Exec Dir @CoveringClimate, enviro correspondent @thenation, author (Big Red's Mercy, HOT, Earth Odyssey, On Bended Knee, The Beatles) and lucky dad.

San Francisco, California
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“Nadie puede llegar a la presidencia y al Congreso de EE UU sin el voto de los latinos”. Jorge Ramos (@jorgeramosnews) inicia su colaboración con EL PAÍS con un análisis sobre por qué los 65 millones de hispanos serán determinantes en las ‘midterms’
EL PAÍS US
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Gaza is suffering the world's worst economic crisis ever recorded, with nine in 10 businesses destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people unemployed, a top UN development agency warned on Thursday. u.afp.com/S9Si
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A maior ambientalista do planeta. Responsável por reduzir drasticamente o desmatamento da maior floresta tropical do mundo. DUAS VEZES: ela fez, a direita destruiu o trabalho dela, ela está fazendo de novo.
Muita gente no Brasil não faz ideia, mas é SEMPRE assim que Marina Silva é tratada em eventos internacionais
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🇺🇳 esto:
¿Cómo puede una Organización que pretende hablar en nombre de toda la humanidad no haber tenido una mujer al frente? Ha llegado el momento de que una mujer de Latinoamérica ocupe la Secretaría General. Se trata de una deuda histórica. @sanchezcastejon, presidente de España
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Filipkowski: So Trump and Mamdani, that whole thing was not planned. Mamdani was there, and he said, ‘Hey, why don’t we go out and talk to the press?’ And Trump said, ‘Okay.’ So they went out and did it. And Mamdani was the one calling on the reporters. And the first three reporters he called on were CNN, Politico, and MS NOW, the three outlets that Trump had just banned from the White House. So he deliberately called on all three of them, one after another, standing right next to Trump. He’s a genius. He ran circles around Trump.
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Bloomberg just dropped the most disturbing investigation I have read this year, and every AI builder should read it and take it seriously. On February 28, two Tomahawk missiles hit an elementary school in Minab, a small town in southern Iran. 156 people died. At least 123 were children. The Pentagon knew within hours that it had bombed a school. The school had its own website. It was labeled on Google Maps. You could see the soccer pitch from a satellite view. You could see the brightly painted walls. Any 12-year-old with a browser could tell what the building was. The AI system could not. Inside US Central Command, personnel were using Palantir's Maven Smart System. It is an AI targeting platform running on a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract, and embedded inside it is Anthropic's Claude. On day one of the war, more than 1,000 targets went through it in 24 hours. Work that used to take a team hours per target got compressed into minutes. The satellite imagery Maven was pulling from was seven years old. The site was still tagged in the database as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard facility. The system spat it out as a recommended day-one target. Humans signed off. The first missile flew. Then a second one landed minutes later to hit the people who came to help. Investigators later found that some Central Command staff had assumed Maven would flag stale intelligence for them. It did not. Nobody had told it to. Palantir told Bloomberg the government is responsible for the underlying data. The Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation team, the people whose actual job is to catch a target like this, had been cut back before the war started. This is not AI going rogue. This is the opposite. This is AI doing exactly what it was built to do at exactly the speed it was built to do it. And a school full of little girls got vaporized because the humans in the loop trusted the machine more than they trusted their own eyes. I keep thinking about the version of this story that comes next. What happens when the system is faster. When the target list is not 1,000 in a day but 10,000. When "review" becomes a button the operator has three seconds to hit before the next target loads. When there is no human left slow enough to notice that a soccer pitch is not a helipad. We are not talking about a spam filter mislabeling an email. We are talking about a system that turned a seven-year-old database entry into two cruise missiles landing on children in the middle of a morning class. A UN-backed panel has now called it a potential war crime. In terms of children killed, it is the deadliest American targeting error of the entire 21st century. And according to Bloomberg, some of Defense Secretary Hegseth's own advisors are worried that too much public scrutiny of Maven might slow down its adoption inside the Pentagon. Read that last line again. If you build this stuff, you own what it does. You do not get to hide behind "the government owns the data." The whole pitch of your product is that speed and integration save lives. When it takes them instead, that is also on you. I am not against AI in defense. I am against AI in a hurry. Speed is the entire mechanism that made Minab possible. Every guardrail we already know how to build takes time, and time is exactly what the system was designed to eliminate. So here is the question I have not been able to stop asking, and I genuinely want to know what you think. If a piece of software helped kill 123 children in a single morning while behaving exactly as designed, what does "responsible AI" even mean anymore?
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All climate journalists should pay attention to this very important, encouraging development. @CoveringClimate extends thanks to @fionaharvey's crystal clear explanation of it
Germany sets out roadmap to phase out fossil fuels: theguardian.com/environment/…
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Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. Brilliant minds. Literary giants. Bold hearts. We are better because they existed.
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🆕7 of 9 Planetary Boundaries are now transgressed; all 7 at their highest recorded levels: Planetary Health Check 2026 finds Earth’s interconnected life-support systems under increasing strain. Report👉️ pik-potsdam.de/en/news/lates… Video👉️ piped.video/watch?v=LnpEiDq4…
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🇺🇳 #UNGA81 "I will keep championing the conviction that peace is possible. That human dignity is universal. That the power of law must prevail over the law of power. And that our common future is worth fighting for. And I will never, ever give up", last speech of @antonioguterres
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Wow, I am extremely grateful to be honored as a @CoveringClimate Journalist of the Year! Especially after leaving legacy media to start CLIMATE-COLORED GOGGLES, and shifting gears to write about climate and culture, which no one else is doing. Congrats to all the winners.
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It's time to remind ourselves what Desmond Tutu said… "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
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With respect to everyone's beliefs, this was one the main reasons I became a climate communicator. My concerns were first and foremost ethical. Respect for all humans and creatures that inhabit Earth. The way we have treated our home, without regard for consequences, is disrespectful. I've never been a "doomer" I simply think we should not put our feet up on God's couch.
The Vatican has officially declared environmental destruction a ”sin against creation and the Creator” in a major new doctrinal text. The 29,000-word document, titled Caring for Our Common Home, elevates ecological concern from a merely political or scientific issue into a direct matter of personal faith. Authorized under Pope Leo XIV, the text declares that destroying natural habitats, polluting, and exploiting resources are not just civic failures, but a 'sin against creation and against the Creator' that directly violates God's plan. This shift from Pope Francis' earlier concept of 'ecological sin' to a more explicit 'sin against the Creator' is designed to reshape how believers view their daily environmental impact. The Vatican emphasizes that failing to safeguard the planet severely harms the poorest populations and future generations, distorting the core relationships that define humanity. By placing ecological action squarely in the realm of moral responsibility, the Church is challenging millions of people to treat environmental care as a fundamental requirement of their faith. source: O'Connell, G. (2026). Vatican theological commission defines 'sin against creation and the Creator' in new document. America Magazine.
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🔴 América Latina es la región más peligrosa para los defensores ambientales. Y no es un dato nuevo. Desde que @Global_Witness inició los registros en 2012, CADA AÑO se repite la misma triste realidad El 85% de los asesinatos documentados en 2025, ocurrieron en la región
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The lesson we should have taken from the internet is that exempting a new industry from the rules of society creates perverse incentives, leading to outcomes that favor the few at the expense of the many. We should not repeat that mistake with AI.
30 years ago, we decided that the best way to develop technology was to give tech platforms broad immunity for the harm they caused, to treat "the internet" as wholly different, and untether it from common law, preempt state law. Remove it from the normal domain of law built up over generations; and put it in its own special category. Wholly different = outside of common law and state law. Today, with very different motivations, the big AI companies are asking for a lot of things, but MUCH of what they are asking for is not to be subject to law itself, to be untethered from state regulators, to be untethered from existing federal law and to be untethered from tort. Wholly different = wholly new regime, reject law as it lives in the world. They are asking for their own special regime in 100 different ways--exemptions from existing law, preemption from state law, their own regulator. If we take the threats to human health and wellbeing seriously, the last thing we should do is remove them from the normal domain of law. Instead, a serious precautionary regime requires state law, tort law, strong and strengthened consumer protection law with stronger private rights of actions, using existing strong protections against corporate collusion, decentralized modes of enforcement so that capture at the federal level does not mean wholesale capture (build on state parens patraie), and likely a federal regulatory regime that is built WITHIN an existing agency, like the federal NRC and NNSA, instead of something wholly new, to avoid the most obvious risk of dangerous agency capture, both by self-interested parties and by the post-law ideology of the EA world. Any vision that requires preemption or immunity is a non-starter, and smuggles in unimaginable risk.
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Again — Robert Reich is right on the money
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