2025-12-31 20:30:00
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Alice Wong, disabled oracle and disability justice leader, died on November 14 at the age of 51. Alice, who had spinal muscular atrophy, will be the subject of a hybrid celebration of her life in the coming spring. She will continue to mean so much to disabled people, both those she counted as close friends and those acquainted with her via social media and her writings.
“What I will do is spend my time, energy, and labor intentionally with the people I care about,” Alice wrote in a Time essay last year. And based on loving tributes from friends of hers, she certainly did.
One thing, of many, that I very much admired about Alice was her dedication to helping Palestinians in Gaza. On her website, Disability Visibility Project, she wrote in 2023, “I know that genocide is a mass disabling event and a form of eugenics.” The same year, along with Jane Shi and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, she started Crips for eSims for Gaza, which has raised more than three million dollars to help Palestinians in Gaza have access to the internet.
Alice also highlighted the genocide in Gaza when accepting her 2024 MacArthur “genius” Grant, writing:
I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle for freedom and self determination. In times of crisis, writers, like all artists, have a responsibility to speak truth to power—to say the unsaid, to think the unthinkable, to question narratives that frame what is considered the truth. Disabled liberation is intertwined with the liberation of all people. By being in community with others, I learned that mutual aid and community organizing are acts of love. I also learned that activism isn’t supposed to be palatable or convenient.
“She spoke up for Palestinians, and some people were not happy about that, and there were people who challenged her voice, that maybe her genius grant should be rescinded,” her friend Yomi Young recounted in an interview. “And Alice stood firm, and she was unflinching, and she would not back down.”
The grant was also very important to her independence, as her friend Rebecca Cokley wrote in the Nation: “It meant she could pay someone to receive the support necessary for basic functions like accessing nutrition, changing her clothes, and using the bathroom. I often wonder what her fellowship could have looked like if those basic needs were already met at the level and quality she needed.”
Alice was very attuned to how politics impact disabled people, as when she co-created the #CripTheVote movement with her friends Andrew Pulrang and Gregg Beratan. As Pulrang said, “our goal has been to just foster discussion amongst ourselves and then to make that conversation noticeable by politicians, people running for office, people in office, and sometimes to reach out to them directly and give them an avenue to talk to us directly.”
In a July 2024 piece for Teen Vogue, Alice—who couldn’t mask to protect herself from Covid due to a tracheostomy—also passionately wrote against mask bans, writing that “the mask is the unsightly marker of deviant individuals: the sick, the immunocompromised, the disabled, and the protester who wishes to keep their identity anonymous.” She also supported Proposition 50 in California, which passed shortly before her death.
When I was very much an up-and-coming disability journalist, Alice was always kind to me, often reposting my calls for sources, which led more people in the disability community to trust me. I was fortunate to be part of a Bitch Media Access series she co-edited in 2021, and when I was ranting about the University of California graduate workers’ union representatives not meeting the needs of disabled workers, she invited me to write a piece for Disability Visibility Project.
In an obituary for Literary Hub, journalist Steven Thrasher recounted a story where Alice, who could no longer eat, gave Thrasher cookies. Thrasher said he needed to lose weight. Alice’s response? “EAT THE FUCKING COOKIES!!!!” What a nice, blunt, and enthusiastic friend she was.
I last saw Alice in person in August, when I was moderating a panel discussion she was on for the documentary Life After, which explores the ways in which assisted suicide programs and policies can be harmful to disabled people. “Ableism is everywhere,” she said at the time, “and it rears its head in legislation and the way society is constructed, interlocked with white supremacy.”
And yet, it’s still so important to have hope. As Alice wrote in an Instagram post that went up after her death: “I’m honored to be your ancestor and believe that disabled oracles like us will light the way to the future. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”
2025-12-31 20:30:00
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Before the mass deportations. Before DOGE eviscerated government agencies, demoralized civil servants, and obliterated lifesaving aid programs. Before the ludicrous confirmation hearings for dangerous and eminently unqualified Cabinet officials. (Remember Rep. Matt Gaetz? He’s the one who never made it that far.) Before Congress demonstrated its craven obedience and its crawling sycophancy to President Donald Trump. Before yet another Supreme Court case threatened to expand presidential power or further undermine voting rights.
And just a day after Trump’s oligarch-padded inauguration and frenzied signing of executive orders, the soft-spoken Episcopalian minister who has been the Bishop of Washington, DC, since 2011, quietly and thoughtfully delivered a message. Her audience: the president, the vice president, and a congregation of government officials and GOP notables at the traditional inaugural prayer services, held at the Washington National Cathedral.
“I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” Bishop Mariann Budde said directly to Trump. “There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”
“The people who pick our crops, and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals,” she continued. “They may not be citizens, or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”
This was not the first encounter the first female bishop of the Washington diocese had with Trump, and it’s likely that the grudge-holder-in-chief already was predisposed to dislike her and anything she might preach that day. Back in June 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Trump—flanked by Ivanka and Jared, Attorney General William Barr, and a few other administration officials—marched across Lafayette Square near the White House for a photo op at St. John’s Church. Unrelated to Trump’s appearance, it was later revealed, police had just cleared protesters from the park with tear gas. “We have the greatest country in the world,” Trump said, clutching a Bible and standing in front of the historic church. “Keep it nice and safe.”
The Episcopalian diocese of Washington encompasses 86 congregations, including St. John’s, which was first established in 1815 and is known as the “church of the presidents.” The night before Trump appeared, some of the protesters had turned violent, setting fires in the church basement and outside. As bishop, Budde responded and expressed her support for peaceful protests.
The president’s unexpected appearance was another matter.
She told the Washington Post, “I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop.” In a since-deleted post on X, she also offered a few observations directed to the president, describing his message as being “antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our church stands for.” She continued, “The President did not come to pray; he did not lament the death of George Floyd or acknowledge the collective agony of people of color in our nation. He did not attempt to heal or bring calm to our troubled land.”
Back then, Trump did not bother to respond.
Fast-forward to the second day of his second term, and Trump’s resting-sulk-face was impassive as Budde delivered her message of mercy and Christ-like behavior. He had already signed a raft of executive orders, and 10 of them explicitly targeted migrants. She noted, “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, because we were all once strangers in this land.” Speaking of God, she even appealed to Trump’s sense of having been somehow chosen after surviving an assassin’s bullet with only minor injuries. “You have felt the providential hand of a loving God,” she said. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”
Naturally, none of this sat well with the president or his party. Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), for instance, suggested Budde, a US citizen, should be deported.
For his part, Trump was not going to permit Bishop Budde to get away with this level of insubordination. Perhaps during the service, he was already composing the fusillade of threats and insults that he posted on his social media platform Truth Social late that night. Referring to her as a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” he complained that she was not only “nasty in tone” but also “not compelling or smart.” Add to that, the service was “very boring” and “uninspiring” and “[s]he and her church owe the public an apology.”
She withstood all the vitriol. She certainly was threatened. Her friends reportedly were concerned about her safety. But Budde responded philosophically—in fact, heroically, given the temper of the times. She kept focused on what was much more important than the newly reelected president’s temper tantrum. “It’s not just the one sermon,” she told the National Catholic Reporter at the time. “We just need to continue to believe what we believe in and stand for the things we stand for—and that’s the work, right?”
It’s been nearly a year since then, but I often think that this might have been the only time the president was forced to sit (relatively) still and quiet and listen to someone stand up for the victims of his cruel policies. From her pulpit, she spoke about the qualities of mercy that are repeated by religious people all the time. But this time, facing all these powerful and vindictive people, she was not just pastoral, she was heroic.
2025-12-31 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In the past decade at the forefront of US politics, Donald Trump has unleashed a barrage of unusual, misleading, or dubious assertions about the climate crisis, which he most famously called a “hoax”.
This year has seen Trump ratchet up his often questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it. In a year littered with lies and wild declarations, these are the five that stood out as the most startling.
Upon re-entering the White House in January, Trump revealed an unusual fixation would become an immediate priority for his administration—the fate of an endangered, three-inch-long fish that lives in California.
The unassuming delta smelt, Trump said rather uncharitably, is “an essentially worthless fish” which had been lavished with water flows that should instead go to nearby farmers or help fight the devastating wildfires that were raging hundreds of miles south in Los Angeles.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an eye-catching executive order titled “Putting people over fish” that demanded water be diverted from the smelt’s habitat and towards needy people.
Experts were quick to point out that water situated so far away would not aid the firefighting effort in LA, with the small amount of water provided to keep the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta ecosystem intact overshadowed by the much larger forces at play in California, such as the climate crisis, which has spurred monumental droughts in the region.
Continuing on the aquatic theme, Trump’s first month in the most powerful office on the planet also included a bizarre tirade against offshore wind energy for its supposed impact upon whales.
The president said that “windmills” were “dangerous,” citing the example of whales being washed ashore in Massachusetts as proof that “the windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”
While there was a spate of dead and sick whales becoming stranded ashore, Trump’s own federal government scientists have rejected the idea that wind turbines placed in the ocean are to blame.
“At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths,” the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration states. “There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”
The main threats to whales continue to be entanglement in fishing nets, boat strikes, and altered prey behavior due to a rapidly heating ocean from the climate crisis, which is causing whales to have to forage closer to land, experts say.
This hasn’t deterred Trump from enacting a long-held grudge against wind energy by halting planned projects and stating that “we don’t allow the windmills and we don’t want the solar panels” in August. The president has also claimed that wind is “the most expensive energy there is”—a false claim: wind and solar are, in fact, among the cheapest sources of power that have ever existed.
In September, Trump delivered a remarkable, often fact-free speech to the United Nations, in which he said that climate change is the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, blaming “stupid people” for predictions that have hobbled countries with a costly “green scam.”
“I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word ‘coal’. Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”
But perhaps the most unusual revelation in the speech was Trump outlining how he has sought to directly rebrand coal as a clean power source. “I have a little standing order in the White House,” he said. “Never use the word ‘coal’. Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”
Coal is, in fact, far from clean. It is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels in terms of the carbon it emits when burned, which then heats up the planet, and gives off air pollutants that routinely harm the heart and lung health of those who live near coal power plants.
Black lung disease, meanwhile, is an affliction many coal miners have suffered after directly inhaling coal dust. The Trump administration axed a program that screened coal miners for the respiratory condition.
The federal government, across different administrations, has lavished funding for plans to install carbon capture facilities at coal plants to stop harmful emissions from escaping, but this has yet to be implemented in any meaningful way in the US.
In the same speech to beleaguered-looking diplomats at the UN, Trump scoffed at the scientific reality of global heating, instead claiming that scientists had just changed their minds from the planet cooling down.
“It used to be global cooling,” he said. “If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler.”
The world is not cooling down. It is heating up at the fastest rate in the history of humanity, due to the burning of fossil fuels and, to a lesser extent, deforestation. Scientists are unequivocal about this, as can anyone able to grasp a simple temperature graph.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the field of climate science wasn’t as developed as it is now, but even then there was an understanding of the greenhouse effect, and few scientists in the decades since have expressed concerns about “global cooling” compared with those warning of planetary heating.
The Earth is thought to have been in a long, gentle cooling pattern for thousands of years due to natural forces, but this was upended by the industrial revolution, with the vast amounts of heat-trapping gases emitted over the past 150 years setting us on a completely new and dangerous path. The world is now hotter than at any previous point in human civilization.
Last month, Trump announced new investigations related to the climate crisis. Not to find more about the severity of global heating and its implications—more to target those who have told the world about it.
“It’s a little conspiracy out there,” the president said at a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington. “We have to investigate them immediately. They probably are being investigated.”
It’s unclear who “they” are—scientists, Democratic politicians, the insurance companies pulling out of states because of the crushing cost of climate-driven disasters? But Trump pushed on.
“Their policies punish success, rewarded failure, and produced disaster, including the worst inflation in our country’s history,” he said.
While the Trump administration has fired scientists, hauled down mentions of the climate crisis from government websites, and banned federal employees from uttering verboten words such as “emissions” and “green”, the reality remains that the world is warming up, and past projections of this have been generally accurate.
Some of the most accurate forecasts of global heating came from the fossil fuel industry, which knew of the dangers from the 1950s onward and produced strikingly accurate projections of future heat in the 1970s.
Instead of informing the world of this peril, however, oil and gas companies instead set about a decades-long campaign to downplay and distort this science in order to maintain their lofty position in the global economy.
Trump has not called for an investigation of these companies, choosing instead to openly solicit campaign donations from them in return for rollbacks of clean air protections once he became president—a promise he has largely fulfilled.
2025-12-31 19:00:00
Bill McKibben isn’t known for his rosy outlook on climate change. Back in 1989, he wrote The End of Nature, which is considered the first mainstream book warning of global warming’s potential effects on the planet. Since then, he’s been an ever-present voice on environmental issues, routinely sounding the alarm about how human activity is changing the planet while also organizing protests against the fossil fuel industries that are contributing to climate change.
McKibben’s stark and straightforward foreboding about the future of the planet was once described as “dark realism.” But he has recently let a little light shine through thanks to the dramatic growth of renewable energy, particularly solar power. In his latest book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, McKibben argues that the planet is experiencing the fastest energy transition in history from fossil fuels to solar and wind—and that transition could be the start of something big.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.“We’re not talking salvation here,” McKibben says. “We’re not talking stopping global warming. But we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in.”
On this week’s More To The Story, McKibben sits down with host Al Letson to examine the rise of solar power, how China is leapfrogging the United States in renewable energy use, and the real reason the Trump administration is trying to kill solar and wind projects around the country.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in October 2025.
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: Bill, how are you this morning?
Bill McKibben: I’m actually pretty darn good, which one feels bad about saying in the midst of planetary ecological trauma and the collapse of our democracy, but it’s a beautiful day in the mountains of Vermont and in the midst of all that bad stuff, I’ve got one piece of big good news, which it’s actually kind of fun to share.
Yeah, I think in the midst of all the stress and pressure and sadness about the way the world is heading at this moment, I think having joy is a revolutionary act and it’s good. I think when you come outside and the sun is shining and it feels good outside, I don’t know. I don’t think we should be ashamed of it. I think we should bask it and hold onto it as long as possible because good Lord, who knows what’s next?
Amen. One of the results of having spent my whole life working on climate change is I never take good weather for granted. If there’s a snowstorm, I make the most out of every flake. If there’s a beautiful cool fall-like morning like there was today, nobody’s out in it quicker than me. So I take your point 100%.
How long have you been working in the field of environmental justice and thinking about the environment?
Al, when I was 27, I wrote a book called The End of Nature, so this would’ve been 1989 because I’m an old person. So, wrote a book called The End of Nature that was the first book about what we now call the climate crisis, what we then call the greenhouse effect. And that book, well, that book did well, it came out in 24 languages and things, but more to the point, it just made me realize that this was not only the most important question in the world, what was going to happen to the Earth’s climate, but the most interesting, that it required some understanding of science, but also more importantly of economics, of politics, of sociology, of psychology, of theology, of pretty much everything you could imagine. And so for 38 years now, I guess, it’s been my work and at some level, I wish I’d been able to spend my life on something not quite so bleak. On the other hand, I have to confess, I haven’t been bored in any point in there.
Yeah. How would you describe the environmental causes in America since you’ve been watching it for so long? It seems to me that there’s a lot of one step forward, three steps back, one step forward, three steps back.
I’d say it’s been more like one step forward, three quarters of a step back over and over again. And that’s a big problem because it’s not only that we have to move, it’s that we have to move fast. Climate change is really probably the first great question we’ve ever come up against that has time limit. As long as I’ve been alive and as long as you’ve been alive, our country’s been arguing over should we have national healthcare? I think we should. I think it’s a sin that we don’t, people are going to die and go bankrupt every year that we don’t join all the other countries of the world in offering it, but it’s not going to make it harder to do it when we eventually elect Bernie and set our minds to it than if we hadn’t delayed all this time.
Climate change isn’t like that. Once you melt the Arctic, nobody has a plan for how you freeze it back up again. So we’re under some very serious time pressure, which is why it’s incredibly sad to watch our country pretty much alone among the world in reverse right now on the most important questions.
Yeah. Is that forward movement and regression tied to our politics, i.e., is it tied to a specific party? If the Democrats are in office, we move forward, if Republicans come in office, we move backwards?
Yeah, in the largest terms. The fossil fuel industry, more or less purchased the Republican Party 30, 35 years ago. Their biggest contributors have been the Koch brothers who are also the biggest oil and gas barons in America. And so it’s just been become party doctrine to pretend that physics and chemistry don’t really exist and we don’t have to worry about them. Democrats have been better, and in the case of Joe Biden actually, considerably better. His Inflation Reduction Act was the one serious attempt that America’s ever made to deal with the climate crisis, and it was far from perfect, and there were plenty of Democrats like Joe Manchin that got in the way and so on and so forth. But all in all, it was a good faith effort driven by extraordinary activism around the Green New Deal. And it’s a shame to see it now thrown into reverse in the Trump administration, especially because the rest of the world is at different paces, some of them very fast, starting to do the right thing here.
So given all of that where we are and kind of stepping back away from the progress we had made forward, you just wrote a new book that is pretty optimistic, which is a little bit different for you because you’ve been described as dark realism. Tell me why are you feeling optimistic in this moment?
About 36 months ago, the planet began an incredible surge of installation of renewable energy, solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries to store that power when the sun goes down or the wind drops. That surge is not just the fastest energy transition play on the planet now. It’s the fastest energy transition in history and by a lot, and the numbers are frankly kind of astonishing. I mean, the last month we have good data for is May. In China, in May, they were putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day. Now, a gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a big coal-fired power plant. So they were building the equivalent of one of those worth of solar panels every eight hours across China. Those kind of numbers are world-changing if we play it out for a few more years, and if everybody joins in. And you can see the same thing happening in parts of this country.
California has not done everything right, but it’s done more right than most places, and California has hit some kind of tipping point in the last 11 or 12 months. Now, most days, California generates more than a hundred percent of the electricity it uses from clean energy, which means that at night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply on their grid is batteries that didn’t exist three years ago. And the bottom line is a 40% fall in fossil fuel use for electricity in the fourth-largest economy in the world is the kind of number that, adopted worldwide, begins to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets. And we know that every 10th of a degree Celsius, that the temperature rises, moves another a hundred million of our brothers and sisters out of a safe climate zone and into a dangerous one. We’re not talking salvation here, we’re not talking stopping global warming, but we are talking the first thing that’s happened in the 40 years that we’ve known about climate change, that scales to at least begin taking a serious bite out of the trouble we’re in.
Yeah, so I own a home in Jacksonville, Florida.
In the Sunshine State.
In the Sunshine State. I was planning on getting solar panels for the house, but then I was told A, one, it would be really expensive, and then B, it wouldn’t save me that much on my bill because of the way some local ordinances are configured. And so for me, somebody who wants to have solar panels and wants to use solar power, it’s just not cost-effective. So how do we get past that?
Well, there’s a lot of ways. One of the ways was what Biden was doing in the IRA, which was to offer serious tax credits. And those, despite the Republican defeat of them, remain in effect through the end of this year through New Year’s Eve. So if people move quickly, they can still get those. Probably more important in the long run, and this was the subject of a long piece I wrote for Mother Jones this summer, we need serious reform in the way that we permit and license these things.
Putting solar panels on your roof in Florida is roughly three times more expensive than it is to put solar panels on your roof in say, Australia, to pick someplace with a similar climate, or Europe, someplace with a more difficult climate, costs three times as much here. A little bit of that’s because of tariffs on panels. Mostly it’s because every municipality in America, they send out their own team of inspectors, permits, on and on and on. It’s a bureaucratic mess, and that’s what drives the price up so dramatically.
There’s actually an easy way to do it. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed a piece of software called the Solar App Plus that allows contractors to just plug in the name of the type of equipment they’re going to put on the roof and the address that they’re doing it, and the computer quickly checks to see if it’s all compatible, and if it is, they get an instantaneous permit and get to work right away. And then, for apartment dwellers, because there’s almost as many apartment dwellers as homeowners in this country, who don’t have access to their own roof usually, we need another set of easy technology. We’re calling this balcony solar.
And across Europe over the last three years, three and a half, 4 million apartment dwellers have gone to whatever you call Best Buy in Frankfurt or Brussels and come home for a few hundred euros with solar panel design just to be hung from the railing of a apartment balcony and then plugged directly into the wall. No electrician needed nothing. That’s illegal every place in this country except that progressive bastion in the state of Utah where the state legislature unanimously passed enabling legislation earlier this year because some Libertarian Republican state senator who I’ve talked to, an interesting guy, he said, “Well, if people in Stuttgart can have it, why not people in Provo?” And no one had a good reason, so now there’s on YouTube lots of videos of Happy Utahns putting up their balcony solar arrays.
So let me just to clarify that because I never heard of this before. In overseas, in different countries, they can go to, I don’t know, an Ikea and grab a solar panel, come home and plug it in the wall to power their apartment?
It often powers 25% of the power that they’re using in their apartment. It’s a real amazing thing and it’s for a few hundred euros. And among other things, it really introduces people to the joy of all this. There was a big story in The Guardian a few months ago following all sorts of people who’d done this and almost to a person, they’d all become fascinated by the app on their phone showing how much power they were generating at any given moment.
Solar power is kind of a miracle. It exists in so many different sizes, from your balcony to big solar farms, all of which we need. But the thing that’s a miracle about it is precisely that it’s available to all of us. I mean, no one’s going to build a coal-fired power plant on their balcony. This is something that everybody can do, and it’s something that once you’ve got the panel, no one can control. We’re talking about energy that can’t be hoarded, that can’t be held in reserve, and that essentially the sun delivers for free every day when it rises above the horizon. So that is an extraordinary boon to especially poor people around the world and an extraordinary threat to the fossil fuel industry, which is why you’re seeing the crazy pushback that marks the Trump administration.
So with the Trump administration and this bill that they passed, The Big Beautiful Bill, that impacts tax credits for renewable projects like solar, how is that going to affect the solar power industry in the United States?
It’s going to decimate it. There are already companies laying people off and going out of business because that tax credit was important and it’s, since we can’t do anything in Washington at the moment, why we need state and local governments to step up big to change the rules here and try to keep this momentum going in the States. The United States accounts for about 11% of emissions in the world. The other 89%, things are going much better than they are here, not just in China, but in all the places that China touches.
In some ways, the most powerful story for me in the book was what happened in Pakistan last year. Now, Pakistan’s been hit harder by climate change than any country on earth. Its cities now routinely report temperatures of 125, 126 degrees. The two worst floods that really we’ve ever recorded on the planet happened in Pakistan over the last 15 years. Right now there’s big major, not quite as bad, but really serious flood across the Punjab. Pakistan also has an expensive and unreliable electric system. So about 18 months ago, people began importing in very large numbers, cheap Chinese solar panels from across their shared border. And within six months, eight months, Pakistanis, without government help, just basically using directions you can get on TikTok, had installed enough solar panels to equal half of the existing national electric grid in Pakistan. It’s the most amazing sort of citizen engineering project in history and of incredible value to people.
Farmers in Pakistan, I don’t know if you’ve traveled in rural Asia, but the soundtrack of at part of the world is the hum of diesel pumps, often the cough of diesel generators because you need to bring up this irrigation water from quite a great depth to wells that came with the green revolution. Often for farmers, that diesel is the biggest single input cost that they have. So farmers were very early adopters here. Many of them lacked the money to build the steel supports that we’re used to seeing to hold your solar panels up. They just laid them on the ground and pointed them at the sun. Pakistanis last year used 35% less diesel than they did the year before. Now the same thing is happening in the last six months across large parts of Africa. Pretty much any place where there’s really deep established trade relations with China, and it’s not just solar panels.
What the Chinese are also doing is building out the suite of appliances that make use of all that clean, cheap electricity. The most obvious example being electric vehicles and electric bikes. More than half the cars sold in China last month came with a plug dangling out the back, and now those are the top-selling cars in one developing nation after another around the world because they’re cheap and they’re good cars and because if you’re in Ethiopia or Djibouti or wherever you are, you have way more access to sunshine than you do to the incredibly long supply chain that you need to support a gasoline station.
But my understanding, and my understanding is definitely dated, which is why I’m glad I’m talking to you, but for a very long time, my understanding of solar power was that it wasn’t that efficient, that you wouldn’t be able to get enough power to really do much of anything versus fossil fuels. Is it true that the Chinese have really invested in the technology and really pushed it forward?
Yeah, I mean Chinese are now, you’ve heard of petro states, the Chinese are the first electro state in the world. This stuff works great and it works great here. I mean, I was telling you about what’s going on in California. In some ways, an even more remarkable story, given the politics, is that Texas is now installing clean energy faster than California because it’s the cheapest and it’s the fastest thing to put up. If you’re having to build data centers, and God knows, I’m not convinced we have to build as many data centers as we’re building, but if you do, the only thing that builds fast enough to get them up is solar or wind. You can put up a big solar farm in a matter of a few months as fast as you can build the dumb data center.
Your question’s really important because for a very long time, all my life, we’ve called this stuff alternative energy, and it’s sort of been there on the fringe like maybe it’s not real big boy energy the way that oil and gas is. I think we’ve tended to think of it as the Whole Foods of energy. It’s like nice, but it’s pricey. It’s the Costco of energy now. It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf ready to go. 95% of new electric generation around the world and around the country last year came from clean energy, and that’s precisely why the fossil fuel industry freaked out. You remember a year ago, Donald Trump told oil executives, “If you give me a billion dollars, you can have anything you want.” They gave him about half a billion between donations and advertising and lobbying. That was enough because he’s doing things even they couldn’t have imagined. I mean, he’s shut down two almost complete big wind farms off the Atlantic seaboard. I mean, it’s craziness. We’ve never really seen anything like it.
Do you think we’ll be able to bounce back? As we’re watching all of these forward movements that have happened before Trump came back into office, it feels like he is burning it all down and not just burning it down, but salting the earth. Nothing’s going to grow there again.
Yeah, I completely hear you. Yeah. This one possibility. Look, 10 years from now, if we stay on the course that Trump has us on, any tourist who can actually get a visa to come to America, it’ll be like a Colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion. People will come to gawk at how people used to live back in the olden days. I don’t think that that’s what’s going to happen. I think that at some point, reality is going to catch up with this, and everyone’s going to start figuring out we’re paying way more for energy than else in the world, and that means our economy is always on the back foot. That means that our consumers are always strapped. I mean, electricity prices are up 10% this year so far around this country because he keeps saying, “We’re not going to build the cheapest, fastest way to make more electricity.”
I don’t see how that can last. But then I don’t see how any of this, none of it… I mean, I confess, I feel out of my depth now, the hatred of immigrants, the racial hatred, the insane economic policy around tariffs, none of it makes any real sense to me politically or morally. So I could be wrong, but I hope that America, which after all was where the solar cell was invented and where the first solar cell came out of Edison, New Jersey in 1954, the first commercial wind turbine in the world went up on a Vermont mountain about 30 miles south of where I’m talking from you speaking in the 1940s. That we’ve now gifted the future to China is just crazy no matter what your politics are.
The idea that we are ceding ground to China is not just about solar energy, but in all sorts of ways. The move of the Trump administration to be sort of isolationists is actually hurting us way more than being open and growing and advancing.
Yep, I couldn’t agree more. Look, I’ve been to China a bunch of times. I’m glad that I’m not a Chinese citizen because doing the work I do, I would’ve been in jail long ago, and I’m aware of that and understand the imperfections and deep flaws in that country. But I also understand that they have a deep connection to reason. They’ve elected engineers, or not elected, appointed engineers to run their country now for decades while we’ve been electing lawyers to run ours. And as a result, they’re not surprisingly better at building stuff. And so they have. And I think now, they’re using that to build a kind of moral legitimacy in the world. If the biggest problem the world faces turns out to be climate change, and I have no doubt that it is, then China’s going to be the global leader in this fight because we’ve just walked away from it.
Yes. The question that comes to mind when you say that is, it’s clear to me that what some climate change skeptics and renewable energy skeptics have been able to do is to wrap things like solar power and wind energy into the culture war. So now that it’s a part of the culture war, people just stand against it because, well, they’re on the wrong team. Instead of looking at the economic reality that their bills could go down significantly if they dived in.
It’s super true, but it’s also true that solar power is remarkably popular across partisan lines. The polling we have shows that yeah, the Republican voters are less enamored of it now because Trump’s been going so hard after it, but still like it by large margins and want more government support for it. I think the reason is that there are several ways to think about this. I’m concerned about climate change. I’m a progressive. I like the idea that we’re networking the groovy power of the sun to save our planet, but I’ve lived my whole life in rural America, much of it in red state, rural America. I have lots of neighbors who are very conservative. There’s lots of Trump flags on my road, and some of them fly in front of homes with solar panels on them because if you’re completely convinced that your home is your castle and that you’re going to defend with your AR-15, it’s a better castle if it has its own independent power supply up on the roof, and people have really figured that out.
So this can cut both ways, and I hope that it will. That’s that story from Utah about the balcony solar. That’s the one place where people have said, “Well, there’s no reason not to do this. Let’s do it.”
Yeah. So you’ve been doing this work for a really long time. I’m curious, when you started doing this work, could you have ever imagined the place that we are in right now as a country?
No. Remember I was 27 when I wrote this first book, so my theory of change was people will read my book and then they will change. Turns out that that’s not exactly how it works. It took me a while to figure out. Really the story of my life is first 10 years after that, I just kept writing more books and giving talks and things because I thought being a journalist that we were having an argument and that if we won the argument, then our leaders would do the right thing because why wouldn’t they? Took me too long, at least a decade, to figure out that we had won the argument, but that we were losing the fight because the fight wasn’t about data and reason and evidence. The fight was about what fights are always about, money and power. And the fossil fuel industry had enough money and power to lose the argument, but keep their business model rolling merrily along.
So that’s when I started just concluding that we needed to organize because if you don’t have billions of dollars, the only way to build power is to build movements. I started with seven college students, a thing called 350.org that became the first big global grassroots climate movement campaign. We’ve organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country on earth except North Korea. And in recent years, I’ve organized for old people like me, what we call Third Act, which now has about 100,000 Americans that work on climate and democracy and racial justice. And so this is a big sprawling fight, we don’t know how it’s going to come out. The reason I wrote this book, Here Comes the Sun, was just to give people a sense that all is not lost, that we do have some tools now that we can put to use.
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2025-12-31 06:20:17
You may have heard of the biggest story on CBS News’ 60 Minutes this year. It was a report that the show never aired. The network’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, pulled the segment, about what happened to migrants deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, less than 48 hours before it was supposed to air.
Now, editors-in-chief often, annoyingly, ask for changes in stories. I was one, and I did it. But what no editor in her right mind will do is yank a piece at the last minute, after it has been reported, vetted, fact-checked, lawyered, greenlit for publication, and promoted for several days. For if you do that, the issue will no longer be the reporting. The issue will be your management. (You will also, because of the Streisand Effect, draw much more attention to the story than it otherwise would have gotten. The yanked 60 Minutes segment quickly became available in a million places on the internet, including a transcript here.)
There are only two ways for people to read a decision like this. One: The editor believes her team is so incompetent, they were about to air a story that would do irreparable harm. Two: The editor is willing to throw her team under the bus to curry favor with the powers that be.
In CBS News’ case, we might have a rare instance where both are true: The editor, who has been hired to curry favor with the powers that be, also truly believes that her team is incompetent.
Five days into the debacle, Weiss wrote a memo to staff to explain why she had yanked the story. It lectures her colleagues about basic journalistic fairness: In order to gain viewers’ trust, she says, journalists need to “work hard.” (Why, yes.) “Sometimes that means doing more legwork…And sometimes it means holding a piece about an important subject to make sure it is comprehensive and fair.”
If it’s hard to follow the journalistic logic here, it makes sense to look at another kind—the brutal logic of corporate media in Trump’s America.
How to ensure that a story is “comprehensive and fair”? In another memo, Weiss elaborated that the CECOT story didn’t try hard enough to show the “genuine debate” about the legality of the deportations. Producers had already requested comment from the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the White House, to no avail. But, Weiss wrote, they needed to ask again. “I tracked down cell numbers for [border czar Tom] Homan and [Stephen] Miller and sent those along.”
Weiss is right, of course, that journalists should work hard to capture “genuine debate.” But the CECOT segment was not about the legal issues around deporting people to the prison. It was about what happened to them once they got there: food deprivation, stress positions, isolation. Torture.
Was Weiss saying that there is a “genuine debate” about whether these things happened? How would Stephen Miller’s view help us assess that?
If it’s hard to follow the journalistic logic here, it makes sense to look at another kind—the brutal logic of corporate media in Trump’s America. And the best way to understand that one is a quick timeline.
October 31, 2024: Five days before the election, Donald Trump files a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS over its routine editing of an interview with Kamala Harris.
January 22, 2025: Two days after Trump takes office, the Federal Communications Commission—which has the power to approve or deny the sale of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to billionaire father-and-son team Larry and David Ellison—opens its own investigation of the Harris interview.
April 21, 2025: The longtime head of 60 Minutes resigns, saying he has “lost independence” from corporate.
July 2, 2025: Paramount settles Trump’s lawsuit with a $16 million payment.
July 11, 2025: News leaks that David Ellison has been talking with Weiss about acquiring her startup, The Free Press, and giving her a leadership role at CBS if he buys Paramount.
July 24, 2025: FCC approves Paramount sale to Ellison.
October 6, 2025: Weiss installed as CBS News’ editor-in-chief.
October 16, 2025: Claudia Milne, CBS’s head of standards and practices—the executive whose job it is to make sure the newsroom abides by its legal and ethical rules—resigns.
December 8, 2025: David Ellison launches a hostile bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which also owns CNN. The sale would require approval from the FCC. Ellison reportedly has told the Trump administration that he would make sweeping changes at CNN if the sale goes through.
December 16, 2025: Trump lashes out at Ellison and CBS, saying they have “treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover’ than they have ever treated me before.” He specifically calls out 60 Minutes.
December 18, 2025: Weiss screens the 60 Minutes segment about CECOT and, according to producers, gives some comments, which are integrated into the script. Newsroom leadership greenlights the segment for broadcast.
December 19, 2025: Around midnight, Weiss lets the producers know that she has more concerns. Running the story as is, she says, would be “doing our viewers a disservice.”
December 21, 2025: 60 Minutes airs without the CECOT segment.
Bottom line: Weiss was plucked from running a small, conservative-leaning newsroom and installed atop CBS when the network’s owner, David Ellison, was currying favor with the Trump administration. Then, right as Ellison needed Trump regulatory approval to merge, she yanked a story that the administration was bound to have complaints about.
Maybe someday a revised CECOT piece will air (to, probably, a smaller audience than the millions who have watched the leaked version online), perhaps with some on-camera comment from Stephen Miller about how “third world” immigrants deserve what they get. But whatever we learn from the story at that point won’t tell us as much as what we’ve already learned.
In authoritarian regimes, you sometimes find independent reporting and public expressions of dissent. Even in the old Soviet Union, they let some of that slide. But “letting it slide” is the point. You are meant to know that what you are allowed to see has been approved by the people in charge.
So too, now, with CBS News. There are still great journalists working there, and great stories being published. But now we know that these stories will only be seen when the bosses allow it. And not all those bosses are working at CBS News.
If I were not part of a nonprofit, reader-supported newsroom, that melancholy note might be the one to end on. But luckily, because I work for Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, I get to say one more thing: We—you, me, millions of other Americans—don’t have to settle for this. We can have news that isn’t in thrall to billionaires, administration water-carriers, or corporate honchos. Mother Jones is an example of how journalism can stay independent and free even, and especially, now.
We run on donations from readers who trust us to dig up the truth and report it without fear. And right now, we are pushing up against a big end-of-year deadline. A lot of the support that determines whether our newsroom can go full bore next year comes in during the month of December. So if you can see your way clear to pitching in, again or for the first time, thank you so much.
2025-12-31 02:35:02
On Tuesday, the Israeli government announced that it would suspend the aid work of several humanitarian organizations that provide lifesaving aid to Palestinians in Gaza living through what Amnesty International and other groups labeled as a genocide.
Israel has claimed that the organizations failed to meet new vetting guidelines. However, as the Associated Press reported, some of the affected organizations have argued that Israel’s rules are arbitrary and could endanger people working for the non-governmental organizations.
The suspensions affect 37 organizations, including Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, Humanity & Inclusion, the International Rescue Committee, and Action Aid. In addition to working to meet the healthcare and other needs of Palestinians, many of these organizations and those involved in them have been vocal about the horrible conditions Palestinians have endured, including in interviews with Mother Jones. A Humanity & Inclusion employee told Sophie Hurwitz and me in 2024 that “one of the saddest things we hear on a regular basis” is that some children who are now amputees “think that their legs may grow again.”
Following the announcement, foreign ministers of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom released a joint statement condemning this decision.
“Deregistration could result in the forced closure of [non-governmental organizations’] operations within 60 days in Gaza and the West Bank. This would have a severe impact on access to essential services, including healthcare,” they wrote. “Any attempt to stem their ability to operate is unacceptable. Without them, it will be impossible to meet all urgent needs at the scale required.”
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières said in a statement to Mother Jones that while they have not gotten any official decision about their ongoing registration applications, if they are prevented from providing services, the impact will be devastating for Palestinians. “In Gaza, MSF supports around 20 percent of all hospital beds and supports the delivery of one in three babies,” said a spokesperson.
H&I told Mother Jones that its registration to operate in Palestine will be suspended, effectively tomorrow. “This decision comes amid an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, with massive and urgent needs among the civilian population, particularly in Gaza,” said an H&I spokesperson. “[H&I] is currently consulting with other affected humanitarian organizations to analyze the implications of this decision and determine the appropriate next steps.
While a ceasefire started on paper at the beginning of October that involved Hamas returning the remaining live hostages and bodies of the deceased to Israel, Palestinians in Gaza have still faced grim conditions. As of December 9, Palestinian officials have reported that 360 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the ceasefire.
This past October, the International Rescue Committee emphasized the importance of continuing aid into Gaza, with IRC CEO and President David Miliband saying that “with 55,000 Palestinian children suffering from acute malnutrition and 90 percent of the population displaced, what is needed now is a dramatic surge in the amount of aid going into Gaza.”
To top it all off, there has been intense rain and flooding in Gaza, displacing Palestinians living in tents who were already displaced from their homes.
