Welcome to the week.
We’re back, and the headlines from the first two weeks of 2025 feel more like a year’s worth of news already, but we carry on.
Let’s get started, shall we?
This week:
🔥 Wildfires and climate change
🧠 Alzheimer’s and amyloids
🍎 New healthy food rules
📱 Meta swings right
And more
Have a great week,
— Willow
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⚡️ Climate change:
The LA wildfires, like so many other natural disasters we keep writing about, can be attributed to climate change, which creates the conditions for more frequent and intense disasters, in this case, due to warmer temperatures, drought, and intensified winds (The Guardian)
🌍 In the Arctic, the climate is warming at 4x the global rate, melting the permafrost, potentially releasing ancient microbes and creating new pathways for disease transmission. I love it here! (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
The melting Arctic is also why Trump is coveting Greenland, as in addition to its strategic geopolitical location and access to critical mineral, melting ice opens up new shipping and trade routes (Mississippi Free Press)
Ok some happy news, because we’re only 3 bullets in and I’m already depressed. 2024 may have been the hottest year on record, but 96% of new power capacity in the US was carbon-free! (Canary Media)
And all city buildings in Chicago now operate on 100% clean power! (Canary Media)
🦠 Health & Bio:
While experts believe that amyloids play a role in Alzheimer’s disease, they likely aren’t the complete story, and successful treatments will likely require a multi-pronged approach (Undark)
Wildfires have been a major contributor to air pollution in recent years, and burning urban areas, like in LA, makes smoke even more toxic (Heatmap)
A systematic analysis of life expectancy in the US reveals stark disparities based on geography, race, urbanicity, income per capita, and homicide rate, suggesting there are “ten Americas” with very different life expectancies (The Lancet)
The legacies left by the COVID-19 pandemic - like a decline in public trust towards health institutions and growing vaccine skepticism - might make the lessons we learned harder to implement in the next pandemic (STAT)
🌎 While attention has primarily been focused on the war in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine in recent years, conflicts have been surging across Africa (The Wall Street Journal)
💦 Food & Water:
🌎 Declining rainfall and rising sea levels could contribute to about 75 percent of coastal freshwater contaminated with saltwater by 2100 (Gizmodo)
The fire hydrants in LA ran dry as firefighters battled wildfires because they are designed to fight single-house or building fires, not fires that span hundreds of acres (LA Times)
Will this year be the year a new farm bill is passed? We are now 2 years past the original deadline, with stakeholders operating on increasingly outdated 2017 policies (Civil Eats)
Are ultra-processed foods responsible for America’s obesity epidemic? (The New Yorker)
The FDA has new rules for labeling “healthy” foods that include new limits for sugar, sodium, and saturated fat (The New York Times)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
Smaller cities in the Midwest are poised to grow economically from the AI boom (The New York Times)
AI is bringing in a new era of search, racing concerns about accuracy, the future of web publishers, and broader implications for how we access and interact with information (MIT Technology Review)
And the current state of social media continues to crumble, with story after story of Meta making major changes in preparation for the Trump administration including:
Changes to its “Hateful Conduct” policy that gets rid of restrictions on speech about topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender (Wired)
Ending it’s fact-checking program (Platformer)
And censoring stories about its own censorship (404 Media)
🌎 = Global news
From ivory tower to open house
Last week’s most popular Action Step was using Pro Publica’s Claim File Helper to find out why your health insurance quest was denied, so you can start the appeal process.
Donate to the National Coalition for the Homeless to help people experiencing homelessness find affordable housing, increased services, and resources.
🌏 Volunteer with the Measles and Rubella Partnership to help prevent childhood disease worldwide.
🌍 Get educated about how you can prepare for extreme weather so you have a plan when disaster strikes.
Be heard about electrification and urge your local government to adopt heat pump targets.
Invest in projects and companies that protect natural capital with ReGen.
🌎 = Global Action Step
NEW: Find the action steps that mean the most to you at WhatCanIDo.Earth
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