Shannon Osaka
@shannonosaka
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climate *zeitgeist* reporter for @washingtonpost. past: proudly @grist, @UniofOxford, @princeton. fan of women's gymnastics. views mine!
Joined September 2017
I spent several weeks earlier this summer learning everything I could about the cow microbiome, gene editing, and a fascinating experiment going on in California's East Bay. It involves this adorable baby calf named Sushi. A quick thread:
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Today is my first day as a climate reporter at @washingtonpost! Feel free to send tips, ideas, etc. to shannon.osaka@washpost.com if you want to make my inbox even more unmanageable.
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I will never get tired of looking at this @climate graphic which shows just how much LAND renewables take up compared to fossil fuels.
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A few months ago, I read a study that showed schizophrenia can be the most deadly preexisting condition during a heat wave. I was puzzled: Why would a mental illness make you more vulnerable to heat?. That question led me to a young man named Stephan Goodwin. This is his story🧵
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Pouring one out today for the people who got into climate change because they liked birds and 15 years later are arguing about FERC and permitting reform.
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I have some - how do you say -✨✨personal news ✨✨. Today is my last day at Grist after an incredible 2.5 years 🥲. Starting Aug 15, I'll be joining the @washingtonpost's expanded climate team. My official title will be Climate Zeitgeist Reporter.
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Several years ago, I read a study that said that having one fewer child was the best individual action to take for the climate. I was intrigued -- and a little skeptical. This story is the result. A thread. 1/.
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"For decades, environmentalists have made their mark by stopping things. But now, the US is going to have to do something greens have traditionally opposed: Build a lot of energy infrastructure. And fast.". I wrote about permitting reform @washingtonpost.
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If I were flying Southwest today I would just give up and start a new life at whatever airport I was stranded at.
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Currently considering whether, from a consequentialist perspective, all the furor about a very-unlikely-to-happen gas stove "ban" is worth it to get people to actually learn about the health risks of gas stoves.
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These aren't small differences in vulnerability -- these are huge. In a study of heat deaths in British Columbia in 2021, researchers found that people with kidney disease were 36 percent more likely to die during a heat wave. For people with schizophrenia, it was _200 percent_
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Stephan's final days show why people with this condition are particularly vulnerable. People with schizophrenia inherently struggle to maintain their body temperatures. Anti-psychotic medications -- normally a lifeline -- inhibit sweating and can cause dehydration.
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"The “nuclear bro” is lurking in the comments section of a YouTube video, wondering it didn’t mention #nuclear. His Twitter name includes an emoji of an atom ⚛️.". I wrote about the subculture captivated by the promise of nuclear power. a brief 🧵.
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Two big stories out from the @washingtonpost today about where people will experience the most brutal heat. This hit home for me in a new way after visiting Phoenix 🥴. The first, from me and @niko_tinius and others.
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What if . we paid for the transition to sustainable aviation fuel by taxing global frequent flyers? . I wrote about a new @TheICCT report and the dilemmas around aviation for @washingtonpost .
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@eilperin @GregJaffe @goldfab @JohnMuyskens And I'm grateful that the Post provides the resources and time to make projects like this happen. If you have time today, please read Stephan's story and watch @MrErinO's videos. It means the world.
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My first piece for the @washingtonpost is about . models 🙃. I wrote about the prediction that the IRA will cut emissions by 40% and why that could be an over (or under!) estimate for what happens next.
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stories on America's political divide: .- tired.- see it every day. stories on America's HOME HEATING divide: .- wow, new information.- relevant to decarbonization.- how did it get like this??. Very proud of this piece w/ @JohnMuyskens and @NaemaAhmed .
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Psychosis itself -- the state of delusion or lack of connection with reality that characterizes schizophrenia -- can be a risk factor. And people with schizophrenia are more likely to be homeless or disconnected from support. See @MrErinO's video:.
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“It would be so much better for everyone if public transport were just more accessible.”. I wrote about how Gen Zers are skipping out on drivers' licenses -- and driving altogether.
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There's so much more to say about this story but it won't fit in a tweet thread. I'm incredibly grateful to Darae Goodwin, Stephan's mother, and the entire Goodwin family, for spending so much time with me and sharing his story to try and help others. No thanks is enough.
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Obviously fossil fuels have a much higher planetary footprint! But the underlying Bloomberg feature/visualization is an amazing demonstration of how we are going to have to think about energy and land use together as we switch to cleaner sources.
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95% of American car trips are less than 31 miles. The average American drives around 37 miles a day. So why are we building batteries with 500+ miles of range?. I wrote about range trade-offs and how we should deal with limited resources.
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The Senate has ratified the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol by a vote of 69-27. The Montreal Protocol remains shockingly bipartisan, given the history of this country with climate treaties.
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Huge thanks to @CoveringClimate for this honor!! Very grateful to my editors and @grist for the opportunity to write about things that fascinate me.
The Emerging Journalist of the Year 🏆 goes to @ShannonOsaka. She joined @Grist at the beginning of the pandemic. Her editors quickly came to value her uncanny ability to find engaging angles + guide readers through challenging subjects.
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In which Rainy and I demonstrate cutting-edge low-carbon transportation
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I am willing to consider many individual actions for the climate but this is where I draw the line
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On July 12, 2022, Stephan -- who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his late 20s -- left home in the midst of a Phoenix heat wave. He was carrying a drawstring bag with a pillow, two guns, and a gallon of water. He never came back.
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"Heat pumps in the U.S. are belaboring under a misconception that has plagued them for decades: That if the temperature falls to below 30 or even 40 degrees Fahrenheit, their technology simply doesn’t work.". I did some heat pump myth-busting for @grist .
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For this story, I talked to a lot of women who are factoring climate change into their decision to have children. Many reported thinking much less about the individual footprint of their decision, and more about what their children's future will look like under climate change.
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It's difficult to model the future, but if the US does meet its climate goals, the avoided emissions of having one fewer child today might look something like this:
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I spent 9 days in Phoenix in 115+ degree temps with spectacular video journalist and co-author @MrErinO, trying to understand Stephan's life and the situation for others on the ground. We talked to ER docs, psychiatrists, nonprofits, and the Goodwin family.
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Two days after he left home, Stephan called his mother from a remote street in the south of Phoenix. He was confused and disoriented. He wanted her to come get him, but he didn't know where he was. "Mom, I'm dying," he told her. Less than two hours later, he collapsed.
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For years, people have said that individual action -- switching your car, going vegetarian, or changing the way you heat your home -- can't do much about climate change. But now, the IRA is changing that calculus. new from me @washingtonpost .
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EVs are known to perform worse in the cold -- sometimes losing up to 30% of their range. A big reason that no one talks about? . The fact that many models use old electric resistance heaters, not heat pumps. my latest: .
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People born in 1950 will have 2x higher carbon footprints -- over the course of their lives -- than people born in 2020, just because of how the US energy mix has already changed. IF the US meets its climate goals (as always, huge if) that number will go down even further.
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5 jillion people at the Post helped this story become reality, but I'm particularly grateful to my powerhouse editor @eilperin for shepherding the idea from start to finish, @GregJaffe and @goldfab for their wise counsel, and @JohnMuyskens for mapping Stephan's journey.
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Most of the popular IRA incentives -- heat pumps, weatherization, induction stoves -- are for homeowners. But what about the roughly 1/3 of American households who rent? .
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"He is an environmentalist who loves nature and a traditionalist who has battled against wind energy, flown around the world in a private jet and critiqued population growth in the developing world.". I couldn't help it. I wrote about King Charles III.
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came back to twitter after 3 hours to find this was being interpreted by some . confused souls . as support for fossil fuels. In fact, I am a climate reporter who supports renewables. Onwards!.
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New paper in Nature finds that if -- *if if if* -- current net-zero pledges are met, the world will be on track for just below 2C of warming. We will not hit 1.5C. But this is a big improvement.
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Turns out, the only peer-reviewed analysis of the carbon footprint of having kids is from 2009 (the 2017 paper is a literature review). And that paper took an interesting approach:
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Fabulous piece from @emilypont on the electrician shortage, how it prevents people from electrifying their homes, and how challenging it is to train new workers.
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It assumed that parents were responsible for their children's and grandchildren's emissions, and so on far into the future -- and its central estimate assumed that CO2 emissions never declined. H/t to @schneidermayers, @hausfath, and @LetsFishSmarter for pointing this out.
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I missed this Smil essay when it came out a few months ago -- the enormity of the task of the energy transition, in one paragraph: .
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Journalists and the public: It would be great if the emissions pathways were easier to understand and communicate!. Scientists: TEWA, NFA, DASMT, DAPD, IAPD, IA2015 😋.
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Willow has me thinking about something that I've been grappling with for a few months now -- the biggest divide in the climate movement right now is the debate between supply-side and demand-side policies. My thoughts for @washingtonpost, and a little🧵:.
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But nuke activists argue the label is misplaced. They say that the movement is a diverse group of men and women who come to nuclear mostly due to fear of climate change. Many of them were anti- to start, and slowly changed their minds in the face of global warming and new science.
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some personal news. this week I fulfilled one of my journalism dreams by (briefly!) setting aside climate to write about gymnastics for the @washingtonpost. The story? A deluge of perfect scores in NCAA gymnastics - and what it means for the sport 1/.
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Say you ran your home on 100% renewable electricity last year. Does that mean your house or apartment actually got all its electricity from wind, solar, and geothermal?. The answer is . no. Not at all. I dove into the strange world of RECs. A thread:.
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Imagine you're at home and you get a phone call from the government. They want you and 149 other ordinary people to help solve climate change. That's what happened to Sylvain Burquier. My latest feature for @grist is out now. A THREAD 🧵 1/.
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Ultimately, having children is a deeply personal decision -- one that goes beyond carbon footprint and even climate change. As @KA_Nicholas told me, “The numbers are the numbers. But what you do with them, and how they influence your decision-making, depends on the person." /fin.
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But CO2 emissions in the Western world are already declining. Thanks to some helpful modeling from @rhodium_group, we can look at how personal carbon footprints in the West have changed as the country has slooowwwly started to decarbonize.
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My two favorite things to write about are tax credits and cars. So imagine my enthusiasm when California passed a tax credit for. not-cars. Me in @washingtonpost .
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The world will need billions of tons of direct air capture to hit even the goal of 2 degrees Celsius. But where is all that energy going to come from? . I spoke to @TimMLatimer about why geothermal and DAC might be a match made in heaven.
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Do heat pumps have a naming problem? I wrote about one of #energytwitter's debates -- and the larger problems with heat pump adoption. brief 🧵. “There are some people that think that heat pumps only do heating — because they’re called heat pumps.".
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My source: "Millennials are no longer young." .Me: this is a violence.
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As Congress haggles over the debt ceiling, I wrote about the 3 big reasons the US is currently painfully slow at building clean energy. #1 -- the crowded line to get plugged into the grid.
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When Sean Youra was 26, he started watching documentaries about climate change -- and then got sucked into an area of YouTube rife with people who believed climate change would doom humanity. In short, he says, he became a "climate doomer." . brief 🧵:.
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Oil and gas companies are capturing an estimated 18 million metric tons of CO2 every year in the U.S. But most of it is _still_ going into new oil. My latest:
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Folks who are < 26 years old and either a) don't have a driver's license or b) have a license but live car-free -- I would love to talk to you for a @washingtonpost article. DM me or comment if you are interested in chatting!.
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This is a version of the chart that so interested me from the beginning. The authors found that having one fewer child would result in avoiding almost 60 metric tons of CO2 emissions -- an amount that absolutely dwarfs other "individual actions".
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1/ 🚨 Taking a break from my vacation to say that my latest paper is out now in WIREs climate change!! 🚨 With the inimitable @drrobbellamy and one of my personal academic heroes, Noel Castree. you can read it here (or DM me to ask for a PDF 🙃):
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Journalists who _don't_ end stories with quotes . how do you do it?? Asking for a friend.
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My Portuguese AirBNB has a heat pump AND an induction stove! 😍
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@jlappen1 Also the WV v. EPA ruling doesn't even prevent federal agencies from regulating greenhouse gas emissions! I can't believe how many outlets irresponsibly reported that it did. It just curtailed one aspect of power, which frankly Biden admin was unlikely to use anyway.
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I've been wondering about whether the growth in the U.S. charging network is keeping up with the rapid growth in electric vehicles. Pulled the data, and the answer is . not quite. Since 2016, registered EVs have grown 3x faster than the public charging network.
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“Nobody can blink first.". In my latest @grist, I wrote about the strange politics of 1.5C, the climate goal we almost certainly will not reach.
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"80 percent of EV charging happens at home, often overnight . but that charging pattern is at odds with how electricity is increasingly being generated." . I wrote about a study out of Stanford on how large-scale EV charging will affect the grid.
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I, too, often get the question/comment "why can't rooftops satisfy all our solar needs?" @Sammy_Roth has the answer.
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I'm perplexed by the number of people who seem to think that the CPSC is going to come into their homes and forcibly remove their gas stoves. Pretty sure they didn't even do that with lawn darts. .
MANCHIN comes out against a ban potential ban on gas stoves by the @USCPSC says Congress “may need to reevaluate the commission.”
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'The Late Devonian was . a place of mental peace — a time before self-awareness and embarrassment. “Everyone is, like, only barely conscious of the idea that they’re alive," Mr. Otoo said. "It’s great, just vibes.”'. @aznfusion does it again.
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Totally chuffed, delighted, and honored to be a finalist for two @CoveringClimate awards -- 'emerging journalist' and 'long feature' -- among so many journalists and pieces I admire. 🥲.
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~~ a personal update ~~. I'm not one to share a lot on the twitterverse, but today marks 3 months since I had major abdominal surgery for stage 4 endometriosis!! I've been writing less over the past several months, and this is why. 1/
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Last year, @emilypont and I learned that an offset project in California's carbon market was on fire, and we got curious. Buckle up for an in-depth look at how California's carbon offsets are burning up - and why the state doesn't seem to care. @grist🧵 1/.
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The Sims 2 came out in 2004.
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But 60 metric tons is higher than the carbon footprint of even the average American right now -- like, 4x higher. So what was going on?.
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Fans of nuclear power on the internet are often dubbed 'nuclear bros'. The label serves to cast nuclear supporters as all being of a particular type: young, white, millennial men with a singular focus on splitting atoms. ☢️☢️.
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It's worth remembering that 1.5C was always an extremely unlikely target. Scientists initially questioned whether it was even possible to model a path to it. Missing 1.5 says more about its original difficulty than what we have done in the last 5 years.
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I've been interested in climate art protests for some time. so I talked to @Fisher_DanaR about "tactical innovation" in protests, the tomato soup incident, and the question of counter-productivity.
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If you're going to read anything today, read @katemyoder's thoughtful, incisive, and historical take on why climate policy continues to be measured by its costs -- rather than its benefits.
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Twitter can be enormously useful for young journalists trying to get noticed and connecting with experts. Without it, I think my career would have taken a very different path. I will be quite sad if and when it disappears!.
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Yes, we need to build a lot to reach net-zero!!! Transmission needs to increase by 2x-5x. Huge build-out of solar, wind, nuclear -- and let's not even mention CO2 pipelines. But projects often get stuck in a morass of regulation or NIMBYism.
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I wrote about the new IRA tax credits starting on Jan 1, and the news on the EV tax credit side. 👀👀. Critically important note -- the EV tax credit is in kind of a temporary holding pattern that could hugely benefit people who buy in Jan/Feb.
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I wrote about why car dealers don't seem to love electric cars -- and how it could be adding to the dent in EV sales. a quick 🧵:.
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"To some scientists, the move was a pointless stunt To others, it marked the first-ever-recorded act of stratospheric solar geoengineering.". I wrote about the rogue geoengineers at Make Sunsets for the @washingtonpost.
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Always feel extremely blessed when my story makes it to the Post TikTok 😍😍.
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The professional titles of the sources in this piece are amazing. "Anthony Falco, a pizza consultant and the author of Pizza Czar". "Scott Wiener, a New York pizza-tour guide and the author of 'Viva la Pizza!: The Art of the Pizza Box'".
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After a morning of passionate tweeting, I wrote about how our favorite Supreme Court case of the day could have been way worse -- and how the Biden admin could still regulate greenhouse gas emissions. @grist .
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Polls show that there is a stark Republican-Democratic divide in willingness to buy EVs. But is this reflected in sales -- and is it a new phenomenon or an old one? I dug in for the @washingtonpost 🧵
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'"Climate emergency" reduced perceived news credibility compared to "climate change."'. This is a big reason why I don't use 'climate crisis' or 'climate emergency' very much in my copy . and why I'm frankly confused that so many outlets are pushing for it.
Happy to share my new study w/ Sol Hart in @ClimaticChange_. We experimentally tested the effects of news tweets that referred to either climate change, climate emergency, or climate crisis.
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I've never been more excited to move to DC.
Gas powered leaf blowers are now banned in DC. They have 124X the pollution of a car and the gas powered variety produces noise that impacts 15X the households than the electric variety. The health and quality of life impacts of this policy are enormous.
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The Senate passed a climate bill. The Senate passed a climate bill. The Senate passed a climate bill. I keep saying this out loud to myself and I still can't believe it. Every previous failure of climate legislation was in the Senate.
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Incredibly excited that a piece I co-authored with @HerrCaitlin and @themadstone (with amazing visuals from @jessetnichols) has won the ONA for topical climate reporting!! We beat out the other finalist, the New York Times ☺️.
WINNER: Topical Reporting: Climate Change: @Grist for The 7 Climate Tipping Points That Could Change the World Forever #OJA21
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Feeling some definite imposter syndrome, but thrilled to be in the company of friends like @rachjuramirez and @robinsonmeyer. Many thanks @SEALAwards!.
Congratulations to our 2021 Environmental Journalism Awards winners: . @drvolts, @OilSheppard, @dharnanoor, @HilaryBeaumont, @JustinWorland, @lisalsong, @rachjuramirez, @rebleber, @robinsonmeyer, @shannonosaka, @SominiSengupta & @Zhirji28. Read more –.
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Why do US oil prices hinge on the actions of an international oil cartel?. I explain "spare production capacity" and more in today's @washingtonpost .
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