The internet lives on the seafloor

🌏 Europe is drowning in record floods while politicians fiddle with green rollbacks and climate deniers turn up the volume (and yes, fires are next!) (The Guardian)

🌏 For example, the EU launched the world’s first carbon import tariff this year, but it’s already wobbling, with a range of actors pushing for exemption powers that could gut the very policy designed to stop carbon-dumping countries from undercutting Europe’s green transition (Canary Media)

🌎 While we’ve been guilt-tripping ourselves over forgotten tote bags, Big Oil has been deliberately flooding the world with plastic, and is increasingly relying on the plastics as a backup plan to fossil fuels (The Guardian) pssst: keep an eye out for our podcast episode with author, Beth Gardiner, to dive deeper into this story, dropping next week 👀

The AI data center boom is quietly becoming one of the biggest climate threats as a speculative gold rush burning through fossil fuels, water, and communities (The Crucial Years)

🌎 Clearing the rubble from Gaza’s destruction will take decades and generate nearly 90,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions, a stark reminder that the climate cost of war is rarely counted but very real (msn)

Hospitals that went into debt treating COVID patients were promised federal reimbursement. Five years later, billions of dollars remain unpaid, leaving an already gutted healthcare system holding the bill (NOTUS)

🌏 Tuberculosis never really left Europe, and with 19,000 deaths in 2024, ongoing wars, climate-driven migration, and wealthy nations slashing global health funding, a disease we know exactly how to cure is being handed the conditions it needs to come roaring back (The Lancet)

🌎 Indonesia has quietly pulled off one of the great public health wins of the century by taking clean cooking fuel access from under 10% to over 90% in just two decades, saving many lives from indoor air pollution (Our World in Data)

Lyme disease doesn’t hit everyone in the same way. Men tend to show more severe, measurable disease markers while women report more symptoms like heart palpitations and light sensitivity, with menopause status turning out to be an important variable (EurekAlert!)

In a remarkable turnaround, Mississippi has gone from one of the worst graduation rates in the country to one of the best, with a graduation rate of 90.8% in 2024-25, way up from 75% a decade ago (Mississippi Free Press)

As SNAP cuts leaves millions scrambling, community fridges, mutual aid networks, and pay-what-you-can markets are quietly becoming the last line of defense against hunger (bon appetit)

Iowa’s farm country is changing with anti-corporate anger over pesticides, CO2 pipelines, and a collapsed soybean market creating unexpected political fault lines (Civil Eats)

The EPA just repealed mercury emission limits on coal plants, which means more of the toxic metal ending up in waterways and then into fish and then onto your dinner plate (Civil Eats)

When Atlanta’s mayor couldn’t convince a single grocery chain to open in a neighborhood that hadn’t had a supermarket in 20 years, he just built one himself (bon appetit)

Seed swaps are a delightfully low-tech act of resistance. Neighbors trade heirloom cowpeas and wildfire seeds, preserving biodiversity and food sovereignty one labeled envelope at a time (Civil Eats)

🌏 Space-based data centers sound futuristic and green, but experts warn they could put the world’s critical digital infrastructure beyond the reach of any government’s laws (Rest of World)

What AI thinks “likely” means vs what you think can vary wildly — say 80% vs 65% — and in a hospital or a courtroom, that gap could matter enormously (The Conversation)

🌏 The entire global tech economy runs on chips made on one small island that China considers its own territory, and despite years of briefings, subsidies, and tariff threats, Silicon Valley has barely budged, because cheaper Taiwanese chips beat geopolitical anxiety every quarter (The New York Times)

The government just quietly shut down the public database journalists used to track spy tech purchases by ICE and the FBI, and replaced it with a worse one, making it significantly harder to follow the money on surveillance (404Media)

The Pentagon threatened to invoke a munitions law to force Anthropic to strip its AI guardrails, and while every other major AI company complied, Anthropic is the only one still drawing a line in a fight that may define what AI gets used for in America (Platformer)