Eric C. Miller

Covering Climate: A Q&A With Policy Expert Leah Stokes A climate policy expert reacts to the "One Big Beautiful Bill" and America's changing political landscape

Get inspired for the fight by @leahstokes.bsky.social: “The Trump administration and fossil fuel industry are coming so hard for the clean energy industry because the fact is: we are winning…We are in the middle of a battle here, and are still going to win the war” open.substack.com/pub/thepower...

The world's top court makes a climate decision Big global win for climate, heatwave disaster in Kashmir, and supporting innovation for lasting change

This past week brought a landmark legal opinion for climate and set another series of staggering heat records: a powerful reminder of why we all have a role in accelerating climate solutions.

Read the full edition of the newsletter here:

This guy really has "it" too. Worth watching in full.

E.P.A. Plans to Revoke the Legal Basis for Tackling Climate Change

Trump has dramatically escalated his war on the health of all Americans and the health of our climate. Let’s hope the courts, our last line of defense against this insanity, will put a stop to this.

The extremely simple fact is that Jeff Epstein was the most notorious child sex trafficker in history, and the President of the US was his close personal friend for decades

Acting like this is complicated is absurd. The man knew what Epstein did, didn't care, and participated

Trump administration says it won't publish major climate change reports on NASA website as promised The Trump administration has made it harder for people, local and state governments to find critical climate change reports.

As I say here, “This document was written for the American people, paid for by the taxpayers, and it contains vital information we need to keep ourselves safe in a changing climate, as the disasters that continue to mount demonstrate so tragically and clearly.”

More by @borenbears.bsky.social here:

Biden’s climate law boosted red states. Their lawmakers are now gutting it. The former president bet that the economic benefits of his policies would protect them over time. Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress have upended that wager.

About 75% of the clean energy manufacturing investments announced since President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act have been in Republican districts. But those projects could be at risk under the latest version of President Trump’s tax bill

The Grand Opening of an American Concentration Camp The Republicans are proudly calling it “Alligator Alcatraz.” Let’s call it what it is.

I wrote about the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp:

A megabill mystery: New solar and wind tax comes as a surprise to Republican senators "I don't know where it came from," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the chairman of the Budget Committee, told NBC News after he released the 940-page legislation.

This is wild. “Republican senators insist they don't know how or why the tax was inserted into the bill they're rushing to pass. No senator is taking credit for or defending it.

"It's a secret, I guess," said Lindsey Graham, the BUDGET COMMITTEE CHARIMAN. “I don't know where it came from."

YouTube video by Citizens' Climate Lobby Fall 2024 Conference | Citizens' Climate Lobby | Senator-elect John Curtis (R-UT)

In his remarks to the CCL last fall, Sen. Curtis assured us all that there was a groundswell of GOP support for the climate provisions in the IRA. How can the man in this video vote in favor of this bill?

The GOP’s New Renewables-Killing Tax, Explained As bad as previous drafts of the reconciliation bill have been, this one is worse.

The North America’s Building Trades Unions issued a statement after the text’s release calling it the “biggest job-killing bill in the history of this county” and adding that that “simply put, it is the equivalent of terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL pipeline projects.”

The climate crisis has been far worse for the US economy than the Great Depression was. It's amazing how far US politics will allow the harm to continue and get worse.

"In order to compare disaster-related costs with other major events, we used current dollar estimates of GDP-related impacts..."

Paradise & Pragmatism Chris Jennings is an historian and writer living in Northern California. His book, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, documents the experiences of five distinct and but related attempt…

"The utopian movements failed, and so offered cautionary tales to subsequent generations of imitators or heirs. Because these attempts did not work, we have tended to conclude—perhaps blithely—that such attempts cannot work as a rule, and so have acclimated ourselves to the imperfect status quo."

Notes from an Occupation | Marilynne Robinson America is an occupied country, ruled by partisans hostile to democracy.

"These people who call themselves conservative are root-and-branch radicals. So it is time to face the fact that their demolition of government and society as we have known them more strongly resembles a hostile occupation than a normal presidency."

American Heretics A penetrating account of the religious critics of American liberalism, pluralism, and democracy—from the Revolution until today  “A chilling considerati...

Jerome Copulsky's "American Heretics" traces this lineage directly: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

End Time and Time Again Dorian Lynskey is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day and The Ministry of Truth: The Biographhy of George Orwell’s 1984. His l…

"If we are inclined to believe that the world will end in our own lifetimes, maybe that’s simply because, for each us, it will."

YouTube video by The Ezra Klein Show What Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Is Really Doing (Part 2) | The Ezra Klein Show

"A transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, and from the future to the past."

I have a lot to say about the resurgent young men / masculinity discourse but for now will confine myself to:

I wish I knew how to convince teenage boys/young men is how little of the world actually requires or even invites the hypermisogynist "tough guy" aesthetic

People Are Real The tragedy of John Fetterman.

@jvl.bsky.social: "If even a quarter of what’s in this piece about John Fetterman is true, then I hope he resigns from the Senate and gets the help he needs. He’s a real person." www.thebulwark.com/p/people-are...

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

The Hungarian Model MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

What did 14 years of autocratic populism produce in Hungary?
Poverty and corruption
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Evangelical Narratives / Exvangelical Memoirs The wild success of evangelical youth culture in the 1990s has yielded a soul-searching generation of disillusioned exvangelicals in the first decades of the 21st century. Some of these have writte…

"Like many other #exvangelical memoirists, Davies is left at once embittered and activated by the formative experiences of her younger self, resentful of the narrative that she allowed to shape her understanding and inspired to help others avoid its darker effects." ericcmiller.com/2025/03/18/e...

Started on the Margin Now We’re Here Matthew Dallek is Professor of Political Management at George Washington University. In his most recent book, he identifies the John Birch Society as the vanguard of an insurgent right-wing extremi…

"In Trump 2.0 we witness the culmination of six decades, the final triumph of an improbable, marginal, paranoid, right-wing, anti-statist, extremist movement that never gave up."

YouTube video by The Art of Conversation with Eric C. Miller Ep 12 - The State of Democracy Now with Peter Doerschler

Airing today at 5pm on 91.1 WHSK, "The Husky"