"Optimistic Researchers Say There Still Time to Head Off Climate Change Before It Starts Killing Rich People"

"Despite its overall conclusion, the report stated that the climate crisis had already worsened to the point at which rich people really ought to start thinking about selling their private islands in the Caribbean."

From The Onion.

"A Cautionary Tale, Not a Triumphal One"

"This dark history has a happy ending, sort of. The Environmental Protection Agency began forcing smelting companies to install pollution controls in the 1970s. The EPA's phaseout of leaded gasoline, fought by oil company lawsuits for years, was basically complete by the mid-1980s. Blood lead levels in the population dropped 78 percent from 1976 to 1991, and crime rates began dropping dramatically in 1992. The correlation was so close it gave rise to a 'lead-crime hypothesis' among epidemiologists. The nationwide number of serial killers, whose average age is 22, dropped, too, from 669 in the 1990s to 117 by the decade ending in 2020; a 2007 analysis concluded that there was a 'robust' connection between childhood lead exposure and violent crime. Whatever inborn tendency to serial murder that seems to exist in some men may have lost its environmental trigger."

In a 2025 Washington Post article, Wendy Smith reviews Caroline Fraser's Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers.

"Is Our Democrats Learning?"

"I hate to be a tough grader on all this but that's how it looks right now. The progressive moment is still over. It's just Democrats don't seem to realize it. When they'll wake up is anybody's guess."

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot assesses the Democratic Party six months after the 2024 presidential election.

"They Saw Fires as Freak Events"

"'It was a period of almost zero environmental consciousness,' said Philip Ethington, a professor of history, political science and spatial sciences at USC. 'They had a poor understanding of the long, long history of fires, and the long ecological necessity of them. The developers didn't want to dwell on the hazards.'"

Jenny Jarvie at the Los Angeles Times tells the "story of how Los Angeles developed itself for disaster."

Even the Stars Are Ill at Ease

"The more complicated answer is that these fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance. That idea formed a guiding theme of the Biden administration's 2023 national climate assessment."

Eric Holthaus at The Guardian writes that "[c]onditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do."

Also at The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright argues that "[t]he city needs greater urban density, not more firebelt bungalows." (At CalMatters, Ben Christopher also questions how L.A. should or should not rebuild, as does Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic.)

And Adrian Daub looks to earlier L.A. writers like Mike Davis.

Dan Walters at the Ventura County Star considers the criticism of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass.

And Mark Z. Barabak at the Los Angeles Times criticizes the critics.

"A Laissez-Faire Market in Large-Scale Power Generation Won't Work"

"The story briskly moves to modern times, sketching out the state's incompetent attempt at electric market deregulation at the turn of the new millennium. Politicians and regulators were played for chumps by Wall Street sharpies, and PG&E customers suffered rolling blackouts as the not-quite-free market failed to provide a reliable supply of electricity. 'It was arguably one of the most complicated heists ever undertaken in California,' Blunt writes."

Russ Mitchell at the Los Angeles Times reviews Katherine Blunt's California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America's Power Grid.

And the Times runs an excerpt from Blunt's book.

"Ultimately, Too Many Otherwise Persuadable Voters Have Become Convinced That Democrats Neither Understand Nor Reflect Their Values"

"In the most provocative segment of the entire book, Orwell also cites 'the horrible, the really disquieting prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.' And he notes the prospectus for a summer Socialist school in which attendees are asked if they prefer a vegetarian diet."

Jeff Greenfield at Politico writes about "How Orwell Diagnosed Democrats' Culture War Problem Decades Ago."

And Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot offer to "Fix the Democratic Brand."

Get the Lead Out

"Put all this together and you have an astonishing body of evidence. We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century."

In a 2013 Mother Jones article, Kevin Drum lays out the lead-crime hypothesis.

"A Fight L.A. Has Picked and Won for 150 Years"

"Climate was what L.A. sold, and really, for years, that's all it had to sell. Far into the 19th century, L.A. was a scruffy village of dust and mayhem—but just look up, the new Angelenos insisted. Look at our fine mountains, breathe our air, fragrant (eventually) with citrus blossoms. Look at us—in shirtsleeves, in the winter!"

In the Los Angeles Times, Patt Morrison writes that Los Angeles "made its first fortune by selling winter."

"Twenty-Five Years Later, the Once Distant Deadline Is Here"

"In early 1995, Amazon was less than a year old, Apple was in the doldrums, Microsoft had yet to launch Windows 95, and almost no one had a mobile phone. But Sale, who for years had been churning out books complaining about modernity and urging a return to a subsistence economy, felt that computer technology would make life worse for humans. Sale had even channeled the Luddites at a January event in New York City where he attacked an IBM PC with a 10-pound sledgehammer. It took him two blows to vanquish the object, after which he took a bow and sat down, deeply satisfied." 

At Wired, Stephen Levy tells the story of a bet that "was a showdown between two fiercely opposed views on the nature of progress."

Recycle and Die

"Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic—even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic.
"Smith said what it did was make all plastic look recyclable.
"'The consumers were confused,' Smith says. 'It totally undermined our credibility, undermined what we knew was the truth in our community, not the truth from a lobbying group out of D.C.'
"But the lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith's community too. A report given to top officials at the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1993 told them about the problems.
"'The code is being misused,' it says bluntly. 'Companies are using it as a 'green' marketing tool.'"

Laura Sullivan at NPR writes about how oil companies "sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work—that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled—all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic."

"'Real Solutions Can't Wait'"

"Despite a mountainous climb ahead, Mr Hawkins is bullish.
"'We will take our case to the voters. We are running out of time on the life-or-death issues of the pandemic, racism, economic inequality, climate, and nuclear arms.'"

Louise Boyle at The Independent discusses presumptive Green Party presidential nominee Howie Hawkins.

And also in The Independent, Hawkins makes his case.

"The Modern GOP Has Made the Left's Case for It"

"Republicans used to have some plausible deniability when the left accused them of racism, corruption, privileging the rich, or wanting to criminalize poverty. Ronald Reagan knew not to say in public the explicitly racist things he said to Nixon on the phone. Trump has stripped that veneer and proved every one of those charges not just right but undeniable." 

Lili Loofbourow at Slate looks at the current state of the Democratic Party.

"How Many People Must Live in the Street Before We Can Build New Homes?"

"Apartment bans are a case of rich vs. poor, longtime resident vs. newcomer, and, all too often, white vs. black, but they are something else too: generational warfare, a showdown in which older homeowners are telling younger renters that there's no more room. Seen that way, the housing affordability crisis serves as a useful framework for understanding a handful of urgent American issues that have stalled out, particularly intraparty conflicts on the left like those over student debt and climate change. Whether by intention or simply in effect, it has begun to feel like the politics of an older generation saying, 'Fuck you, I got mine.'"

Henry Grabar at Slate argues that "[l]ike college debt and climate change, the housing affordability crisis is generational warfare."

"Nationalise the Oil Companies"

"Take ExxonMobil, which plans to pump an astonishing 25% more oil and gas in 2025 than it did in 2017. As that well-known bastion of eco-socialism, the Economist, puts it: 'If the rest of the industry pursues even modest growth, the consequence for the climate could be disastrous,' adding that 'the market cannot solve climate change by itself'. According to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we wish to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels–beyond which climate disasters multiply–then oil and gas production has to fall by 20% by 2030, and 55% by 2050. However, the economic self-interest and political power of the fossil fuel industry is deliberately sabotaging this goal."

Owen Jones at The Guardian writes that as long as energy companies and banks "remain under private ownership on a global scale, humanity's future will be threatened."

"Older Americans Are Standing in the Way of Action"

"The ruling gerontocracy won't make it easy for younger Americans to translate their political energy into policy. HuffPost’s Michael Hobbs argued earlier this month that age may be the defining split in our democracy. Older Americans, he noted, are more likely to vote in elections and three times as likely to donate to political campaigns. They also tend to live in smaller rural states, giving them disproportionate influence in the Electoral College and the Senate. 'Without a dramatic increase in immigration or a sudden doubling of the birth rate, this is likely to be a permanent shift,' Hobbs wrote."

At The New Republic, Matt Ford argues that "global warming is every bit as frightening to millennials as the Vietnam War was to boomers."

"Malthus May Have Been Less Wrong Than He Was Hasty"

"Regardless, the far right need not wait for future food shortages to cast climate science as a rationale for ultranationalism. Even in our present era of indefensibly ill-distributed abundance, one can credibly claim that the Third World's growing affluence poses an existential threat to our own. After all, China's share of global carbon emissions is twice that of the U.S. and rapidly rising. And while India's carbon footprint is currently relatively small, it's poised to explode in the coming decades, as the Earth's second-most populous country continues to industrialize. If you accept the consensus projections for carbon emissions over the next half-century—but reject the idea that all human lives have inherent value (as, by all appearances, many of our current leaders do)—you can argue somewhat coherently that sustaining the American 'way of life' requires keeping the Global South down."

Eric Levitz at New York worries about a far-right embrace of the politics of climate change.

"It Pales in Comparison to Ours"

"This is why some Greens say the 2020 presidential race is not a challenge so much as an opportunity to expose Democrats. 'There is this growing cafeteria socialism where Democrats pick and choose elements here and there and put them on a platter because they sound conducive to running a progressive-sounding campaign,' Hunter said. 'If you are espousing Medicare for All and free college for everyone, but ultimately still allowing for capitalist interests to run amok… then you are not a socialist. You're just running on a platform that draws people in falsely.'"

Emily Atkin at The New Republic discusses left-wing disputes over the Green New Deal.

"This Goes Back to Hamilton, the Daddy of It All"

"'From its very beginning, the United States again and again enacted policies to shift its economy onto a new growth direction—toward a new economic space of opportunity,' argues Concrete Economics, a book by Cohen and DeLong that appears on the reading list. 'Yes, there was an "invisible hand" … But the invisible hand was repeatedly lifted at the elbow by the government, and re-placed in a new position from where it could go on to perform its magic.'"

Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic portrays the Green New Deal as "a leftist resurrection of federal industrial policy."

"Stop Thinking Like Individuals"

"If affordable mass transit isn't available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won't opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than through power and politics."

In a 2017 Guardian article, Martin Lukacs argues that "it's only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis."