Children Subject To Extreme Conditions In Solitary Confinement: Children in a Louisiana prison were held in solitary confinement cells in extreme heat, an emergency lawsuit filed by the ACLU, SPLC, and others alleges. On days in which the heat index ranged from 115°F to 132°F, at least 15 children, 14 of whom are Black, were imprisoned in windowless, un-air conditioned cells in what was the death row of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola prison. The conditions put the children at risk of heatstroke, and other serious, "potentially irreversible physical and mental harm," Craig Haney, a psychologist cited in court filings, told CNN. Incarcerated people and Black Americans are disproportionately harmed by extreme heat due to centuries of intertwined systemic racism.  The conditions imposed on the children put them "at substantial risk of serious physical and psychological harm due to their extensive and continued exposure to high temperatures," Dr. Susi Vassallo, a physician and expert on the effects of heat on incarcerated people said in a filing. Adding, "prolonged exposure to high heat indices places people … at risk of engaging in acts of self-harm when trapped in these conditions, powerless to cool themselves off." The children were confined to the unairconditioned solitary confinement for 72 hours during intake and as much as 48 hours as punishment, the court filings say, with no little if any physical or psychological resources. Water in the cells had, “a color, tastes bad, and would make me sick,” one teen said, quoted in court filings. “I worry about my mental health because I’m forced to be in these cells.” Another said, "The past two days, I have been alone in my cell all day. I was not allowed to come out except to shower and I was not allowed to talk to anyone." “I would not dare to keep my dog in these conditions for fear of my dog dying,” Vassallo declared. “Louisiana’s cruelty to animals laws would not support keeping a dog confined in this heat in a cage. And Louisiana law requires air conditioning in all juvenile detention centers.” (Louisiana Illuminator, The Advocate, CNN, The Guardian, The Appeal, KATC, Democracy Now, Common Dreams, Truthout, The Independent; Climate Signals background: Extreme heat and heatwaves)

Groups Warn DOE Against 'Certifying' Methane Gas: A DOE "certification" of liquified methane gas could undermine efforts to reduce methane pollution and boost the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, nearly 150 groups warned Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in an open letter, Wednesday. Giving a government imprimatur to "lower-emissions gas," the groups warn, would give cover to the industry despite the fact that "all gas that is produced comes with significant immediate and long-term consequences." "The oil and gas industry has caused disproportionate harm to communities of color," Shanna Edberg of the Hispanic Access Foundation said in a statement. "Creating a certification system would falsely legitimize a harmful industry and distract from the response we need to climate change: a just transition to renewable energy.” (E&E $, Reuters)

Kerry’s China Visit A Positive Step For Climate Talks: After three days in Beijing, US climate envoy John Kerry concluded his trip Wednesday optimistic about the restart of climate talks with China. The meetings took place amidst the world’s two hottest weeks on record, an ominous backdrop for the two largest global emitters to meet over climate for the first time in nearly a year. Kerry characterized his trip as needing to, “unstick what had been stuck,” stating,”indeed, we did succeed.” Though no formal agreements were issued, the decision to ramp up talks ahead of COP28 with a focus on renewables, coal, and methane emissions reflects a key step forward for international climate action. However, the willingness to find common ground remains complex. Chinese leader Xi Jinping made clear — via state media reports — that the country’s pathway to carbon neutrality “must be determined by ourselves, and free from outside interference.” Regardless, Li Shuo, senior adviser to Greenpeace East Asia, told reporters Kerry's visit represents a critical development in the “complex rescue operation for the US-China climate dialogue.” Kerry is the third high-level US official to visit China in recent weeks, following Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as the Biden administration seeks to broaden dialogues amongst tensions regarding trade, human rights, and Taiwan. (Wall Street Journal $, Bloomberg $, E&E $, The Guardian, E&E News, AP, Politico, Axios, Reuters, The Hill)

(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: This right wing conspiracy theory about eating bugs is about as racist as you think (NPR)

CLIMATE LITIGATION: She’s on a mission from god: Suing big oil for climate damages (New York Times $)

DENIAL & DISINFO: Europe takes aim at climate misinformation on social media (E&E $)

CRISES FORETOLD: ‘We are damned fools’: Scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come (The Guardian)

ORPHANED WELLS: Zombie Wells, Part 3: Sinkholes near old Texas oil wells may signal issues in climate change fight (Houston Chronicle), Are there orphan wells near your home? Map shows locations around Houston (Houston Chronicle), 5 disturbing takeaways from the Chronicle's investigation into Texas zombie wells (Houston Chronicle), California will cap hundreds of orphaned oil wells, some long suspected of causing illness (LA Times $)

INSURANCE: Another insurance company halts Florida home policies amid worsening storms (HuffPost), Florida man blames 'wokeness' for fragile insurance market (Gizmodo), Why Florida’s home insurance crisis isn’t going away (Grist)

GAS LEAKS AND EXPLODES: Gas leaked from faulty fitting at Pennsylvania chocolate factory where 7 died in blast, report says (NBCPhiladelphia Inquirer), 1 man is dead and 48 are injured after a suspected gas explosion in downtown Johannesburg (AP)

EPA: Questions trail EPA retreat from Cancer Alley probe (E&E $), Sierra Club challenges EPA ozone standard approval for Detroit (E&E $), Upcoming EPA air rule will guide state action on climate (E&E $)

DOE: DOE commits $150M to contractor-training grants, expanding residential energy efficiency efforts (Utility Dive), DOE declines to issue a rule for LNG export application reviews (Politico Pro $)

DOI: A proposed national monument in Arizona impacts Utah ranchers, energy (Deseret News), This national park is so wild, it has no roads. now some want to mine outside its gates. (Washington Post $), White House to announce first Gulf of Mexico offshore wind auction (Politico Pro $)

WHITE HOUSE: How Biden steered climate money to red states (E&E News), VP Harris, Israel announce $70M climate investment (E&E $), Biden pushes a strong role for unions in tech jobs, even as potential strikes are on the horizon (AP)

THE HILL: Climate activists arrested on Capitol Hill (E&E $)

HOUSE: Plant a trillion trees and pump that gas, House speaker says (Gizmodo)

POLITICS: These governors said no thanks to federal climate money (Washington Post $)

ELECTIONS: Climate change and extreme weather big yawns for GOP (E&E News), The world is burning from a record heat wave. GOP presidential candidates are shrugging (The Hill), Trump’s energy industry donors defect to his primary rivals (Politico)

CITIES AND STATES: Declaring natural gas ‘green energy’ in chicken bill violated Ohio constitution, groups argue (Energy News Network), Scientists test South Side air, rain to find ways to tackle climate-related problems (Chicago Sun-Times), Summit, Public Service Commission negotiating gas bill late fees, shutoff (Arkansas Online)

• ALABAMA: Birmingham public transit inches forward with federal help, and no state funding (Inside Climate News), A Black man was elected mayor in rural Alabama, but the white town leaders won’t let him serve (Capital B News)

IMPACTS: US hit by blazing heat, smoky air, tropical storm all at once (Reuters), Europe battles heat wave and fires, record temperatures scorch China (Reuters), A powerful storm sweeps Croatia and Slovenia after days of heat, killing at least 4 people (AP), As seas get hotter, south Florida gets slammed by an ocean heat wave (NPR), Climate change menaces China's ancient heritage sites (Reuters), Floodwaters lap walls of India’s Taj Mahal; heat index in Iran tops 150°f (Democracy Now), Global warming is bringing more change than just heat (New York Times $), What Everest tells us about climate change (Context)

• SUMMER CAMP: Welcome to summer camp! You can play outside for 15 minutes. (Wall Street Journal $), A new summer camp activity: Dealing with extreme weather (New York Times $)

HEAT: Here’s where global heat records stand so far in July (New York Times $), Here’s how the world is dealing with extreme heat (Washington Post PHOTOS $), Extreme heat is ramping up all over the world. So are solutions. (Grist), How extreme heat can affect your health (Wall Street Journal $), What is supercharging the global heat? – video explainer (The Guardian), Is it safe to go outside? How to navigate this cruel summer. (New York Times $), A stagnant jet stream is fueling intense heat worldwide. could climate change be to blame? (Yale Environment 360), How El Nino is helping drive heatwaves and extreme weather (Reuters, explainer), WHO urges governments to set up surveillance for people at risk from heatwaves (Reuters)

• US: 116 degrees at night: Death Valley’s extreme heat goes off the charts from climate change (LA Times $), Extreme heat indices above 105°F to hit 80 million people in U.S. (Axios), Passengers pass out as Vegas flight stranded in 111 degree heat on tarmac (The IndependentThe Hill), With record heat expected, these 5 maps show what’s to come across the US (Washington Post $), Phoenix fire captain discusses what it's like to work as the city breaks heat records (NPR), Seniors are migrating to states that face America’s most extreme heat (Washington Post $), Worse air quality in L.A. expected during heat wave. Why do high temperatures cause more smog? (LA Times $), 
• EUROPE: Europe battles heat and fires; sweltering temperatures scorch China, US (ReutersWall Street Journal $), Heatwave-linked pollution sees Spanish city urge less car use (Reuters), 
• AFRICA: Zambia braces for El Nino-induced electricity supply crunch (Bloomberg $)

WILDFIRES: Canadian wildfires hit Indigenous communities hard, threatening their land and culture (AP), Canada wildfires devour land, vault CO2 emissions higher (AxiosDemocracy Now), EU sends water bombers to help fight wildfires around Athens (The Guardian), Residents count the cost of Greek wildfire (AP), A Croatian firefighter has died in a storm that swept the Balkans, bringing the toll to 6 dead (AP), ‘Fighting a losing battle’: Waves of wildfires leave Canada’s volunteer firefighters drained (The Guardian)

FLOODING: A Kentucky town still recovering from a tornado hit with record floods (Washington Post $AP), High-water rescue crews save people flooded in Kentucky as death toll rises in northeast US (AP), Kentucky declares state of emergency amid flooding (The Hill)

HURRICANES: Tropical Storm Calvin drenches Hawai’i (Yale Climate ConnectionsAP), State of emergency declared in Hawaii as tropical storm brings heavy rain, strong winds (The Hill)

COLONIAL PATTERNS: Element Africa: A ‘disaster’ pipeline, an oil-field spill, and a mining pit tragedy (Mongabay), No more plundering: Can Africa take control in green mineral rush? (Context)

REAL ESTATE: Maryland island sees rise in homebuyers despite rising sea level threats (NBC)

RENEWABLES: How Wyoming’s Carbon County came to embrace renewable energy (E&E News), More jobs in solar industry in Michigan despite a decline in utility scale projects nationally (Michigan Radio), US utility-scale solar outlook improves on easing supply chain limits: Morgan Stanley (Utility Dive)

BUILDINGS: Arizona is keeping its air conditioners on. But there’s a problem. (Heatmap $), How to keep your home cool in extreme heat (TIME), Your air conditioner isn't built for this heat. 5 tips can boost performance (NPR)

MINING: The world’s moving closer to deep-sea mining. There are no rules. (E&E News)

POWER DEMANDS: Global power demand growth to rebound in 2024 after slowdown, IEA says (Reuters), US power demand to fall despite EVs, gas shift — report (E&E $)

LNG: German lawmaker tours liquefied natural gas sites on Gulf Coast, opposes expansion (WWNO)

METHANE: Agriculture industry takes steps to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas (NPR)

OIL & GAS: Analysts expect 47 billion-cubic-foot rise in US natural-gas inventories (Wall Street Journal $), These energy companies don’t need sky-high oil and gas prices (Wall Street Journal $)

COAL: Cover it? Move it? What experts suggest could address coal ash at Claxton playground (Knoxville News Sentinel), Why heat waves are deepening China’s addiction to coal (New York Times $)

HYDROGEN: ‘Massive emissions ramifications’: Forthcoming hydrogen policy stirs intense debate (The Hill), Coal-fired Pleasants Power Station closer to hydrogen switch after purchase agreement signed, county commissioner says (Charleston Gazette-Mail)

UTILITIES: Mayor: Combined 29% electric rate increase may threaten lives (WyoFile), NYC could face up to 446 MW power deficit in 2025, due to electrification and peaker retirements: ISO (Utility Dive)

EVs: EVs are sending toxic tire particles into the water, soil, and air (The Atlantic), Tesla’s profit rose in the second quarter as price cuts spurred demand (New York Times $)

ACT LOCALLY: What people can do to address the human-driven causes of climate change (NPR)

BUSINESSES: Big companies seek new paths to deep grid decarbonization (Canary Media)

WILDLIFE: Five animals that have evolved to cope with wildfires (Washington Post $), Starving orcas and the fate of Alaska’s disappearing king salmon (New York Times $)

INTERNATIONAL: China’s grand vision for a vast rail network transforms a neighboring country (Wall Street Journal $), Chinese coal consumption hits record high as temperatures soar (Democracy Now), Construction starts on first UK-German power link project (Reuters), EU and Argentina strike gas, hydrogen & renewables deal (Climate Home), EU lawmakers drop call for cap on power plants' windfall revenues (Reuters), Shepherd wants Spain's next government to help drought-hit farms (Reuters), UK clinches $5 billion EV-battery plant as race for green investments heats up (Wall Street Journal $)

• Want to see how states can maximize federal clean energy investments? Look to Colorado (The Hill, Alli Gold Roberts op-ed)
• Washington and Beijing are talking again. Good. (Washington Post, Editorial Board $)
• Digging deep: Why oil and gas should take a closer look at geothermal (Utility Dive, Andrew Howell and Karine Kleinhaus op-ed)
• What we don't know about the health effects of wildfire smoke (TIME, Augustin Buibaud op-ed)
• This heatwave is a climate omen. But it’s not too late to change course (The Guardian, Michael Mann and Susan Joy Hassol op-ed)
• With the climate in peril, winning slowly is the same as losing. How can Starmer settle for that? (The Guardian, Caroline Lucas op-ed)
• Of EVs and heat waves (Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins, Jr. $)
• The climate is changing faster than we are (Energy Monitor, Katie Kouchakji op-ed)
• Jason Aldean’s ‘Try That In A Small Town’ is the racist anthem white folks have been waiting for (The Root, Candace McDuffie op-ed)
• John Kerry’s cool Chinese reception (Wall Street Journal, Editorial Board $)

Shellenberger, Pielke, Wielicki Using Substack To Support Themselves After Failing Out Of Real Life

Right-wingers have been attacking normal people for decades, with conspiracies, disinformation, and all manner of nonsense. What’s new is that now, with social media, they can turn disinformation into a career.

Way back in 1964, Richard Hofstadter's foundational Harper’s article "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" chronicled how "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," who are given to "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." “Paranoid Style” has basically become shorthand as a response to anyone who thought that the radical conspiracies of the Republican Party that came to the forefront of politics in response to the first Black president (supposedly being born in Africa) were an aberration, instead of a characteristic, of American conservative politics. 

Similarly, the John Birch Society newsletter is the historical counter to claims that social media has somehow changed humanity to unleash a never-before-seen undercurrent of hate and discontent. For years in the mid-20th century, the racist, conspiratorial organization printed right-wing propaganda and posted it directly to subscriber's mailboxes. 

So what's new? Social media. Conspiracy theories aren't an invention of social media, nor are hate speech, harassment, or hawking opinions that may or may not be true and may or may not serve someone's financial interests. But social media has monetized these tactics, so that instead of it costing time and money to produce something hatefully conspiratorial like the John Birch Society newsletter, the combination of algorithmic amplification and monthly subscriptions via Substack or Patreon mean that feeding a wealthy audience of idiots a bunch of reassuring (but false) narratives is now a career option for someone who's otherwise failed out of the real world. 

Michael Shellenberger basically admitted it last year, becoming the template for a dis(info-)influencer. For years after it was relevant, Shellenberger touted his TIME: Hero of the Environment award from 2006 to show that his criticisms of environmentalists were supposedly in good faith. But that schtick only lasted so long (about a decade) before he was removed from the group he co-founded, and had to create another: Environmental Progress. But that, too, was unsuccessful in maintaining funding, leading him to run for Governor of California under a 'fund the police to be crueler to addicts' platform seeking to unite both conservatives in the state and liberals nostalgic for the War on Drugs. 

He's now barrelling forward with a chaotic mix of covid, climate, and censorship conspiracies that are popular on Twitter (especially in its Musk era) and selling subscriptions to the Substack with UFO "whistleblowers" straight out of Ancient Aliens. 

He went from 'I'm just like you, I care about the environment, and I'm just a very sensible, serious person so I think environmentalists are always wrong about everything,' to 'The government is hiding UFOs from you.' Quite the career arc! 

The same fate perhaps awaits former University of Alabama climate scientist Matthew Weilcki, who's left academia and moved to Colorado to, apparently, do Substack "science" and fall for obvious parodies, while posting things like "Fossil fuels are directly responsible for ending slavery" on Twitter. We'll see, as he chases subscription sign-ups, how quickly and how far he strays from the anodyne science-y explainers denying climate science connections to things like heatwaves, and chases the clicks further into UFO territory. 

Because he wouldn't be the first. According to a note in his Substack, CU-Boulder professor Roger Pielke Jr. has been not just relegated to a tiny office (which he considers "unusable" because it's filled with boxes of his past failures) but has also now, per a July 2023 update on "Conflicts of Interest", says he has been removed from his department and has "no research funding other than support via Substack." While still tenured there, he apparently only receives nine months of salary, so he's hoping to use Substack to fill the gap and per his pinned tweet, has made blogging his "profession, not just [his] passion". 

Apparently that means a lot of friendly conversations with climate deniers and Covid conspiracy theories, while also criticizing climate activists and journalists for good measure.

And like Shellenberger's UFO whistleblower (to abuse the term) Pielke too has found a whistleblower, supposedly, though this one is complaining about a shadowy conspiracy shutting down a thoroughly-criticized climate paper, so Pielke's not yet venturing to the Shellenbergian territory of shadowy conspiracy hiding evidence of UFOs or China's supposed shadowy conspiracy to develop Covid as a bioweapon targeting white people and sparing Chinese and Jewish people. 

But in each case, people who should just maybe stop being wrong all the time are being insulated from the consequences of being wrong all the time and instead are being rewarded for it, incentivizing more of exactly the sort of behavior that left them ostracized from the real world in the first place. 

It's not that Substack is inherently bad: Independent media is absolutely crucial, and Heated and other great journalists take full advantage of the benefits of a newsletter platform. But the combination of a Twitter algorithm that rewards right-wing propaganda and the financial need to generate subscriptions is going to apply quite heavy pressure on disinformers who have otherwise branded themselves as sensible centrists to embrace lucrative conservative propaganda. 

After all, centrists aren't the ones signing up for Substacks about COVID or climate conspiracies, and how long can you cater to a rabidly anti-science audience without starting to foam at the mouth a bit yourself?  

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