Northern
Somalia, 1986, back in the, um, good old days
when those fleeing drought and famine at least
found some modicum of international aid. And
then came Musk.
One
way to think about the climate crisis is that we
are systematically reducing the margin on which
we live on this planet. There were always places
where humans couldn’t live: the Antarctic, the
centers of the great deserts, the high
mountains. But now we’re systematically adding
to that list, as places become dangerously
combustible, or overrun by rising seas, or just
plain too hot. We’re shrinking the board on
which we play the sublime game of being human. I
was thinking of this today because I read a truly remarkable piece
in the New York Times, the kind of reporting
that justifies a subscription despite all the
endless disappointments. It was written by Peter
Goodman, with powerful photographs from Finbarr
O’Reilly.
The
two of them traveled widely in recent weeks across
Somalia, and what they found—well, you need to
read the whole thing. But climate change and war
are making life there almost impossible, and now
that the U.S. has shut down the U.S. Agency for
International Development the “almost” is
disappearing.
For
nine days, they trudged across the parched soil
of southern Somalia, taking turns carrying their
3-year-old daughter on their shoulders.
Abdullahi Abdi Abdirahman, his wife and their
seven children sought escape from a landscape
drained of life.
Another
drought had killed their goats and sheep,
turning their life savings to dust. So they
pressed on for 140 miles toward Dollow, a dusty
outpost on the Ethiopian border. They were drawn
by the same things that had already attracted
more than 100,000 other people: International
relief organizations were clustered there,
offering food, water and health care.
Yet
when they arrived in late January at a camp on
the fringes of town, they were horrified to
learn that aid groups had abandoned the area.
President Trump had dismantled the U.S. Agency
for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D.,
eliminating Somalia’s primary source of
assistance. From London to Berlin, governments
had reduced funding for humanitarian aid.
Relief organizations had been forced to choose
where to focus their remaining money.
Let
me get my anger out of the way first. Elon Musk,
in particular, shut down US AID—boasted about
“feeding it to the woodchipper” in the first
weekend of his DOGE assault on the federal
government. That is to say, the richest man in the
world did this, under the auspices of our
government. His cruelty and his self-regard—and
his abject racism—know no bounds.
It’s
not particularly important to take out a
subscription to this newsletter—it will come
to you free regardless. But you might
consider donating to one of the
organizations still at work in Somalia, like
Mercy Corps
And
then the most piggish and self-involved man in the
world, Donald Trump, started a war in Iran, and
now the price of fertilizer is through the roof,
making life much harder for the people who grow
food in Africa (and those who eat it). And an El
Niño is now bearing down on the planet, riding on
the highest temperatures in human history, which
were caused mostly by us in the western world. All
of it taken together is too much
Drought
ravaged the most recent harvest. Some 6.5
million people — roughly one third of the
population — were suffering hunger at levels
deemed an emergency, the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization warned in February.
That included more than 1.8 million children
under 5 facing acute malnutrition.
Those
numbers have almost certainly increased given
the war. Yet the World Food Program, the largest
source of aid in Somalia, has only enough
funding to support 300,000 people a month
through July, a fraction of the nearly 2 million
people a month it was reaching in early 2025.
Humanitarian
relief organizations now contemplate a surreal
hierarchy of suffering.
“There
are different categories of starvation,” said
Hameed Nuru, the World Food Program’s Somalia
director. “We are only able to reach those who
are really on the verge of, if you don’t give
them something now, they will not be there
tomorrow.”
In
some areas, children are still getting food, but
not pregnant mothers. “Literally, it’s who dies
first,” he said, “and who dies next.”
Somalia
is, of course, a particularly apt place to do this
reporting. Trump has referred to its citizens as
“garbage people,” and he and Stephen Miller
dispatched ICE to Minneapolis to hunt Somalis. As
it happens, it’s on the fairly short list of
places I’ve never been, but one of my closest
colleagues is Somali, and she is as fine a human
being as I know, so I thought of her as I read and
re-read this piece. But as Goodman points out in
his reporting, Somalia is by no means unique.
Indeed,
the news this week of a new Ebola outbreak
elsewhere in Africa reminds us of another way we
keep shrinking the world: there are places it’s
too dangerous to go because we’ve unleashed
diabolical illnesses. As Kat Lay reports:
The
Global Preparedness
Monitoring Board (GPMB) said in a
report published on Monday
that “as infectious disease outbreaks become
more frequent they are also becoming more
damaging”, warning that pandemic risk is
outpacing investments in preparedness and “the
world is not yet meaningfully safer”.
Disease
outbreaks are becoming more likely due to the
climate crisis and armed conflict, while
collective action is being undermined by
geopolitical fragmentation and commercial
self-interest, the report said.
In
fact, it’s more or less Musk again—he made a joke
at a presidential cabinet meeting about
“accidentally” cutting Ebola funding, but insisted
it had been restored, something that—and this will
shock you—seems not to be entirely true.
In
Geneva, Prof Matthew Kavanagh, director of the
Georgetown University Center for Global Health
Policy & Politics, said aid cuts may have
played a role in leaving the world “playing
catch-up against a very dangerous pathogen”.
He
said: “Because early tests looked for the wrong
strain of Ebola, we got false negatives and lost
weeks of response time. By the time the alarm
was raised, the virus had already moved along
major transport routes and crossed borders.
“This
crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. When you pull
billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline
USAID programmes, you gut the exact surveillance
system meant to catch these viruses early. We
are seeing the direct, deadly consequences of
treating global health security as an optional
expense.”
That
margin is thinner all the time. Consider this report from
Laura Paddison about the heatwave that shook
India last week: there was a day when all the
fifty hottest cities on our planet were in that
country.
On
April 27, average peak temperatures across all
50 Indian cities on the list hit 112.5 degrees
Fahrenheit.
Top
of AQI’s list was the city of Banda in the
northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which
has a harsh, sub-tropical climate which often
delivers brutal summers.
Even
before what are typically hottest summer months,
the heat has ratcheted up. On April 27,
temperatures in Banda reached 115.16 degrees,
according to AQI, the highest temperature
recorded anywhere on the planet that day. The
coolest Banda got, in the early hours of that
morning, was 94.5 degrees…
Experts
have warned heat in India is becoming so
extreme, it may “cross the
survivability limit” for healthy
humans by 2050.
Across
the border in Pakistan, as Asad Mumtaz Rid reports, it’s
at least as bad.
In
southern Pakistan throughout April and May,
temperatures have risen far above seasonal
norms. In Sindh, daytime temperatures have
frequently crossed 44C to 46C, forcing residents
indoors during peak afternoon hours and severely
affecting outdoor labourers, transport workers
and farming communities.
The
impact has been particularly severe in Karachi’s
coastal settlements, where prolonged electricity
outages and water shortages have compounded the
effects of extreme heat. In Ibrahim Hyderi, one
of the city’s largest fishing communities,
residents say survival is becoming increasingly
difficult.
Abdul
Sattar, a fisherman with more than three decades
of experience, recalled how one of his
colleagues collapsed from heat exhaustion during
the recent heatwave. “We gave him lemon water
and rushed him to a doctor,” he said. “He
regained consciousness after receiving
intravenous fluids.”
There
are things we can and must do to make a
short-term difference. One is to provide
cooling—air-conditioning—to much of the planet.
As a study last week
from the Rocky Mountain Institute described,
Between
now and 2030, the increase in electricity
demand for air conditioning systems alone will
exceed that for data
centers, one of the
fastest-growing energy uses globally. By 2050,
cooling electricity demand is expected to match
the combined annual electricity consumption of
the United States, China, India, Germany, and
Japan today.
That’s
not optional—at this point, it’s medicine. In
those kinds of heatwaves cool air is as important
to the human body as water, or food. But,
obviously it will drive up demand for energy,
which is why, as the RMI experts point out, we
need to
Reduce
energy use and emissions through super-efficient
technologies, improved system design, and better
refrigerant management, while scaling next-gen,
innovative solutions that lower life-cycle costs
and emissions.
All
of this is possible—new heat pumps are far far
more efficient at cooling air than old AC units,
and we can paint roofs, plant trees, and do lots
more.
But
at the most basic level we have no more
important task than converting absolutely
everything we can, right away, to sun and wind
and batteries, so that we stop pouring carbon
into the air and making the problem ever worse.
And the horrible part is that we can
do this, which makes the fact that we’re not
doing it as fast as we can deeply and profoundly
immoral. Hell, no one is even asking Americans
to do with less, because that is clearly
impossible. We’re just asking them to do with
slightly different, and save money in the
process. Here, for
instance, is the latest update from Biden’s key
energy deployment expert, Jigar Shah, talking
about a new method for coaxing more juice
through existing transmission lines, which
experts call
reconductoring
with advanced conductors. Reconductoring
replaces the wire on an existing line with
advanced conductor technology that carries 50 to
110 percent more current through the same
towers, on the same right-of-way, in 18 to 36
months. No new permitting. No land acquisition.
Montana-Dakota Utilities reconductored a 15-mile
230 kV line, increased ampacity by 77 percent,
finished a full year ahead of schedule, and came
in 40 percent under cost estimate. The Berkeley
and GridLab 2035 study found a national
reconductoring program could quadruple the rate
of transmission capacity expansion at only 20
percent higher total system cost — saving $85
billion by 2035 and $180 billion by 2050.
But
we have to do it. We have to force our leaders,
state by state at the moment since DC is such a
disaster area, to actually make these relatively
small changes.
A
way to look at the work we’re doing together is
that we’re trying to build some margin back in.
Every gas car that becomes an EV buys us back an
inch or two, every furnace that becomes a heat
pump, every solar panel and wind turbine that
sprouts takes the tiniest bit of pressure off the
system.
We
were born onto a world with lots of margin,
especially those of us who are older. The size of
the game board was expanding back then, as we
learned new ways to grow and store food and the
like. But through short-sightedness and greed we
began to shrink that buffer, and now greed and
short-sightedness have become the cornerstones of
government policy, along with pure and undiluted
racism. It’s not like anyone is fooled. Goodman
again:
As
he sat beneath the shade of a mango tree, its
branches sloping toward the river dividing
Somalia from Ethiopia, Adan Bare Ali, deputy
mayor of Dollow, said his community was
suffering from troubles that had been concocted
far away. The drought was worsened by climate
change — primarily the result of industrial
polluters in larger, more powerful nations. The
war was the handiwork of foreign actors.
“The
situation has become unbearable,” he said. “The
American regime is led by a person who really
doesn’t care about anything happening outside
his gates. The Americans are not honoring their
commitment to the world.”
+Two
of the country’s really great environmentalists,
Vanessa Fajans-Turner and Ayana Johnson, teamed
up for a crackerjack essay about the
ways that NY Governor Hochul is undercutting the
state’s climate law.
The
proposed changes would extend
the deadline for greenhouse gas regulations
from 2024 to 2028. It would also replace
the binding 2030 emissions target with a
softer 2040 commitment
and adopt a methane accounting
method that makes fossil-fuel
emissions look smaller without actually
reducing them. The 2050 target remains, but
the deal weakens the pressure to act now,
allowing dangerous greenhouse gas pollution to
amass in the intervening quarter-century.New
York is one of 10 states
with binding, economy-wide climate targets,
alongside California, Colorado, Maryland,
Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. All face
similar affordability pressures, strained
grids, and federal headwinds. None has walked
back its targets. If lawmakers, who are
deliberating now, agree to water down the law
with the imminent budget vote, New York would
be first.
+Corbin
Hiar reports that a
small company that wants to inject
sun-reflecting particles into the atmosphere has
revealed a bit more of what they have in mind
Stardust
Solutions has raised $75 million
since 2023 from investors who are betting that
global warming could get so out of control
that governments might decide to pay the
Israeli-U.S. startup to spray millions of tons
of sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the
stratosphere. Its plans were so guarded that
it required scientists to sign nondisclosure
agreements before they could study its
potentially planet-altering technologies.
On
Thursday, the company revealed the makeup of its
proprietary particles. They are made of what’s
known as amorphous silica and are 0.5 microns in
size — only visible with a microscope. The
startup also shared information about the
systems it could use to disperse the spherical
silica particles some 11 miles above the ground
and monitor them as they fall back to the Earth…
“This
announcement is a clear example of why self
governance led by for-profit entities does not
work,” said Shuchi Talati, the executive
director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation
on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that seeks
to include marginalized countries and
communities in debates over sunlight-reflecting
technologies.
Stardust,
she said, “cannot create their own principles
and then applaud themselves for following them.
They cannot define safety according to their own
standards and then self-certify that they meet
them. The field requires coordinated,
legitimate, and independent research
governance.”
+Perhaps
you’re in the mood for listening to some guys
talking about the El Niño that appears poised to
come crashing out of the Pacific in the months
ahead. Here’s the
estimable David Wallace-Wells and, um, me, on
KQED’s Forum the other day. David, anyway, was
great—and I got in a pitch for California
gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer; the primary
is two weeks out now.
Meanwhile,
the crucially important meteorologist Jeff
Masters has a new account of the
rapid heating of the water in the Gulf of Mexico
and why that matters.
In
2012, the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico began
rising along a shocking upward trajectory.
Climate
change is causing oceans
worldwide to warm. But that year, summertime
sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico
began heating up at about twice the rate seen
in the global oceans. The trend has continued
into the 2020s, with sea surface temperatures
hitting record highs in both 2024 and 2025.
The shift has huge implications for the
hurricanes that form in the Gulf – and the
people who live along its shores and on the
islands that dot its waters.
Hurricanes
are heat engines that take heat energy out of
the ocean and convert it to the kinetic energy
of wind. The maximum intensity that a
hurricane can reach increases by about 5-7%
per degree Celsius of sea surface temperature
increase. So the rise of about half a degree
per decade in Gulf sea surface temperatures
per decade since 2012 may be causing a 3% per
decade increase in the winds of the strongest
hurricanes. Because stronger winds cause more
destruction, this equates to about a 30%
increase in hurricane damage per decade for
these strongest storms.
+Some
good news. A big new study found
that Americans are littering less, with a 34
percent reduction in trash along roadsides. Now
if we could just stop tossing carbon into the
air…
+New
Mexico Attorney General Raùl Torrez, in the Santa
Fe newspaper, calls on the state’s Oil
Conservation Commission to hold drillers
responsible for cleaning up their messes.
Across
New Mexico, there are already hundreds of
abandoned wells, with thousands more at risk.
Some leak methane or contaminate groundwater,
threatening public health and the land our
communities depend on. When companies fail to
clean them up, the cost does not disappear. It
falls on the public.
That
is not fair to New Mexico families.
The
rules under consideration would move New Mexico
closer to a simple standard: Companies should
set aside funds that reflect the real cost of
cleanup so they can plan ahead and follow
through on their responsibilities.
In
other words, if you drill it, you clean it.
It’s
amazing that this even has to be said, but I’m
glad someone is saying it.
+Finally,
I’d like you to meet Burrito, who according to
Warren van der Sandt, has become the crucial
employee at a big solar farm in Tennessee.
Apparently the 9.5 megawatt facility owned by
Volkswagen brought in 65 sheep to keep the
vegetation trimmed between the panels, and they
were doing a good job, but they became the object
of carnivorous affection for local coyotes. Enter
Burrito, who when he came on board quickly began
to patrol the perimeter of the site (which powers
the production of VW’s EVs)
If
unfamiliar animals approached, he reacted
immediately. Donkeys naturally protect herd
animals from threats. It’s in their nature,
despite their “dozy” reputation.
Burrito
acts as a scout, clearing “paddocks” for safety
before the sheep enter to feed. Workers said the
donkey even inspected areas before the sheep
moved through them.
Once
a stray without a home, he is now the most
essential “worker” on the property.
Do
something useful for people on the margin if
you can manage it today. And thanks
