Fires and floods are scaring insurance companies away from disaster zones, but communities are doing their part to improve outcomes.

The insurance industry is broken, especially in wildfire-prone states like California that have been hit hard by climate change. Could a community-based risk reduction model be the solution? Proud to have gotten to co-write this story for @kneedeeptimes.bsky.social with @megduff.com 🌎🧪

See where wildfire smoke is getting worse in the U.S. The past six summers have been the smokiest on record. New research shows that smoke could become the costliest consequence of climate change for Americans.

As global heating produces more wildfires, "Americans have increasingly been bombarded by toxic smoke." 41K people in the US now die from this smoke each year, "one of the most costly and important climate impacts.” www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Hundreds of red leaves form a carpet bellow the Japanese maple. Two red leaves cling to the otherwise bare tree. Photo by Robert Emond.

#ColorADay | #RedWed

“Memories of Autumn Past” alternate title “Roll Out the Red Carpet”

#Photography 📸
#WestCoastKin #PNW #Oregon
#PhotographersOfBluesky
#PhotographersUnited
#BlueskyPhotography
#ArtistsOfBluesky
#BlueskyArt #Landscape #Nature

‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ Once Again Aims To Help Working Actors Get Health Insurance With New Casting Notice Jimmy Kimmel wants to help actors get health insurance with a new casting notice for his talk show

reminder: Jimmy Kimmel is enough of a mensch that he devised a segment on which actors who are just short of having enough work to qualify for union healthcare come on his show and deliver a single line of dialogue

deadline.com/2024/07/jimm...

Bee on a white pink flower

A bee is here

Human-Caused Warming Tripled the Death Toll of European Heat Waves This Summer, New Report Shows - Inside Climate News Public health researchers struggle to track the accelerating pace of global warming impacts.

A new study led by @clairbarnes.bsky.social shows that human-caused global warming tripled heat wave deaths in European cities this summer to 24,400. These 16,500 people would still be alive if we weren't burning fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow.

hey just an FYI: we're not yet at the part where AI companies and the state are so closely intertwined that disclosing energy usage would constitute a threat to national security or some other such bullshit, making transparency into the environmental impact of data centers all but impossible

‘A climate of unparalleled malevolence’: are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction? The long read: Churning quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate we are going could lead the planet to another Great Dying

It bears repeating: choosing to double down and accelerate our burning of fossil fuels will kill off a substantial proportion of humanity

That is something we want to avoid - and can choose to avoid

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

"Putin appears to have gained the upper hand...[He] was treated as an equal on U.S. soil, managed to sidestep any potential American sanctions for now and announced no battlefield concessions. Trump, who vowed...to end the war on his first day in office, failed to secure even a temporary cease-fire"

Eyeopening walkthrough of DC by this creator. If you aren’t in DC, worth a watch all the way to the end—

The perfectly fine, already-paid-for satellites Trump wants to destroy in a fiery atmospheric reentry | CNN NASA is planning to decommission premier satellite missions that gather information on planet-warming pollution and other climate vital signs beginning as soon as October, sources inside and outside o...

Remarkably, NASA is looking for partners (wealthy individuals, philanthropic orgs, companies etc.) to keep crucial climate satellite missions like the Orbiting Carbon Observatory going. Whether they make such a deal before $$ runs out remains to be seen... www.cnn.com/2025/08/13/c...

Donald Trump threatens to clear encampments in D.C. With D.C.’s MPD now under federal control and the National Guard coming to D.C., the fate of people in encampments remains up in the air.

"“I ain’t ever bought no prostitutes. I ain’t never raped nobody. I ain’t never paid anybody off. None of that stuff,” said G, a resident from one of the photographed tents.

“He’s much more of a criminal than I am”"

streetsensemedia.org/article/home...

This is a wonderful read.

Once again, if you know anything about who is behind the DHS or ICE social media accounts, particularly on X, I'm very interested in talking to you. hannahgais@proton.me or 334-315-8634 on Signal.

Good Peter Baker article ⤴️ on Trump's brutish abuse of power in service of narrative. But words matter. When is a behavior an "echo" of something in the past, and when is it that thing incarnate?... 1/2

Well done, New York! The state's building code now requires most new buildings to be all-electric. This makes good economic sense: It's cheaper to install a two-way heat pump to both heat and cool, vs a one-way AC plus a one-way furnace. Outgrowing indoor combustion also benefits climate and health.

Gaza is starving Palestinians seeking food are being killed by the IDF. It's time for the entire world to say enough.

In the past when I sat down to write about Israel, I’ve had a moment where I take a deep breath and accept that, as a Jewish woman, it’s going to be difficult. This time, there was no such moment.

I wrote about the intentional starvation of Gaza by Israel/US, and the moral imperative to say enough:

Alex de Waal has worked on humanitarian causes across the globe for over 40 years.

“There is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.”

View of the WGBH building in Boston with an electronic marquee reading “Local. Trusted. Defunded.”

WGBH building in Boston today

Pilot over the intercom: uhhhhhhh we are all just flesh. We exist so briefly.

The Senate’s version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill would see the General Services Administration take possession of the nearly 7,200 new postal EVs and associated infrastructure and put the assets up for auction. The proposal is unlikely to generate much revenue for the government; there is almost no private-sector interest in the mail trucks, and used EV charging equipment — built specifically for the Postal Service and already installed in postal facilities — generally cannot be resold. “The funds realized by auctioning the vehicles and infrastructure would be negligible. Much of infrastructure is literally buried under parking lots, and there is no market for used charging equipment,” Peter Pastre, the Postal Service’s vice president for government relations and public policy, wrote to senators this month.

👀 Scoop: Trump and Republicans want USPS to sell off its brand new EVs and chargers.

That would mean literally **ripping up post office parking lots** to auction off assets with no private-sector value.

It’s buried in the Senate’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

A Coal Miner’s Daughter Takes on DOGE to Protect Miners’ Health Since 1970, more than 75,000 miners have died of black lung disease. Now, researchers working to prevent those deaths get layoff notices.

"About a fifth of the coal miners in Central Appalachia have black lung."

"And from 1970 to 2016, more than 75,000 died."

"It comes down to how much is a life worth. You want more coal, but you don't care about the coal miners."
#WestVirginia #USA #Healthcare

As Anita Wolfe told me: “It comes down to how much is a life worth. You want more coal, but you don’t care about the coal miners and what’s happening to them.” 7/7

In the meantime, compliance dates are looming for a new dust regulation, the MSHA silica rule, which lowers dust exposure limits in mines.

NIOSH researchers were working on tools that would make it easier for mines to comply. But they've already lost six months of research time. 6/7

Most of that work has been paused since February due to travel and funding restrictions. It remains paused as researchers wait to hear if they will get their jobs back.

That may be decided by the case AFGE v. Trump, which alleges that the DOGE layoffs are unconstitutional. 5/7

Those researchers had been working to get dust levels down in mines. They also work on massive mine cave-ins, lithium-ion battery explosions, gas well leaks, mine rescue training, and a whole host of other potentially life-saving projects. 4/7

The judge in Wiley v. Kennedy said research to prevent black lung is legally required, but she stopped short of saying which researchers to call back.

Secretary Kennedy's response was to un-fire a director of mine research, but none of the hundreds of researchers who report to him. 3/7

Coal miners and their advocates notched a win in Wiley v. Kennedy, restoring (at least for now) time-sensitive programs for coal miners with black lung -- a disease that still impacts thousands of miners each year.

But the researchers working to prevent the disease? They still face layoffs. 2/7

A Coal Miner’s Daughter Takes on DOGE to Protect Miners’ Health Since 1970, more than 75,000 miners have died of black lung disease. Now, researchers working to prevent those deaths get layoff notices.

When I started reporting this story for @capitalandmain.bsky.social, 90% of NIOSH staff had received layoff notices. Now, the situation is more complicated. 🧵1/7

capitalandmain.com/a-coal-miner...