Welcome to the week.
Happy Memorial Day! We’re kicking off the unofficial start of summer with a new podcast episode about urban heat plans (we’re clearly very fun at parties)! Our guest is Dr Minal Pathak, associate professor at Ahmedabad University and a former senior scientist with the IPCC who helped craft the landmark Sixth Assessment Report. Listen here.
And now, the news.
This Week
And more!
Have a great week,
— Willow
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Last week, we asked: What's the primary factor that makes work feel meaningful to you?
You said:
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Salary (13%)
“The day they stop paying me is the day I stop turning up!”
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Personal passion (25%)
“I believe my life journey has led me to do what I'm doing now at the later stage of my life.”
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Helping others (37%)
“I could be working in a high-stress environment for a company that sees customers as individual profit centers - for at least double what I make now - but I prefer the small mom-and-pop environment where I am now. We are actually friends with many of our clients.”
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Job security (11%)
“Today's society and job security is as volatile as it's ever been. A satisfying take home salary is at least a way for to save for a house before starting a family.”
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Social impact (11%)
“Working as a team, building relationships and communication, and working together to solve or build something new and creative.”
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Other (3%)
“It's really about matching my skills - the things I am good at doing - to a thing someone needs. Turns out being useful is one of my core values.”
New Shit Giver Rob is here because he “would like to be able to find solutions to the problems facing us as a whole.
Too many news sources always provide the problem but never the solution, or at least one of many needed which at the very least we could help at least by doing one of them.“
Absolutely — let’s do it.
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⚡️ Climate change:
🌍The global renewable energy transition is being driven overwhelmingly by China, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of new wind and solar capacity in 2023-2024 (Chartbook)
States can fill the gap in funding for industrial decarbonization through initiatives like cap and trade revenues, green banks, “buy clean” mandates, etc. (Canary Media)
🌎India is the world’s most polluting steelmaker, and is key to whether the global steel industry meets its green production targets (Bloomberg)
Frozen climate funds include $147 million for Puerto Rico’s credit unions to provide low-interest solar loans, leaving communities vulnerable to frequent power outages (The New York Times)
Edison International is being sued for misleading investors about their wildfire risk reduction efforts before the Eaton fire (The LA Times)
🦠 Health & Bio:
The FDA has bypassed the normal scientific advisory process to restrict COVID-19 vaccine recommendations to people over 65 or with chronic conditions (Your Local Epidemiologist)
Coal-based steel plants are major contributors to air pollution in US cities that rank among the top 25 worst for air quality (Canary Media)
Community groups in “Cancer Alley” are pushing back against a Louisiana law making it illegal for them to use low-cost air pollution monitors to push for stricter pollution controls (The New York Times)
Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP would disproportionately impact women and children (the 19th)
A group of neurology experts have developed a new traumatic brain injury classification system to better predict recovery and improve treatment decisions (The New York Times)
💦 Food & Water:
🌎 The European Central Bank has identified water as the top nature-related risk to the eurozone economy, with surface water scarcity alone threatening almost 15% of economic output (Bloomberg)
🌍 The USDA is cancelling grants for school feeding programs that feed nearly a million children across 11 countries (Civil Eats)
🌍Indonesia could avoid $4.72 billion in environmental and social damage from palm oil expansion by switching to a community-based biofuel model (Mongabay)
Wastewater treatment plants have legal authority under the Clean Water Act to require industrial customers to remove PFAS before discharge (but most aren’t) (Undark)
🌎The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute is collaborating with Indigenous communities in Panama on a reforestation project that pays landowners to plant native trees for carbon sequestration (Mongabay)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
The US intelligence community is building a centralized web portal that will serve as a one-stop shop for intelligence agencies to buy and analyze sensitive personal data from commercial brokers (The Intercept)
A student has developed a tool to scan Reddit for radicalism, and then deploys AI-powered bots to automatically engage with users in an attempt to de-radicalize them (404 Media)
The Take It Down Act banned deepfake porn and scams, although the Trump administration has indicated plans to weaponize it (Platformer)
Rhizome has raised $6.5 million to expand its AI-powered platform that helps utilities assess and prevent climate-induced grid infrastructure vulnerabilities (Heatmap)
The Chinese drone giant DJI is facing an automatic ban in the US unless it passes a national security review (Rest of World)
🌎 = Global news
Maybe AI should stick to the weather
Last week’s most popular Action Step was finding a sustainable bank near you using bank.green.
Donate to independent, non-profit media keeping us all informed on climate, climate justice, and solutions at Grist
🌍 Volunteer with Engineers Without Borders to leverage your engineering skills abroad and build infrastructure where it’s needed most
Get educated about PFAS free products and brands with this list from PFAS Central
Be heard about healthcare and food security by opposing cuts to SNAP and Medicaid
🌎 Invest in global health by partnering with Gavi’s matching fund program
🌎 = Global Action Step
NEW: Find the action steps that mean the most to you at WhatCanIDo.Earth
Together With Bookshop
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Picture a city that beats brutal heat waves with cool tree-lined streets, slashes household energy bills, and cuts carbon pollution by as much as 80%, without waiting for these miracle technologies.
That future-positive vision is already taking shape in fast-growing places like Ahmedabad, India, where community-designed cooling plans and demand-side innovations are proving that climate action can double as a public health and equity upgrade.
It's co-benefits. You've heard it a thousand times. We're gonna talk about them more today.
What can you do to help your city deliver cleaner air, lower costs, and a safer climate?
My guest today is Dr. Minal Pathak, associate professor at Ahmedabad University and a former senior scientist with the IPCC who helped craft the landmark Sixth Assessment Report.
We will explore how people-centered, data-smart solutions can transform just about any city into a climate-resilient wellbeing powerhouse and how you can start pushing your neighborhood, your spheres of influence, down that path today.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
▶ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.
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