1/ Once you accept that climate change is *already* making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this:
With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.
And that’s just the beginning.
Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Southern California — will decide to move north in search of better economies + a more temperate environment.
Those who stay behind will be disproportionately poor and elderly.
In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people.
(The opioid crisis, by comparison, causes 15 additional deaths per 100,000.)
But it‘s not just the south.
Across the country, it’s going to get hot.
For example...
In a few decades, Buffalo, New York, may feel like Tempe, Arizona, does today.
Tempe will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century.
Fresh water will also be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly **ubiquitous** west of Missouri.
At the same time, 100 million Americans — largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin — will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke.
Crop yields will be decimated from Texas to Alabama, all the way through Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.
“One day, it’s possible that a high-speed rail line could race across the Dakotas, through Idaho’s up-and-coming wine country and America’s new breadbasket along the Canadian border, to the megalopolis of Seattle...”
Some of the nation’s largest metro areas — Miami, New York, Boston and more — will be profoundly altered.
Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort Lauderdale, Florida, condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia.
For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in our own backyards.
The decisions we make about where to live are distorted by politics that play down climate risks AND by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature.
Until now, market mechanisms have essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development.
People have gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.
But...
As the costs rise — and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on — the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.
Microsoft has long downplayed its role in the 2020 "SolarWinds" attack -- one of the largest cyberattacks in US history -- but a new ProPublica investigation reveals that the tech giant ignored warnings that could have stemmed the damage... 🧵
2/ In 2016, while researching an attack on a major tech company, Microsoft engineer Andrew Harris said he discovered a flaw that left millions of users — including federal employees — exposed to hackers. propublica.org/article/micros…
3/ The weakness Harris discovered was in MS' Active Directory Federation Services, which allowed users to sign on a single time for nearly everything they needed. The problem was with how the app used a computer language known as SAML to authenticate users as they logged in.
"Friends of the Court," ProPublica's investigation into Supreme Court justices' beneficial relationships with billionaire donors, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service!
Here are the highlights from the reporting 🧵👇
2/ The series began with this story by @JustinElliott @js_kaplan & @Amierjeski that revealed how SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas had, for 20+ years, been treated to undisclosed luxury vacations by real estate titan and GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. propublica.org/article/claren…
3/ Then they revealed that Crow had purchased multiple parcels of real estate from Thomas, including the house where the justice's mother still resides.
Like the free travel, this deal had not been disclosed by Thomas.
This year, ProPublica documentaries explored how university expansion led to Black land loss, retraced the steps of the Uvalde shooting response, documented the fallout of the Philips breathing machine recall and more... 🧵👇
2/ “Inside the Uvalde Response,” with @TexasTribune & @FRONTLINEPBS, reconstructs one of the most criticized mass shooting responses in history, providing real-time insight into officers’ thoughts & actions.
3/ In 2021, Philips recalled millions of breathing machines. “With Every Breath” is an intimate glimpse at what happens when patients and a doctor learn that a lifesaving device may be causing harm.
w/@PittsburghPG
For more than a decade, the all-white judges of a Louisiana appellate court ignored thousands of petitions filed by prisoners, most of them Black, who claimed they had been wrongly convicted.
Efforts to expose the injustice went unheard. (THREAD)
2/ In Louisiana, all such 'pro se' (that’s Latin for "for oneself") petitions must be reviewed by 3-judge panels.
“It got somewhat cumbersome to have to select 3-judge panels for every writ, because you’d get hundreds of them,” said a longtime law clerk to Judge Edward Dufresne.
3/ So, at a 1994 meeting of the judges of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeal in Jefferson Parish, Dufresne proposed a plan to streamline the process: A 3-judge panel would no longer rule on pro se applications.
2/ GOP lawmakers across the US have been shielding their redistricting work from scrutiny by claiming 2 types of privilege: attorney-client privilege & legislative privilege, which allows members of state legislatures to deliberate in private. propub.li/3Q8FnRw
3/ Legislative privilege was originally intended to protect lawmakers from criminal or civil claims for things they said on the floor, but has come to encompass their work-related communications.
Some states have extended this privilege to specifically cover redistricting...
NEW: A ProPublica investigation has found that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas secretly participated in Koch network donor events – a breach of judicial norms that one federal judge said “takes my breath away.” 🧵👇
2/ In 2018, Thomas flew to Palm Springs on a private jet and attended a dinner for the network’s donors.
The justice was brought in, former network staffers said, in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.
3/ That dinner happened during the network’s marquee fundraising event, typically open to donors who give at least $100,000 a year.