Jonathan Mingle

fair point. i can barely remember what i did yesterday.

that said, the piece was partly motivated by utilities' breathless data center demand forecasts. hard to recall, but the hype was gathering steam even way back in ye olde times of early 2024.

Opinion | We Can Get the Electricity We Need Without Frying the Planet (or Our Pocketbooks) (Published 2024)

Agreed, that's a very sensible piece, but I have to push back.

Sure, it's from way back in the Before Times of May 2024, but the NYT also published this banger by some random guy:

www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/o...

“Other major cities such as Cape Town, South Africa, Mexico City and Jakarta, Indonesia, as well as parts of California, are also facing day zero scenarios as they sink and run out of water.”

It’s almost like something dramatically changed after the Industrial Revolution! (figure via Ed Hawkins)

NIH grant cuts have disrupted hundreds of clinical trials, study finds The second Trump administration has been defined by widespread cuts to federal spending, including at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). | The second Trump administration has been defined by wid...

Cuts to NIH grants have disrupted at least 383 clinical trials, with infectious disease research hit especially hard. A stark example of the real-world repercussions of Trump and co.'s health policy 🧪 my latest:

Even Fortune Magazine has gotten the memo:

the angry mobs will have pitchforks in one hand and be waving their monthly electric bills in the other

fortune.com/2025/11/14/e...

I think the Georgia Public Service Commission election results are a very loud warning sign that this backlash is well underway

and cuts across partisan affiliations.

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Fantastic piece, thank you for it.

Here's Meadows' "Places to Intervene in a System" - I think about her framework at least a couple times a week!

Not sure which of her "leverage points" lines up with your argument, but it's worth pondering...

donellameadows.org/archives/lev...

Climate effects aside, just the sheer scale of our emissions are astounding. Humanity makes more CO2 every year than all other materials we produce combined

Inevitable outcome.

Ever since McAuliffe stood w/ Dominion's CEO in 2014 and declared its Atlantic Coast Pipeline would be "an energy superhighway to fuel our new economy ...the safest, most environmentally responsible, locally cooperative pipeline ever built in US history."

A natural born shill.

A normal day in Delhi with the government AQI readings showing around 400, but it looks and feels way more beyond that. This should be a health emergency anywhere in the world, but in Delhi, however, this is a period of forced adaptation imposed upon us by government.
#airpollution #health #delhi

Wow and I always thought the most damning citation of Larry Summers was the epigraph from *Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor* (2011)

NEW: Global fossil fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless 'stated policies' are abandoned

Contra some terrible news coverage, IEA World Energy Outlook shows coal near peak, oil peaking by 2030 & gas by 2035 (see chart)

What's going on? 🧵 + cool charts

www.carbonbrief.org/iea-fossil-f...

And it's going to make large swaths of America *uninsurable* long before they become physically uninhabitable.

www.nybooks.com/online/2023/...

This bar chart shows a decrease in mentions of 'climate' since a peak in August 2022, when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Post (me and @kcrowebasspro.bsky.social) analyzed the social media posts and appearances of prominent politicians across the country.

We found that no one is talking about climate change anymore. In 2025, mentions are 60% lower than in 2024.

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Useful summary of where things stand here from NYT, but hooboy... this glaring error jumped out at me before they fixed the headline.

Emissions are still going up!

Small detail that's, uh, somewhat important if you're trying to frame the climate story circa 2025.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

As a reporter, it makes me feel like I should pay close attention to these vibes, because there are going to be many, many stories to find and write here.

The data center backlash has 2009 early days Tea Party vibes.
Except with much more potential broad-based support since, as @heatmap.news own polling has shown, its seems like just about *everyone* hates data centers.

Definitely going to see more politicians try to catch this wave.

Oh and by the way... turns out they were right.

The grassroots organizers — working in conservative conservative VIrginia hill country — won.

The pipeline was never built.

The company behind it wound up *completely divesting from their gas business and building an offshore wind farm instead.*

This is exactly the sentiment I heard over and over while reporting on the broad grassroots opposition to a proposed fossil gas pipeline in rural Virginia.

Much of organizers' energy at first went into simply convincing their neighbors that the project wasn't inevitable.
That they had some agency.

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

You mean... let FERC rubber-stamp them?
With a 99.5% approval rate?
And tell opponents to go pound sand?

Tracking Anticipated Deaths from USAID Funding Cuts Brooke Nichols has launched online tracking tools that capture estimated increases in mortality and disease spread for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases as a result of the near-total...

By this time next week, the estimated deaths due to the illegal destruction of USAID and the shuttering of its aid efforts will breach 400,000.

More than 260,000 will be children.

Source: www.bu.edu/sph/news/art...

In fact I agree so hard that I wrote a book making precisely that case in 2015.

Soot melts glaciers, disrupts monsoons critical to food security, kills millions per year. Tackling it offers climate/health win-wins.

Happy to send you a copy, @billgates.bsky.social!

us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

100% agree with Zeke's core critique of the Gates memo here: climate mitigation and poverty alleviation are not zero-sum!

And his point that solutions like rural electrification, clean cookstoves, and cutting outdoor and indoor air pollution will both slow climate change and save millions of lives.

20+ years of climate impacts research in one figure. Climate change hits everything, everywhere, all at once.

From Solomon Hsiang's new NBER paper on empirical methods and economic impacts of climate change: www.nber.org/papers/w34357

beyond his relentless focus on corruption and elites having too much power etc, this also explains a lot of Bernie's broad appeal.

lots of people, including plenty of GOP-leaning rural voters here in Vermont, are charmed by his ornery, perpetually unintimidated "i'm not having this shit" affect.

Perfect. 60 Minutes edited out an important part of its Trump interview in which he boasts about extracting millions from its parent company on an utterly meritless claim . . . that 60 Minutes selectively edited its Kamala Harris interview.

the spookiest Halloween content I've encountered today:

The Lancet and WHO effectively rebutting Bill Gates' 'climate is not that important' take in real-time:

"This report makes clear that climate inaction is killing people now in all countries. However, climate action is also the greatest health opportunity of our time."

www.who.int/news/item/29...