Mark Lubell
@envpolicycenter.bsky.social
Professor Mark Lubell co-directs the UC Davis Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior. Water, agriculture, climate, conservation, social science. Thinkology. Advocate for truth and evidence. https://environmentalpolicy.ucdavis.edu/
The conventional wisdom is the Democrats' big climate law failed to deliver votes and then died. That's wrong. My new study finds its factories moved 2.5 million votes—more than Trump's margin. And the law's still alive. My latest in @theatlantic.com. Gift link! www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Bidenomics Was More Successful Than People Think
Conventional wisdom holds that Joe Biden’s bet on climate investment was a bust. The data suggest otherwise.
theatlantic.com
HUGE win for investments across the country to tackle the climate crisis and huge loss for Lee Zeldin and Donald Trump. Court orders the EPA to make good on a congressional appropriation of $20 billion in climate grant funding. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/c...
Appeals Court Says E.P.A. Cannot Block Billions in Climate Grants
The funds have been frozen since early in President Trump’s second term.
nytimes.com
New essay + research from @leahstokes.bsky.social finds that congressional districts that received Biden's clean energy factory investments swung 1.5% to Dems relative to those that didn't. This amounts to 2.5 million votes - larger than Trump's victory margin. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Bidenomics Was More Successful Than People Think
Conventional wisdom holds that Joe Biden’s bet on climate investment was a bust. The data suggest otherwise.
theatlantic.com
I do a lot of work on climate adaptation. I think the human species will survive. The questions are: how much death? What scale of economic damages? And who will suffers these deaths and damages? Unmanaged retreat will be worse on all these dimensions. www.cnn.com/2026/08/05/c...
Want to be first to escape a hurricane? This new company is selling seats on private planes | CNN
When the next hurricane heads toward Florida, some people won’t join the lines of traffic slowly snaking out of neighborhoods, they won’t need to worry about gas, or where they should head. Instead, t...
cnn.com
And so it begins. In Climate Dystopia, the rich get to survive whilst everyone else drowns, burns and dies from heat illness. Or does it? Are we going to let them get away with this? Or are we going to fight? 🤔
CNN@cnn.com · 2h agoA new company called PriorityEvac, which launched in June, is offering private evacuation flights from Florida’s coasts. For $1,250 a year, a member is guaranteed a spot aboard an Airbus A320 aircraft to Atlanta for a maximum of two hurricanes per season. https://cnn.it/4cpbgkr
Even rivers with strong international institutions are fragile in the face of climate change. apnews.com/article/danu.... No surprise to see graphs like the one below, with climate change being visible early.
Here's how the midterms are shaping up. The outcome will determine how much room Trump will have in his campaign to eliminate environmental safeguards and kneecap clean energy. legal-planet.org/2026/08/03/e...
Election 2026: Three Months to Go - Legal Planet
SummaryAggressive gerrymandering has given Republicans a better chance of holding control of the House of Representatives. Democrats have an uphill battle in trying to take control of the Senate becau...
legal-planet.org
Overnight temperatures are warming up across much of the contiguous United States during the month of August. Some of the largest trends are across the West, especially for daytime maximum temperatures (which I will post later). More U.S. climate change visuals: zacklabe.com/united-state...
“Some economists have warned that disruption due to the Rhine’s low water levels could shave as much as 0.2 percentage points off German growth.” Net Zero is much cheaper than letting emissions and temperatures rip. #climatecrisis www.ft.com/content/e5cb...
Rhine drought strands ships and forces German production cuts
Water level of crucial trade river has fallen to match 2018 record low after extreme heatwaves
ft.com
"The paper concludes by determining that the most plausible pathway to an effective social response to the #ClimateCrisis would be driven by civil society. ...if society is experiencing large-scale & sustained levels of risk that have tangible long-term ...social cost to people & property"
Dana R. Fisher (aka the Apocalyptic Optimist)@fisherdanar.bsky.social · 3d agoWorth remembering that the shock must be severe and sustained for a lasting AnthroShift: www.nature.com/articles/s44...
More prescribed burns, more just letting wildfires burn. With brush building up and global warming increasing extreme megafires, Europe has to get more comfortable with fire. open.substack.com/pub/icemushr...
Why the solution to Europe's fires is more fire
The fastest-warming continent, which seems headed for another record wildfire season, needs to do more prescribed burns--and even let some wildfires burn
open.substack.com
Water minister Emma Hardy said the UK needs to be "prepared for this new normal". Except this won't be a "new normal" because "normal" conditions will keep shifting, with droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, storms, floods and diseases becoming worse through feedbacks as time passes.
Major incident declared after large wildfire breaks out - as UK warned of 'new normal' after drought declared
Firefighters in Suffolk were battling the biggest wildfire of Wednesday, but other crews were kept busy elsewhere in the country too. It broke out just hours after half of England was declared to be i...
news.sky.com
Socio-ecological system solution to the wildfires (apart, you know, curbing the GHG emissions..)
POLITICO Europe@politico.eu · 7d agoFirefighters in France and Spain are struggling to find enough airplanes to pour water on devastating wildfires. Preventing future blazes might depend on finding enough goats.
In ten years #AI data centres will use 20% of the electricity generated in the USA-if they continue to be built, that is: dataconomy.com/2026/07/22/a... #ArtificialIntelligence
AI surge to drive US data centers to use one-fifth of power by 2035
Data centers are projected to consume one-fifth of the electricity generated in the U.S. by 2035, a fourfold increase from
dataconomy.com
The growing intermittency of…conventional nuclear energy. www.reuters.com/business/ene...
Low Danube river levels force Romania to shut down both of its nuclear power reactors
Romania will shut down its second nuclear reactor on the Danube river, the energy ministry said on Wednesday, three days after decades-low river levels forced it to shut down the first.
reuters.com
Trump’s assault on science goes beyond the ideology of particular topics like env justice. It goes after the fundamental idea that knowledge should inform decisions. One grant was terminated for keywords “promote policymaker's use of scientific evidence". www.highereddive.com/news/inside-...
Inside the federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding
In court documents, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and others shared which words they used to target grants.
highereddive.com
Trump’s assault on science goes beyond the ideology of particular topics like env justice. It goes after the fundamental idea that knowledge should inform decisions. One grant was terminated for keywords “promote policymaker's use of scientific evidence". www.highereddive.com/news/inside-...
Inside the federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding
In court documents, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and others shared which words they used to target grants.
highereddive.com
Another outing for the Silurian Hypothesis! www.cnn.com/2026/07/25/c...
If another advanced civilization lived on Earth before us, would we know? | CNN
Two scientists explored the idea that there was another civilizaton before humans, which harnessed energy and wiped itself out. To investigate, they looked deep into the Earth’s past but also far into...
cnn.com
A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine examines the current state of climate attribution science “at a moment of accelerating impacts and heightened societal attention.” Bookmark this one.
Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts
Read chapter Front Matter: Decades of data and research indicate that human-caused climate change is altering the frequency and intensity of several types...
buff.ly
Shifting atmospheric circulation patterns over Europe since the 1980s have been the major cause of increasingly severe droughts on the continent, according to a study in Nature Geoscience. go.nature.com/4x1kDPo 🌎🧪
AI generated so I cannot 100% vouch for accuracy but it suggests fires not yet hitting vineyards. But smoke damage likely to worlds most famous wines. Not to mention threatening a historical city with 1.2 million people. chatgpt.com/s/m_6a661b64...
Check out this image
View the full image in ChatGPT.
chatgpt.com
#ClimateChange is ridiculously expensive! — more so than phasing out fossil fuels. A new study says that NY State will surpass half a trillion dollars on infrastructure spending related to climate change by 2050. Now this is just one state. And one type of cost! www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/n...
New York Faces Half a Trillion in Storm Prevention Costs, Report Finds (Gift Article)
A study from a group called Rebuild by Design estimates that the money will be needed to repair the effects of climate change in the next 24 years.
nytimes.com
While shocking, none of this is surprising We have known for decades that climate change increases the frequency & intensity of wildfires What will it take for governments to act? science.nasa.gov/earth/explor...
Wildfires and Climate Change - NASA Science
Fire is a natural part of many landscapes, and sometimes it is beneficial to forests and grassland ecosystems that have evolved with fire. Many different
science.nasa.gov
What happens to #AtmosphericRivers when they interact with #MarineHeatwaves? Our new paper now out in @natureportfolio.nature.com Scientific Reports provides an answer. We assessed the impact of “the #Blob” on landfalling atmospheric rivers on the North American west coast. Here is what we found 🧵
Mangroves: 🌊 Protect coastlines 🌱 Store carbon in their biomass & soil 🐟 Provide vital breeding grounds for fish & crustaceans 🎣 Ensure food security Protecting them is protecting the health of our planet. 🔗 https://bit.ly/3RMyOsu #GenerationRestoration #MangroveDay
Interesting paper looking at the impact of farm classification in countering #deforestation. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
Small-scale farmers critical to curbing deforestation linked to forest-risk commodities
Small-scale farmers critical to curbing deforestation linked to forest-risk commodities, Çelik, Aysegul, Flach, Rafaela, van Bodegom, Peter M, zu Ermgassen, Erasmus K H J, Behrens, Paul, Henriksson, Patrik J G, Taherzadeh, Oliver
iopscience.iop.org
So many of Trumps terrible policies will cause harm that won’t be felt for years or decades, but then will cut deep into American quality of life and health and wealth: loss of medical care, environmental degradation, loss of scientific innovation and more.
Soumya Rangarajan, MD, MPP@soumya-goblue.bsky.social · last wk.“After the introduction of the Grad PLUS program in 2006, tuition at medical schools increased at a slower rate than in prior years. According to the association, the primary driver of increases in med school costs in recent years has been the rising cost of living, not tuition.”
“In the words of a former Antarctic tour guide we interviewed: "You'd see massive glacier calvings, and you'd just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering. And you'd be like … 'can you not put two and two together?'"
Jimmy Thomson@jameswsthomson.com · last wk.I worked as an Antarctic guide for several years, and came away with the belief that we need to ban Antarctic tourism. Glad to see others felt the same way.
