This cartoon isn't an exaggeration—not even 1% an exaggeration.
Weeks ago it seemed this far-right Supreme Court would still block any map intentionally authored to be racist.
We just learned that that's no longer true.
We have reentered Jim Crow, and it's a national disgrace.
Told you.
And this is why, as the reality becomes clear, journalists are going to be amongst the most hated people on Earth. The media has totally failed to inform and educate the public about what we face.
AI data centers will use up enough clean water for 1.3 billion people by the year 2030 according to a United Nations report.
We CAN live without data centers, we CAN'T live without clean water.
We have spent decades carefully measuring the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer while simultaneously structuring agriculture around continuing the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer.
Australia is replacing coal and gas power with solar and wind—
At the turn of the millennium, Australia got more than 80% of its electricity from coal. This has dropped to less than 45%.
The chart shows how the country’s electricity mix has changed in recent decades.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, coal was initially replaced by gas, with only moderate growth in solar and wind. But in the last five years, solar and wind have been deployed much more quickly.
Gas is now on the decline, too. In 2023, solar overtook gas to become Australia’s second-largest electricity source.
While coal is declining, it still supplies much more of Australia’s power than most high-income countries.
(This Data Insight was written by @_HannahRitchie and @parriagadap.)
The "free-range" label on the egg carton at your grocery store has no requirement that the chickens ever go outside.
The Animal Welfare Institute has found that the USDA does not actually inspect facilities to verify outdoor access claims.
What this winds up looking line in practice is a barn with 20,000 to 30,000 birds and a single small door leading to a fenced concrete or gravel patch.
Most of the chickens never see the door, and the ones that find it step into a space that may be a few square feet per bird, often with no grass and no shade.
The label that actually means something is "Certified Humane Pasture-Raised" or "Animal Welfare Approved."
Certified Humane requires 108 square feet of outdoor pasture per hen, with at least 6 hours of outdoor access daily.
Animal Welfare Approved requires continuous access to living vegetation. The eggs from those programs cost more, but they're the only ones where the bird on the box is actually living something like a chicken's life.
"Free-range" and "cage-free" are marketing terms and not much more.
Measles vaccines save millions of lives each year.
Measles used to be an extremely common disease. Just sixty years ago, over 90% of children would have been infected by it, and of those who developed symptoms, around a quarter would be hospitalized.
The US alone had around three to four million cases annually, leading to tens of thousands of hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths each year.
However, in 1963, John Enders developed the first effective measles vaccine. Vaccination efforts ramped up rapidly in richer countries, and in the 1970s and 1980s, they were scaled up worldwide.
In just the last fifty years, it’s estimated that measles vaccinations have prevented over *90 million* deaths worldwide.
Two to three million people would die from measles every year without them. This means these vaccines are likely the most life-saving ones currently in use.
At a time when ocean temperatures are smashing records and scientists are still trying to understand how fast the system is shifting under climate change, they are talking about scrapping a 368 million dollar early warning network that has ALREADY BEEN PAID FOR by tax payers.
This is not just a few sensors in the sea. It is a network of ~900 instruments measuring temperature, currents, carbon, chemistry and ecosystem change. It was designed to deliver long term data over decades.
This would effectively end key long running records and that matters because ocean data only becomes powerful over time. You cannot rebuild a continuous climate record once it is interrupted.