Today, Elon Musk, a trillionaire, pays the same amount into Social Security as someone making $184,500.
If we end that absurdity and lift the cap on taxable income, we can make Social Security solvent for 75 years and expand benefits by $2,400. My Social Security bill does that.
Thank you Big Oil and enablers. The data is out: Our planetary energy imbalance has surged 40% since 2021, hitting 1.12 Watts per square meter. We are physically forcing extra heat into our system at a horrifying rate. What this actually means:
>Every single day, the sun shines down and pours clean, raw energy. In a healthy scenario, the Earth takes what it needs and radiates the excess heat back out into the cold vacuum of space in a self-regulating loop
>Big Oil has broken that loop: When we burn coal, oil, and gas, we dump billions of tons of greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide and methane) into the atmosphere. This pollution acts like a suffocating blanket wrapped around the globe. Sunlight passes right through it to warm the surface, but when that heat tries to bounce back out into space, it hits the blanket and gets trapped
>The Earth Energy Imbalance is the difference between the amount of energy arriving from the sun and the amount that successfully escapes back into space. It is the planet's energy bank account
>Surging energy imbalance means the gap between incoming and outgoing energy is widening at an accelerating, hockey-stick rate. Latest data: Earth's energy imbalance surged by 40% in the first half of the 2020s, hitting 1.12 Watts per square meter
>That's 1.12 Watts of extra, unescaped energy for every single square meter of the entire planet's surface, running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It's the energy equivalent of exploding hundreds of thousands of atomic bombs inside our atmosphere every single day
>This trapped energy doesn't just vanish. First, over 90% of that trapped heat is forced straight into our oceans which are acting as a giant buffer. Result: marine heatwaves that bleach coral reefs to death, collapse fisheries, and structurally alter marine life. Second, the trapped energy powers the melting of permanent ice reserves at a record pace, which dumps trillions of tons of freshwater into the sea, driving up global sea levels. Third, trapping this much energy in the system supercharges the global weather machine to suck moisture out of the soil and give us devastating, multi-year droughts and apocalyptic wildfires. Then, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water, it dumps that moisture all at once in economy-wrecking floods
Rep. Keating to Rubio: "I'm sure you're aware that Ukraine, country that at the time had third-largest nuclear arsenal, peacefully turned over their nuclear weapons in conjunction with Budapest Memorandum.
And in exchange for U.S. commitment to defend Ukraine if it ever came under threat. The U.S. gave its word to Ukraine that it would defend them.
And I find this amazing. In your opening remarks, as you took us all over the world and mentioned 15 different incidents where you have interceded — 15, the top 15 — not once did you mention Ukraine when you were prioritizing achievements that are there."
Moving the world to clean, renewable energy costs less than world fossil-fuel subsidies
Worldwide subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry exceed the annual cost of transitioning the world to 100% clean, renewable energy for all energy purposes. This means that eliminating fossil-fuel subsidies more than pays for an energy transition. Let’s look at the numbers. Transitioning the world to renewables costs $6.8 trillion dollars per year. According to the International Monetary Fund, fossil-fuel subsidies alone cost $7.4 trillion dollars per year, or 6.4% of world GDP. These subsidies include $730 billion per year in explicit subsidies and $6.7 trillion per year in tax-code benefits, unpaid air pollution damage, unpaid climate damage, and other unpaid environmental and road damage. So, if we want to eliminate the over 7 million air pollution deaths per year from energy, the growing climate damage from energy, and energy insecurity arising from fossil fuels, one sure-fired way is to stop subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry.
Cost of subsidies
https://t.co/v8c1fFoPM8
Cost of transitioning world
https://t.co/c3RjxqKhcO
Video
https://t.co/d434yPOtA5
This article says climate change is “believed to have played a role” in the UK's extreme heat this week.
As a climate scientist, let me fact-check that.
First, climate change is not a religion. No belief is required. It is about evidence.
And the evidence has been crystal clear for more than two decades: climate change is making heat waves hotter, longer, more frequent and more dangerous.
In fact, science has advanced far beyond saying climate change merely “played a role.” Today, we can quantify how much more likely and how much hotter climate change made a specific event.
Here's the bottom line:
Climate is changing. Humans are responsible. And we are experiencing the impacts now. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that solutions already exist, and the majority of people care - 89%, around the world!
But meaningful action depends on helping people understand not just what is happening: we need to know how it affects our lives (this heat wave being example A today) and what we can do about it.
That’s the opportunity this reporting missed.
https://t.co/vYfPDKcWWf
I hate to admit this but Trump was right.
He said that if I vote for Kamala Harris gas prices, groceries prices and my utility bills will go through the roof.
I voted for Harris and my gas, groceries and utility bills have gone through the roof.
Applebaum: Putin’s real fear is a Maidan-style street revolution — people against corruption, demanding democracy and Europe.
Liberal-democratic language is explosive inside Russia. That is why he needed to crush Ukraine’s democracy movement. 1/
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Putin and his accomplices in the abduction of Ukrainian children. This is a global case – and it must have global consequences. Everyone who commits crimes against children must truly feel that this is wrong.
Today, we have new sanctions against those who abduct children and try to normalize it. And the pressure on Russia must not ease. Sanctions work. And the world has power. Please use it right.
From an address to the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children (3/3).
The Institute for Primary Facts in New York City just launched the "Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room" containing printouts of all the Epstein files.
In all, at least 75 career federal officials who’d played important roles in elections have left, been fired or been reassigned.
In their place are roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections.
https://t.co/rGHgBhxjLS
Callais will be remembered alongside Dred Scott and Plessy
Catastrophically wrong decisions eventually overturned
The arc of the moral universe doesn't bend toward justice on its own
We have to bend it
That work starts now -TN
https://t.co/nYIt4JSgeZ https://t.co/sjKXls4FaS
Best analysis I've read on the Roberts Court destroying the Voting Rights Act and the decision's racist implications.
A powerful opening connecting it with the deceptive use of "colorblindness."
Thanks to @AdamSerwer
Gift Link
https://t.co/DpBjIJhXkD
🚨BREAKING: Newly obtained documents show a clear paper trail of Trump administration officials planning to share sensitive voter data with an outside political group trying to overturn elections, as part of a secret agreement. https://t.co/ehhCCzys1D
BREAKING: The Supreme Court has completed its decades-long project to destroy the Voting Rights Act. It has blessed racial discrimination and further encouraged partisan gerrymandering in the Callais ruling. 1/2
Justice Kagan:
"I dissent. The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—'one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation's history.' It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people's representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court. I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority's now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act."
This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.
A Syrian billionaire needed U.S. sanctions lifted so he could cash in on $12 billion in reconstruction contracts.
In an attempt to influence American foreign policy, he proposed a Trump-branded golf course, cut Jared Kushner & Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar real estate deal for a resort in Albania, and had someone physically deliver a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican Member of Congress with instructions to take it to the White House to get the President's attention.
Trump threw his weight behind repealing the sanctions. They were lifted. The contracts are moving, the Trump family’s deals are expanding, and not a single Washington Republican is willing to say a word about any of it.
This is a corruption of everything the office of the presidency is supposed to stand for, and the American people deserve to know about it.
https://t.co/A4lQE3ktoG
In 2025, solar power grew 30%, faster than wind and far quicker than nuclear.
The battle between the two reactors: fusion (sun above) vs. fission (nuclear below) is drawing a clear winner.
The arc of energy history bends toward cheaper, leaner, faster-to-scale power.
"At his confirmation hearing, Roberts famously promised, 'to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat." The memos show something different: a justice with a rooting interest, and a strike zone that shifts depending on who's up." https://t.co/WL3GIufBii