Blame the cows

A whopping 44% of pavement in LA is basically pointless. Swapping parking lot designs, carving tree wells into residential patios, and depaving school blacktops could cool the city down without anyone losing a single parking spot. (The LA Times)

🌍Ethiopia banned gas car imports and slashed EV tariffs, triggering a battery-powered revolution that is proving the EV boom is happening in unexpected places while the rest of us are still figuring it out. (Bloomberg)

Colorado had its warmest December on record, and the snowpack in the West is among the lowest ever measured, which doesn’t bode well for the tens of millions of people who depend on water from those mountains. (The Atlantic)

🌏 Clean energy drove over a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025, while the country installed more solar panels than the rest of the world combined and crossed the threshold where EVs now make up half of all new car sales. (Carbon Brief)

An AI powered lobbying platform generated at least 20,000 fake emails that helped kill Southern California’s proposal to phase out gas-powered appliances (The LA Times)

The FDA refused to even review Moderna’s promising mRNA flu vaccine, a move that has spooked the entire vaccine industry and could kill development of future shots for everything from cancer to the next pandemic. (The Bulwark)

🌎 AI-powered digital stethoscopes are showing promise as cheap, scalable TB screening tools in low-resource areas (Digital Health Technology)

Black residents in “Cancer Alley” just won a major ruling allowing them to argue that zoning toxic plants in their communities violates the 13th Amendment (Capital B)

🌍 Let’s look at the Netherlands as a blueprint for healthcare, with their tightly regulated private insurance system with universal coverage that costs way less than Obamacare (Undark)

The NIH just ordered its premier infectious-disease institute to scrub “biodefense” and “pandemic preparedness” from its website, and is planning to gut funding for emerging disease research, a move that makes flames shoot out of my eyes (Nature)

House Republicans have a revamped farm bill that’s already hitting roadblocks because they just can’t stop including unprecedented cuts to SNAP, even as farmers keep demanding overdue investments (Civil Eats)

Meat is bad for the climate, forests, antibiotic resistance, and might spawn the next pandemic, yet we eat more of it every year, which means we need to find some better alternatives (Volts)

Perennial crops could be agriculture’s climate game-changer because their deep root systems act as carbon sinks, unlike annual crops which are carbon sources (Civil Eats)

Grocery workers at chains like Safeway and Walmart can’t afford to eat without SNAP, because their employers deliberately keep hours below 30/week to dodge health insurance requirements, pushing workers onto government assistance while pocketing nearly a quarter of all SNAP dollars spent in their stores (More Perfect Union)

🌎Lagos generates 15,000 metric tons of waste daily (40% recyclable) but only recovers 12% of it, so startups are mobilizing unemployed youth to collect recyclables (Mongabay)

2025 was the year the grift economy went mainstream, from prediction markets to AI slop to surveillance pricing tech charging people different prices for the same items to deepfake scams hitting $1.1 billion (Your Brain On Money)

🌎 Governments worldwide are mandating social media age checks, but the tech is easy to fool, and privacy experts warn that forcing everyone to verify their age creates massive surveillance infrastructure (Rest of World)

🌏At the Munich Security Conference, cyberattacks topped the G7’s list of security concerns, with European leaders debating a shift from defense to offense in cyber ops against Russia and China, while also eyeing ways to reduce reliance on US tech (Politico)

🌏AI companies now wield economic, political, and cultural power rivaling the East India Company’s control of half of global trade in the 1800s (Rest of World)

LA County is suing Roblox for allegedly failing to implement adequate moderation and age-verification safeguards (NBC LA)