🧵 I’m on vacation this week but oil and gas never sleeps so I zoom testified tonight before the Colorado Senate Ag & Nat Res Committee.

A little tutorial about that.

First of all I’m visiting my 22 yo. So here’s what I saw on my laptop vs what was on the wall behind me. 1/

I wasn’t intending for George Carlin to send a message to the CO Senate so I began by saying that I considered this bill so important that I was testifying from my kid’s tiny apartment in rural South Carolina while on holiday.

BIG NEWS: New England’s last coal plants, including the infamous Bow plant, are closing after litigation.

Your reminder that before the lawyers, waves of civil disobedience happened here including by those who stood on rail tracks and blocked coal trains. nhpr.org/nh-news/2024-0… So much praise to those to risked arrest, risked their lives, and risked lengthy incarcerations to open a space in the culture for this legal settlement.

Dec. 2022: In another effort to shut down Bow coal plant, activists stop train in Massachusetts

nhpr.org/nh-news/2022-1…

LIVE TWEETING the Univ Pittsburgh/ PA Health Dept presentation on health study of #fracking in southwest PA, delivered by toxicologist Jim Fabisiak

Finding: living near fracking wells increases lymphoma in kids by 5-7 fold. No association with Ewing Sarcoma. Found a modest association between brain cancer and living near uranium mine tailing legacy site.

Fellow New Yorkers! The NYS Climate Action Council is wrapping up its process for finalizing the Climate Action Plan. Our kids’ futures hang in the balance. This is my message to you and to the members of the Council. 🧵1/27 2/ In the coming weeks we will learn whether our state government is strong enough to stand up to the #fossilfuel industry, or if it will once again bend to the entrenched and powerful.

Joyful news! A clear victory for environmental justice in NYS today: bravo to the leaders of Onondaga Nation who fought so hard and so long for return of (a small fraction of) their land. It’s a start.

https://twitter.com/syracusedotcom/status/1542149924653088770

Also meet my friend Joe Heath, Onondaga chief counsel, who, as a young law student, represented the Attica prisoners after the 1971 uprising, brutality, cover-up. Short video with Joe and Onondaga leaders announcing today’s news embedded in story above.

nystateofpolitics.com/state-of-polit…

Yes what’s required now is forceful political response.

I’ll get there. Please know that we #adoptees—institutionalized as infants, denied our vital records as adults, culturally viewed as “bad seeds”—are now seeing ourselves turned into a twisted rationale for inflicting harm. This is massively traumatizing. I am NOT OK. Also please remember that the women who raised us suffered, by definition, from infertility and often repeated miscarriages. In many cases our adoptive mothers’ lives were saved by medical procedures now banned in many states.

Interactive map of all 50 US states showing which ones permit, restrict, or prohibit #adoptees from obtaining our original, unfalsified birth certificates. Thx, ⁦@adopteelaw⁩! and hat tip to ⁦@naturenurture5⁩ for bringing this to our attention adopteerightslaw.com/maps/ As of 3/22, just 10 states grant #adoptees the right to apply for and obtain their original unredacted birth certificate w/o restriction. In 16 states + DC, adoptee access to OBC is prohibited outright. In 24 “compromise” states, access is restricted or conditioned in some way.

Important AP investigative story on the int’l adoption system that separated Korean kids from their families “as part of a lucrative business under the military governments that ruled South Korea from the 1960s to the late 1980s.” #adopteetwitter seattletimes.com/nation-world/s… “Adoptions were a way to remove the socially undesirable, including children from unwed mothers or poor families, and to reduce the number of mouths to feed.
About 200,000 Korean children were adopted by families in the West in the past six decades, including 7,924 in 1984.”

🏳️‍🌈Happy Pride! Being gay + being adopted are two big parts of my identity. Years of secrecy obscured them both. Ergo I’m thrilled to be part of this ⁦@AdopteesUnited⁩ conversation by and about LGBTQIA+ adoptees. Join me! #adopteevoices
#twicequeer 🌈 adopteesunited.org/rainbow-adopte… PS a third, very public part of my identity is as a biologist in service to the climate movement. Close observers have noticed I’m part of this film screening event on the same evening.

Yes I’m doing both. It all matters, and it’s all connected by the word DISPOSSESSION.

https://twitter.com/foodandwater/status/1535653111066509312

Heads up, CO friends: Coloradans for Energy Access is actually the gas industry + real estate dudes trying to stop the renewable energy transition or what they call—wait for it—“forced electrification.” CEA is a fossil fuel wolf in grassroots clothing. desmog.com/2022/02/10/gas… “Xcel Energy, a Minnesota-based electric and gas utility, is among the ranks of Coloradans for Energy Access. The investor-owned utility has assets across eight Midwestern and Western states, with a particularly large presence in Colorado.”

NEW RESEARCH: #Fracking in PA contaminates drinking water where pregnant women live and harms their infants.

So, here's a link to the goddamn abstract and bc I have a PhD and a full-text pre-proof, I'll do an whole thread but as a mom: THIS IS ENOUGH
sciencedirect.com/science/articl… This a first-of-its-kind study that uses exact locations of mothers' residences, gas wells, and public drinking water sources and combines them with dates of infant births, measurements of water contaminants, and timing of drilling and fracking activities. It's big data.

Thread for the non-adopted:

Like every #adoptee I’m still thinking about this week’s NYT exposé and want to offer historical, intersectional context for widespread belief that adoption is benevolent.

Stolen at Birth, Chilean Adoptees Uncover their Past

nytimes.com/2021/12/17/wor… First, the Chilean baby-trafficking operation, which apparently brought thousands of infants to the US for adoption by white couples in the 1970s-80s, is not exceptional. It’s an old script first drafted during the Greek civil war in 1946 when conflict, chaos, and oppression…

Adoption is trafficking. The willful naïveté of US adoptive parents to this fact is the fuel that keeps the machine going.

“Possibly thousands of Chilean adoptees taken from their parents without their consent during the country’s military dictatorship” nytimes.com/2021/12/17/wor… “Gen. Augusto Pinochet, actively encouraged overseas adoptions to reduce poverty. The process was abetted by a vast network of officials— including judges, social workers, health professionals and adoption brokers—who forged documents and are widely assumed to have taken bribes.”

Most of my followers here work on #climate. Also my life’s work. Or are part of the #LGBTQ STEM community. Where I also reside.

More recently, I tweet about adoption.

To mark the end of National Adoption Awareness Month #NAAM, I made a thread for all of you.

#adopteevoices I want my climate activist friends and my LGBTQ brothers and sisters to know that it’s not okay to say you’ll “just adopt” if you want kids. Adoption is a corrupt industry that preys on poor women denied reproductive justice and denies basic civil rights to adoptees.

THREAD: Can we be clear on something?
There is no “debate” within the academic, independent scientific community about the snake oil that is Blue Hydrogen which is made from fracked gas. There is science showing that it’s bad and then there are its influencers.

https://twitter.com/nalanpog/status/1427465179630080007

Here is the best peer-reviewed science we have, authored by our two of our finest climate scientists: environmental engineer Mark Jacobson at Stanford @mzjacobson and biogeochemist and ecosystem ecologist Bob Howarth at Cornell @howarth_cornell

https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/1425874007711043586

COLONOSCOPY PSA for everyone age 40 and over*

*(with special message for #adoptees)

So I spent the last two weeks waiting for results from the pathology lab after my colonoscopy on 7/29 and I’m now here to tell you why you need to follow me into that procedure room, friends. I got the results yesterday. One of the two polyps found and removed from my body was almost certainly NOT going to turn into my assassin. But the other one was of the kind that can and do.

But it’s out now. And that means that mf-er is not going to be the cause of my death.

More great coverage of the new Howarth-Jacobson "blue hydrogen" paper in the NYT.

A problem cosplaying as a solution.

nytimes.com/2021/08/12/cli… Fun thought exercise: Read the subhead, swap out "natural gas" for "hydrogen" and you are essentially in a time machine to 2009.

How about we not ask Big Oil to promote climate solutions and then retail their press releases and then announce oh snap actually that makes it worse

New long-anticipated paper on the mirage of “blue hydrogen” by ⁦@howarth_cornell⁩ and ⁦@mzjacobson⁩ dropped this morning. Here’s a good plain English summary:

UK plan to replace fossil gas with blue hydrogen ‘may backfire’ theguardian.com/environment/20… And here is press release from Cornell and link to original paper. Which is a fantastic piece of science:

https://twitter.com/atkinsoncenter/status/1425815047868239873

Here's an explainer thread on today's bombshell exposé from our partner @PSRenvironment on the secretive approval and use of highly toxic PFAS chemicals as ingredients in #fracking fluid.

Let's start with @HirokoTabuchi's story in NYT, which is fantastic

nytimes.com/2021/07/12/cli… As @HirokoTabuchi notes, @EPA approved the use of these chemicals for fracking 10 years ago, over the grave concerns of its scientists. We are just finding out about it now bc fracking ingredients are trade secrets. The oil/gas industry enjoys exemptions from federal...

Big news for @FERC watchers and pipeline fighters 👀

US Court of Appeals just revoked approval of an in-service gas pipeline in MO and IL, ruling that the gas utility had failed to prove need.

Case could mark tipping point for future pipeline approvals.

stltoday.com/business/local… This is the 65-mile, two-year-old Spire pipeline that runs north into IL farm country from St Louis and was built over the objections of farmers/landowners whose land (and drainage) was wrecked.

ICYMI: good news from our Appalachian friends:

⁦@EPA⁩ recommends that Army Corps of Engineers not grant Mountain Valley Pipeline stream crossing permit

Unrelenting activism did this.

And it took a FOIA request to unearth the EPA communique. virginiamercury.com/blog-va/epa-re… This does not cancel the MVP project but is a huge setback.

It takes a village to kill a pipeline.

Thank you to all the Virginia and W Virginia pipeline fighters! @JonSokolow @geoyapti @clean_virginia @stopthemvp @AppVoices (reply with any groups or citizen heroes I missed)