Tag: climate-change
-
Why the Permitting Reform Bill is Bad for our Democracy and for the Climate
(In other words, here we go again…) Image Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/climate/data-centers-pollution-trump-ai-energy.html On Wednesday, a group of Senators introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA). The bill aims to reform the federal environmental review and permitting process for energy projects in the US. The release was notable for including a diverse list of co-sponsors, including…
-
Who’s Talking About Climate Change (and why does it matter)?
This week, we are releasing the first landscape assessment of climate communicators in the US and Canada. The project was conducted in collaboration with the folks at The Talking Climate Collaborative and maps out the ecosystem of climate communication. For anyone who doesn’t understand why communicating about climate change is so important, remember that the…
-
Will the Polycrisis Get the Attention it Deserves at Climate Week NYC?
Source: World Economic Forum, Global Risks Report, 2023, p. 10. In a week, the largest climate event in the US–Climate Week NYC–gets underway. Intentionally scheduled to coincide with the meeting of the UN General Assembly, Climate Week NYC “brings together more than 100,000 people across 1,000+ events in New York City. From global leaders shaping…
-
On Overshoot and Democratizing AI
I had planned to take this weekend off since it’s Labor Day here in the states, but there’s just too much to say… This week, the UN Environment Programme released its new report: Limiting Overshoot – Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return. The report “examines the implications of entering an era of 1.5°C…
-
How Climate Shocks Motivate Social Change
Even though September begins on Tuesday, this summer of climate shocks has yet to slow down: record-breaking heat and extreme weather are continuing across much of the northern hemisphere and thousands of people are missing and hundreds of lives are confirmed lost after a glacier’s collapse triggered a flash flood in Nepal and Tibet this…
-
The Summer of Climate Shocks Rages On
The summer of 2026 will go down as a summer of climate shocks. “Climate shocks are deviations from normal environmental patterns in the form of droughts, floods, heat waves, or other extreme events that have been exacerbated by climate change” (Saving Ourselves, p. 3). While I write this newsletter, the US and Europe continue to…
-
Why Media Coverage Matters?
Credit: MeCCO/CU Boulder As our world warms and many of us feel the effects of the climate crisis first hand, the media coverage of climate change, which is making heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and storms stronger, has declined substantially (also see the work of the Media and Climate Change Observatory at CU-Boulder, which created the figure…
-
Why Science Can’t Save Us from the Climate Crisis
source: Nature 2026 Ever since IPCC chair Bob Watson informed me that “science was necessary but not sufficient” and “only one small input” in the polcymaking process over a meal at the UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) meetings in 2001, I’ve been trying to understand the role that science plays in…
-
A Tale of Two Wildfires:
How Inequality Mediates our Recovery from Climate Shocks A lot of my recent research has been focused on understanding how climate shocks motivate social change, and the ways that process works in reality. To that end, I have studied the effects of the Palisades and Eaton fires that struck LA County in January 2025. Julie…
-
What I learned studying the social consequences of the LA Wildfires
This week, my paper on wildfire displacement (co-authored with Julie Gonzalez) was published at Environmental Research Climate. The paper summarizes our efforts to understand the social consequences of wildfires after the LA Wildfires in January 2025. Our goal was to study the ways that people personally and collectively experience the effects of wildfire and what…
