Welcome to the week.
This is our last week in office before we take off for some much needed hibernating for the rest of the year, but keep your eyes peeled for some bonus content over the next few weeks (available to Important Members only! If you haven’t upgraded yet, you get the first 30 days free so why not try it out?)
The news cycle in 2025 continues to be particularly brutal, so if you need a breather, feel free to skip right to our featured solutions piece. It’s about local climate wins to restore your faith in humanity, just a little bit. Otherwise, here’s what’s on the docket:
This Week
And more.
Thanks for giving a shit,
— Willow
{{active_subscriber_count}}+ people who give a shit got this post in their email, for free.
🤝 Become an Important Member
We’re 100% independent and proudly supported by readers like you.
Members get a 30 day free trial to:
Ad-free everything
Your What Can I Do? profile: get and keep track of personalized action steps, connect with other Shit Givers
Vibe Check: Our news homepage, curated daily just for you. Never doomscroll again, thx
Seriously?: The frameworks, models, history, and pop culture we use to understand what’s happening now and next
Half Baked: Weekly briefs to help you think and act on specific, timely issues as they happen
Not Important: My favorite books, art, movies, music, apps, and more that have nothing to do with the jet stream slowing down
Lifetime thanks for directly supporting our work
⚡️ Climate change:
Permitting reform is back on the table as a rare issue with bipartisan support (and support from both clean energy and fossil fuel industries) to streamline permitting so we can build more stuff, faster, but environmental groups don’t love it (HEATMAP)
Developers cancelled power projects totaling roughly one-quarter of America’s total generation capacity in 2025, with clean energy accounting for 93% of cancellations (Distilled)
Zillow removed its climate risk feature from property listings after complaints that risk scores appeared arbitrary, despite providing critical information about wildfire, flood, heat, wind, and air quality risks (The Guardian)
US electricity prices have surged 40% since Feb. 2020 (three times faster than inflation), driven by (surprise!) data center demand and other infrastructure challenges like wildfires and insufficient pipeline capacity. Meanwhile, states that expanded wind and solar have seen smaller price increases. Just saying. (American Inequality)
🌎Mexico’s 2026 budget claims to allocate $11.7 billion for climate change mitigation and nearly another billion for energy transition, but a closer look reveals that most funds are actually going to unrelated projects and some items are even counted twice to inflate climate spending totals (Mongabay)
🦠 Health & Bio:
Despite recent breaches of scientific integrity at the CDC, their health data is still reliable due to the US’s decentralized, bottom-up system where local and state health departments collect, verify, and clean data before sending it to the CDC (Your Local Epidemiologist)
A study of 28 million adults under 60 in France found that those who received at least one dose of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine had a 25% lower all-cause mortality rates over 45 months compared to the unvaccinated (Medpage Today)
We actually have all the scientific and medical advancements we need to detect, treat, and stop the pathogens most likely to cause pandemics — meaning the question is not whether we can prevent the next pandemic, but whether we will (Vox)
While some countries have fewer recommended childhood vaccines, the comparison the US isn’t 1:1, especially when comparing to other countries that also have universal health care, paid parental leave, and consistent prenatal screening. Context matters! (the 19th)
The EPA has nearly doubled the amount of formaldehyde considered safe to inhale by adopting the chemical industry’s preferred threshold cancer risk model instead of the longstanding linear approach that assumes even small exposures to carcinogens to be dangerous. (ProPublica)
💦 Food & Water:
Of the $12 billion in economic aid for farmers, $11 billion is going to commodity crop farmers and ranchers, thus primarily benefiting large farming operations while small and medium farms continue to struggle (Civil Eats)
Abbott, company that makes formula for premature babies is literally threatening to stop production unless it is shielded from lawsuits over infant deaths allegedly linked to its product. Cool cool cool (Bloomberg)
The EPA approved five pesticides in 2025 that qualify as PFAS “forever chemicals” under the international OECD definition, because the EPA doesn’t count single fluorinated carbons as PFAS even though they are still highly resistant to breaking down (Civil Eats)
Washington is experiencing catastrophic flooding, prompting evacuation orders for 100,000 residents in a key agricultural area (KUOW)
The federal government announced a $700 million regenerative agriculture pilot program that RFK Jr. says fulfills MAHA promises, although critics say it faces serious implementation challenges (Civil Eats)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
Researchers have found evidence that rage bait is indeed increasing polarization, and were able to reverse it by simply changing the order in which hyper-partisan posts appear (Platformer)
🌍Starlink now has 8 million users across 150+ markets, and is popular particularly in underserved areas as a faster, cheaper alternative, and has been used in places like Myanmar to circumvent government internet blackouts (Rest of World)
Surging AI-driven electricity demand is colliding with NIMBYism blocking new power generation (Virginia, for example, approved a 2.4 GW data center on the same night it denied a 20 MW solar project), and putting the US on a trajectory toward even higher electricity prices (Distilled)
Disney signed a three year, billion dollar deal with OpenAI to allow Sora 2 users to generate AI videos featuring Disney characters and will be putting AI-generated content on Disney+ starting in early 2026. Corporate-approved slop, coming to a streaming service near you! (404 Media)
People trust AI chatbots because they’re designed to be “unconditionally validating” and free of judgement, which also helps keep users hooked and generating profitable data for companies (Mother Jones)
🌎 = Global news
Some solutions near you, as a treat
🙋♀️ Vote!
Are the news summaries in this newsletter:
Last week, we asked: How do you (if at all) prefer to engagement with our long-form content (essays, podcasts)?
You said:
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Read the full essay in the newsletter (28%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Listen to the podcast version (13%)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Watch on YouTube (11%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Read the transcript separately (2%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Skip to summary/key points (5%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 I engage with different formats depending on the topic (28%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ I don't engage with long-form content (essays, podcasts) (13%)
Last week’s most popular Action Step was supporting the National Immigration Law Center’s work fighting for laws and policies that are pro-human dignity. Let’s go!
Donate to the Citizens Climate Lobby to help build the political will for better climate policy, because do we ever need it.
🌎 Volunteer your sports team to join the Green Sports Alliance and get support in reducing waste, conserving energy, eliminating toxic chemicals, and all the good things.
🌏 Get educated about delivering primary health care at scale with community health worker programs.
Be heard about increasing electric vehicle charging infrastructure in your community with this script you can take right to your local government meetings, you’re welcome.
Invest in socially responsible ventures and put your money where it matters using Betterment.
🌎 = Global Action Step
NEW: Find the action steps that mean the most to you at WhatCanIDo.Earth
🎧Why Giving Just Giving People Money Works
We are joining podcasts across the planet for Pods Fight Poverty, a campaign directly supporting our good friends at Give Directly.
Now, if you've been with us since episode 116, which feels like a thousand years ago, you'll remember when we asked one of the most deceptively simple, world altering questions ever.
Why is just giving people money the most effective way to help them change their lives and maybe even end global poverty altogether?
To crack that open I had Caroline Teti and Michael Faye on the show, two people who've spent years with Give Directly, knee deep in data and logistics and lived experience, my favorite combination of things, and guess what the answer turned out to be?
People are the experts on their own lives. You are. So why aren't they? Different people need different things on different days. So if you want them to get exactly what they need, you give them the resources to choose cash directly, and that's what Give Directly does.
No middlemen, no guessing, just trusting other humans with the dignity and agency we would expect and that they deserve. Yeah, wild idea. It works. It works better than almost anything else we've tried.
So here's the part where you come in. None of us can erase global poverty by ourselves. Again, that's our whole tagline. But literally, any one of us can lift one person out of poverty, today, right now. So for Pods Fight Poverty, if you can head to givedirectly.org/important and chip in.
That's givedirectly.org/important. And look to take it even further, my wife and I already personally contribute to Give Directly every year, every month actually, which is the best way to support a group like this, by the way.
I'm gonna step it up and will personally match the next $5,000 in donations when you use our link, which again is givedirectly.org/important.
And to get you in the spirit, we're gonna revisit our conversation right now with Teti and Michael. It's funny, it's hopeful, it's deeply nerdy, and it'll remind you why this work matters every single day.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
The Biology of Thinking Differently
Kavin Senapathy explores how we think about neurodiversity when we take a step back and consider cognitive diversity in other species.
While the neurodiversity paradigm emerged in the 1900s as a human-centered concept rooted in social justice, the biological reality it describes isn’t uniquely human at all. From crows to bees, cognitive diversity is standard in social species.
At a time when deficit-based thinking about autism and neurodivergence is the norm, and where systems are designed for the neurotypical, understanding neurodiversity as a part of biodiversity reframes the entire conversation.
The question isn’t “what’s wrong with different ways of thinking?”, it’s “why would any population evolve to think identically?”
Spoiler: They don’t. Because that’s not how survival works.
💌 Loved this issue of It’s Called Science?
Check out what else we make (or take it easy on the emails, we get it) right in your Subscriber Preferences.
🤝 Thanks for reading. Here’s how we can help you directly:
☎️ Work with Quinn 1:1 (slots are extremely limited) - book time to talk climate strategy, investing, or anything else.
🎯 Sponsor Important, Not Important - reach {{active_subscriber_count}} (and counting) sustainably-minded consumers across our newsletters, web, and audio.