Bucknackt's Sordid Tawdry Blog: Alaska

01 September 2026

MOTHER JONES CLIMATE WEEKLY: It Just Got Way Easier to Sue Fossil Fuel Companies Over Climate Change, Trump officials plan to exclude oil and gas projects in Alaska public lands from environmental review, From Memphis to Gary, Indiana, Black communities are being left in the dark, The US military’s fatal stance on climate change, Super El Niño won’t fix the West’s water crisis, This Man Wants You to Know About New York’s Sweltering, 100-Plus-Degree Subway Stations 30AUG26

Picture from article below The US military’s fatal stance on climate change

STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS

Brutal heat waves across the nation, epic wildfires in the heartland, submerged subways in New York–2026 is another banner year for climate extremes, so who’s to blame?

And more importantly, how do you prove it?

Researchers are chugging away on that problem even as the fossil fuel industry works to discredit “attribution science,” sowing disinformation about a discipline that aims to quantify how greenhouse gas emissions (and therefore major polluters) supercharge the adverse climate events we are experiencing ever more frequently.

“Bad weather is of course not new. So how do you show that emissions from company X cause injury Y from a hurricane or whatever?” attorney Michael Buschbacher, whose firm, Boyden Gray, sides with the fossil fuel industry in climate liability cases, asked during a Federalist Society panel last year.

How indeed.

This past week, I wrote about a new paper from Indiana University Earth systems scientist Christopher Callahan, whose promising statistical model measures the relationship between CO2 emissions and extreme weather. His approach could make it easier to hold industry accountable. “There is no level of emissions that does not contribute to changing climate impacts,” Callahan told me. “Every ton matters.”

The other climate scientists I spoke with agreed and praised the paper. Callahan’s work is “extremely valuable,” said Brown University climatologist Kim Cobb. “This would have been a pipe dream 10 years ago.”

Hopefully it won’t take another 10 to start making a difference in court.

You can read my story about Callahan’s model, and the high stakes of attribution science, at MotherJones.com.

—Rachel Santarsiero

TOP STORY

A woman walks through a smoke-filled park wearing a mask, with the skyline of New York City in the background through the orange-tinged haze.

SELCUK ACAR/ANADOLU/GETTY

It Just Got Way Easier to Sue Fossil Fuel Companies Over Climate Change

For years, industry has argued you can’t prove which company caused which disaster. A new study says otherwise.

MOTHER JONES

SPONSORED CONTENT BY COLUMBIA RIVERKEEPER

New report on the most toxic place in America

Columbia Riverkeeper’s new report, “Hanford Nuclear Site Cleanup in the Age of Nuclear Uncertainty,” aims to help contextualize Hanford cleanup amidst an acceleration of federal deregulation around safety and oversight of nuclear energy, from lowering radiation standards to exempting advanced nuclear reactors from federal environmental review. Read it today!

HIGH COUNTRY NEWS

From Memphis to Gary, Indiana, Black communities are being left in the dark

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The US military’s fatal stance on climate change

BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS

Super El Niño won’t fix the West’s water crisis

WIRED

MOTHER JONES CLIMATE DESK WEEKLY, And you thought data centers were bad?: Why AI May Produce More Planet-Warming Emissions Than the Data Centers That Enable It, In Inupiaq, when the weather talks, you listen, This high-stakes Virginia congressional race may hinge on climate and energy issues, Trump vowed he'd "unleash US energy," but the oil industry isn't playing his game, Return of the Caspian Tiger: How a Species Feared Extinct Has Come Back to Kazakhstan 16AUG26

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STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS

The data center boom is a ticking carbon bomb, but not for the reasons you might think. New findings show that the real issue isn’t how much power data centers consume—though make no mistake that those needs are massive—but how much planet-warming emissions they will help the oil and gas industry unleash.

Fossil fuel companies have used various models for decades to figure out where to drill. Artificial intelligence is now promising to speed up that process by crunching more data, faster.

A study from two former Microsoft researchers found that AI could help boost global energy-related emissions by as much as 4.8 percent. That’s significantly higher than multiple projections of the emissions from data center energy use.

“The scale of this was staggering,” says researcher Will Alpine, who co-authored the peer-reviewed paper with his wife Holly and two others. Their findings show that the AI boom could be great news for fossil fuel profits and not-so-great news for the climate.

It’s no wonder some gas and oil firms—notably Chevron—are doing deals to power data centers and then using some of the computing capacity from those facilities to turbocharge their own operations.

Check out Molly Taft’s piece from Climate Desk partner Wired on the risks of fossil fuel companies using AI as a growth hack. And for even more context, see their piece on why a growing number of the gas plants powering data centers are particularly terrible for the climate. (Hint: the turbines.)

—Brian Kahn