The Trump administration is trying to kill every program that pops up in a search for the word “climate.” In the process, the heart is being cut out of agencies that produce information that the state needs to manage its environmental threats.

From our magazine: It was a police-led art heist. The target: Some of the most controversial, but best-studied and most-discussed works in U.S. contemporary art.

Featured story from @lisedigger: Samuel Junior Sanchez was among about 300 criminal defendants who’d received notice that they’d been affected by a nationally publicized misconduct scandal. He appears to be the first freed on a plea deal.

Camp Mystic sat on a tract of land known to be at high risk for a devastating flood. Nearly 1.3 million Texas homes are similarly situated in parts of the state susceptible to dangerous floodwater.

"To remap the floodplain is a significant effort and rural counties don’t have the resources that urban counties do. … I know from work in other parts of Texas that in a lot of rural counties the flood maps can be decades old."

I remember the river. how it felt like a silent companion and always gentle guide. how it felt timeless, ever present and patiently waiting for our return. I remember singing “Peace, I ask of thee oh river, peace, peace, peace”

Climate scientists said the torrential downpours on July 4 exemplify the devastating outcomes of weather intensified by a warming atmosphere. These disasters, they said, will become more frequent as people around the world continue to burn fossil fuels.

From @CandiceBernd: County officials have continued to deflect questions at press conferences about what actions they took after NWS warnings came out when many were asleep, saying they remain focused on search and rescue operations.

Our top story: Extreme flooding events are nothing new to Texas. Neither are droughts. And the first does tend to follow the second here. This weather reality has likely been exacerbated by climate change.

i figure that to be this cold . i must have earned it, like stepped on the crack that grew into the unbalancing . earthquake or burnt the last drop of coal needed to smother the earth’s . atmosphere with a black velvet blanket.

Federal resources for managing climate-augmented weather disasters are being wiped out. Meanwhile, state leaders stand by while denying the seriousness of climate change as a driver of these events—and the threat this poses to the state economy.

"The total amount of rainfall is not really changing but it is being condensed into more of these short, high-intensity events and then longer periods of drought. So we’re basically getting more drought and more floods."

RT @rosecahalan: The single most powerful piece of journalism I've read about the flood is this heartwrenching essay by my former TM collea….

Our top story: What happens after the flood and the waters have receded? What comes after all that is left are fractured memories and moldy floorboards?

“Most of our floodplain maps are obsolete. They’re out of date. The rainfall amounts are not nearly large enough to predict the type of floods we’re going to have. So whatever [Texans] think it is, it’s worse than they think.”

I remember the river, . flowing so peacefully and slowly you could almost miss its motion.I remember the river,. mirroring the vastness of the starry sky stretched far beyond the nestled valley.

Bringing this one back . just because! . From @by_jmiller in 2024: Ken and Angela Paxton have ties to a jet-setting lobbyist-turned-CEO caught in a tangled web of alleged fraud involving a powerful business clan and a commercial shipping giant.

New from @CandiceBernd: The state’s deadliest flood since 1921 has now put the county’s lack of sirens into the spotlight. Texas lawmakers had a chance to lay out a new disaster response plan including outdoor sirens, but the measure failed.

New from @lisedigger: A federally funded project at @RiceCEVE is trying to improve flood hazard detection and resilience in Texas. We spoke with assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering @Avantika_Gori.

Earlier: Without any announcement or open debate, the GOP-controlled Texas Lege passed a biennial state budget that effectively halves the amount dedicated to its multi-billion-dollar border security operations—from a proposed $6.5B down to about $3.4B.

“Climate change loads the dice toward more frequent and more intense floods. The flash flood that tore through Camp Mystic at night, when people were most vulnerable, shows the deadly cost of underestimating this shift.”