This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

Since its initial publication in 1970, millions of children have read In the Night Kitchen, the classic picture book by celebrated author Maurice Sendak. The book is about a young boy who has a surreal dream about baking a cake that needs to be finished by morning. It was named a Caldecott Honor Book, one of the most prestigious awards in children’s literature. 

At least two copies of In the Night Kitchen are available in elementary school libraries in Indian River County, Florida. This concerned Jennifer Pippin, the chair of the local Moms for Liberty chapter, because the main character, Mickey, is sometimes depicted without clothes. In an interview, Pippin told Popular Information that she believes the book may be “harmful to minors.” She was worried that if a “5-year-old picks up this book and has never seen a picture of a penis… [t]he parent wouldn’t be able to discuss this with the child.” This is an example of one of the offending images:

Pippin submitted formal challenges to the Indian River County School District seeking the removal of In the Night Kitchen, which she calls “pornographic.” Pippin challenged other books with drawings of figures without clothes, including Unicorns Are the Worst, a book about a goblin complaining about how much people like unicorns. The concern about Unicorns Are The Worst is this picture of a goblin’s butt:

Following Pippin’s challenges, which occurred in November and December of 2023, the books were removed from the library shelves. 

The Supreme Court of Oregon on Thursday ruled that 10 Republican and Independent state senators cannot run for reelection this year. Their transgression? Not showing up for work.

Since 2019, Republicans, Oregon’s minority party, have been staging walkouts to prevent the majority party from passing progressive measures, like a proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and to protest Covid restrictions. The AWOL senators were facing fines of $500 for every day of missed work, but that didn’t stop them: During the 2019 walkouts, some senators even went into hiding or fled the state. Then-Goc. Kate Brown (D) admonished them. “Public servants are chosen by and entrusted to represent their constituents, and working for the people of Oregon is an honor and a privilege,” she said. “Playing games and avoiding tough conversations is a dereliction of that responsibility and trust.”

Conservatives’ unusual strategy works in Oregon because it is one of the few states that require at least two-thirds of its 30-member Senate to be present to conduct legislative business. The legislature tilts blue but consistently has more than a third of Republican and Independent senators.

In 2022, voters amended the Oregon Constitution to have more stringent attendance rules for state legislators—no more than 10 absences—or else they would be banned from holding state office for the next term. Hannah Love, a campaign strategist for the ballot measure, explained to Oregon Public Broadcasting that “Oregonians…do not want to let the gridlock of the extreme partisan walkouts hold our democracy back any longer. They know that as regular people, we can’t walk off the job with zero consequences or accountability. And we’re sick of politicians who think they can play by a separate set of rules.” The measure passed with 68.3 percent of the vote, but there were sharp detractors. “What they’re trying to do is use extortion to prohibit freedom of speech,” said John Large, chair of the Lane County Republicans.

Despite the new attendance rules, 10 lawmakers still boycotted the senate in 2023 over a bill to expand gender affirming care and access to abortion. Their main point of protest was language allowing minors under the age of 15 to receive an abortion without parental consent or notification. “That, to us, is the issue,” said Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp (R-Bend). They walked out of work for six weeks. The bill ultimately passed, but the final language required parental notification for minors under the age of 15 getting abortions. Both parties celebrated the passage as a win.

Earlier this week, a right-wing group calling itself the “Take Our Border Back” convoy began its journey from Virginia to the US southern border. The organizers, who plan to hold anti-immigration rallies in three border cities, say their goal is “to call for immediate action to secure our borders before irreversible serious consequences befall our nation.”

Their catalyst, presumably, was the standoff in Eagle Pass, Texas, where the Texas National Guard has blocked the US Border Patrol from patrolling a section of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande. Abbott has accused President Biden of failing to enforce laws that protect the US border, and has said that Texas “has the legal authority to control ingress and egress into any geographic location in the state.” The convoy organizers appear to agree: In their promotional materials, they complain about politicians “who are enabling tens of thousands of illegal entrants, criminals, and known terrorists from over 160 countries worldwide to cross daily into our country along our southern border!”

“That’s the kind of thing that happens with these border things—in the aftermath, you have an increase in paramilitary activity around the border, extrajudicial efforts to round up undocumented immigrants.”

It’s hard to predict exactly what this convoy will amount to. Initial reports on its size were underwhelming—some accounts estimated that the initial size to be around 40 vehicles, a far cry from the 700,000 that the organizers had hoped for.

Small though the convoy may be, extremism experts that I spoke with told me they were still watching it closely. Noelle Cook, a researcher who is working on a book about the women who participated in the January 6 Capitol insurrection, has been monitoring long-dormant channels from the 2022 People’s Convoy, in which vehicles converged outside of Washington, DC, to protest Covid vaccine mandates. Recently, Cook says, these channels have come alive with fans following the new convoy from home. For the organizers, these channels are “a way to get people across the country thinking that they can participate in something.”

And in those online spaces, networking opportunities abound. The organizers draw from a veritable grab bag of right-wing movements and conspiracy theories: The Christian nationalist organizers refer to the convoy as “God’s army;” the QAnon adherent leaders use hashtags associated with the conspiracy theory; the Covid denialist leaders spread the word about the convoy in anti-vax forums. The cross-pollination of these various factions is one thing Devin Burghart, the president and executive director of the extremism tracking group Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, is paying close attention to.

In mid-October, Wesley Bell, St. Louis County’s first-ever Black prosecuting attorney, appeared at a virtual event for Missouri Democratic voters eager to discuss the race he was running against Sen. Josh Hawley. “We’re in a place to get this guy,” Bell boasted. Come Election Day, he said, “I’m going to wake up either as the St. Louis County prosecutor or the US senator-elect.”

But less than three weeks later, Bell abruptly called a press conference. Standing in front of a wall of posters bearing his name—and with the words “U.S. Senate” covered by white masking tape—Bell announced he’d instead decided to primary Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), one of the most progressive members of the House.

Bush had been making national headlines as a leading voice for a ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 6,000 Palestinians had already been killed in the Israeli bombardment launched after Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack. (As of this writing, the death toll has risen to over 26,000.) In a tweet a day prior to Bell’s announcement, Bush had decried Israel’s military operations as an “ethnic cleansing campaign.” ​​

Bell insisted there was “nothing personal” about his decision, but he called Bush’s statements “offensive” and contrasted himself with her—on the war and more generally—by pledging to “stand with the president.” Asked by a reporter whether US aid to Israel should be conditioned on adherence to international law, he responded, “I think we have to stand with our allies.” And, drawing a clear contrast with his new opponent on criminal justice issues, Bell called Bush’s support for defunding the police “misguided,” claiming it hurt Democrats electorally. The following day, he released a list of endorsements that included a number of prominent Jewish members of the St. Louis community, as well as a handful of police chiefs in the district.

On Tuesday, another possible line of attack emerged for Bell, as news broke that Bush was under federal investigation for allegedly misspending security money. (In late 2023, a congressional ethics board recommended a complaint regarding campaign funds being used to pay her husband for “security” be dismissed.)

While Gov. Ron DeSantis traveled the country promoting his state’s effort to ban everything from books to student pronouns in what turned out to be a failed presidential campaign, Black community educators felt swamped by an energized public ready to learn the history their state is intent on denying them.

“It has been overwhelming,” says Kristin Fulwylie, executive director of the Black History Project, an education nonprofit that oversees Black history courses in Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, and Fort Lauderdale. “There’s a lot of energy. Our students are really eager and asking for new additions to our programs.” 

Many of these extracurricular programs have grown in strength since last February, when the College Board publicly capitulated to DeSantis’s stripped down version of the Advanced Placement (AP) African American studies course. Florida Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz Jr., took to Twitter to claim that the course was “filled with Critical Race Theory” and “woke indoctrination” for including lessons on intersectionality, Black queer studies, and the reparations movement for decendents of the formerly enslaved, among others. Conservative officials across the state parroted the same rhetoric to ban lessons on race, gender, and sexuality, dismantle diversity and inclusion initiatives, and target LGBTQ students. Not only did Florida legislators succeed in forcing changes to the AP African American studies course, a flood of censorship legislation –from the Stop WOKE Act in 2022 to last year’s “curriculum transparency” law–has criminalized teaching Black and LGBTQ authors and subjects. Disturbingly, school libraries and even assigned reading lists must now be vetted by “media specialists” who have been trained by the state. 

Some educators outside of Florida’s strictly monitored classrooms have responded by bringing the fight to the schools; others have carved out new spaces to learn on their own terms, filling libraries, community halls, and cultural centers or what researchers call “third spaces.” 

Freedom Schools

On Friday, Utah’s state House of Representatives distinguished itself by becoming the country’s first legislative body to pass an anti-trans bill in 2024.

It also happens to be dangerously extreme, by seeking to make it a criminal offense for people to use a bathroom in a public building that doesn’t correspond with the gender on their birth certificate. According to Erin Reed, who tracks anti-trans legislation nationwide, the law raises the prospect of people forced to “potentially undergo a genital examination if under criminal investigation for being in the bathroom.” People determined under the law to have used the wrong bathroom inside public spaces, from colleges to Salt Lake City’s airport, could be sent to jail for up to 6 months. 

The bill, which would need to pass the state’s Senate and be approved by the governor to become law, is so extreme that Reed and others have said it could even ensnare cisgender people and subject them to prosecution if someone thinks they’re peeing in the wrong place.

As Chris Geidner writes at Law Dork, “It is extreme legislation that explicitly retrofits the crimes of voyeurism and criminal trespass in the state to allow for the prosecution of many transgender people for using the right bathroom.”

When pressed on the House floor, the bill’s sponsor could not point to a single example of inappropriate behavior by a trans person in an Utah bathroom. But members of the Utah House—which meets for only 45 days a year and just started its 2024 session on Tuesday—nonetheless voted 57 to 17 to police bathrooms.

GOP presidential contender Nikki Haley responded to former President Donald Trump’s gaffe from Friday night, in which he confused her with Nancy Pelosi and suggested that she had something to do with the security failures at the US Capitol on January 6. 

“Last night, Trump is at a rally and he’s going on and on mentioning me several times as to why I didn’t take security during the Capitol riots,” she told an audience in Keene, New Hampshire. “I wasn’t even in DC on January 6.”

 

 

 

Nikki Haley, like most candidates who have sought to deny Donald Trump the 2024 GOP nomination, has had to carefully calibrate her criticism of the former president, who remains overwhelming popular inside the party. One attack she’s been willing to deploy is to gently suggest that, at 77, he’s too old to be president again.

Trump helped make her case last night in the form of what seemed to be a senior moment, where he repeatedly confused Republican Nikki Haley, who spent years as his UN ambassador, with former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi. In a rambling digression during a rally in New Hampshire, the former president blamed Haley for security lapses at the Capitol on January 6, even though Haley had left the federal government more than two years before the riot.

The moment came after Trump complained that the media never report on the size of his rally crowds, as compared with Haley’s smaller ones. But then he made his bizarre segue, as he seemed to blame his primary opponent for what happened at the Capitol. “By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6. You know Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, you know, they—do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things,” Trump said. “Like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people.”

A deeply confused Trump confuses Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley multiple times: Nikki Haley was in charge on January 6. They don’t want to talk about that pic.twitter.com/f3lhWgAzUw

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) January 20, 2024

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The global transition to clean energy has a cost, but it may be a lot lower than the figures that sometimes get thrown around. The differences are large, amounting to trillions and even tens of trillions of dollars.

A new analysis from RMI, the clean energy research and advocacy group, identifies what its authors say is a basic flaw in many of those estimates: They don’t fully take into account the decrease in fossil fuel spending.

“This kind of narrative that there’s a massive surge in capital that’s required is simply incorrect,” said Kingsmill Bond, a co-author of the report and an analyst for RMI whose work covers the financial side of the energy transition.

The report finds that global capital spending (money used for equipment and property, among other things) on energy supply is on track to be about $2.5 trillion in 2030, up from $2.2 trillion in 2023.

On my way to Moms for Liberty’s New York City town hall last night, I passed a posh-looking elderly woman, decked out in a brown fur coat, matching fur hat, and bright red lipstick. 

This was a more typical sight on the Upper East Side—the wealthy enclave that has been home to characters like Carrie Bradshaw, Jared and Ivanka, and much of the cast of Gossip Girl—than the one I encountered at the end of the block. Outside the Bohemian National Hall—a Czech and Slovak cultural center on East 73rd Street that the right-wing group booked to great outrage—protesters wielding signs with slogans like “Moms for Bigotry” and “Protect Children From Hate” shouted down attendees who filed into the building (which included Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew, and disgraced former congressman George Santos) via a police-protected ramp. Moms for Liberty, the so-called parents’ rights group that has pushed book bans and helped stir the moral panic about pronoun usage in schools, promised the event would consist of “important discussions about education in NY.”

“They need to go back to Florida—take the bigotry back where it belongs,” said one protester. “If it works in DeSantis land, fine. It doesn’t work here.”

But the protesters were skeptical that the group had anything of substance to offer at its first formal event in deep-blue New York City. 

“They need to go back to Florida—take the bigotry back where it belongs,” said protester and Brooklyn resident Julie DeLaurier, who said her two kids were graduates of the city’s public schools. “If it works in DeSantis land, fine. It doesn’t work here.”

New York City schools, she added, need “full funding—not censorship.” (The city’s education department will face $100 million in new cuts during the next fiscal year, on top of $600 million in cuts Mayor Eric Adams already announced, Chalkbeat New York reported this week.)

Millionaires from around the world support wealth taxes as a way to curb extreme inequality, according to a new poll that was released to coincide with the meeting of the World Economic Forum wrapping up today in Davos, Switzerland. “Davos” has evolved into quite the place to be for the billionaire set, who fly in on their private jets to party and schmooze with government and business bigwigs from all over the planet—and basically get to feel important.   

The poll results were accompanied by a letter signed by 260 millionaires—including Brian Cox, who plays billionaire Logan Roy in Succession—and a few billionaires, asking world leaders to raise their taxes. It was conducted by UK firm Survation at the behest of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of affluent Americans that advocates for fairer tax policies.

The key takeaways:

More than half of respondents said extreme wealth is a threat to democracy, that it hinders social mobility and prevents others from improving their lots, and that it exacerbates climate change.Two-thirds said they would support higher taxes on themselves if the money were used to improve public services and infrastructure—70 percent felt such policies and investments would make their economies stronger.Three-quarters favored a 2 percent wealth tax on billionaires. Indeed, 58 percent said they would support such a tax for anyone with more than $10 million in assets.

The respondents consisted of 2,300 citizens of G-20 nations who have more than $1 million in “investable” assets—or net assets excluding a person’s primary residence. Globally, this puts them within the richest 5 percent, per Patriotic Millionaires—though only barely in the United States, where the average household in the top 10 percent has assets of $5.2 million, according to data from RealTimeInequality.org.  

There are 184,300 US households with average wealth of $141.5 million. I can’t imagine they would let their fortunes be taxed without making an epic stink.

The poll results accompanied PM’s Proud to Pay More report, which profiles a handful of very wealthy people who believe their class should be taxed much more heavily. “We have spent the last 50 years believing in and nurturing an economic idea: that intensifying investment in the individual and encouraging the personal protection of wealth will benefit everyone,” writes Giorgiana Notarbartolo, an Italian entrepreneur from an old, wealthy industrial family. “It’s not hard to see how much damage the reality of the application of this idea has brought to our society.”

District Judge Lewis Kaplan has said it multiple times: Donald Trump raped E. Jean Carroll in 1996. Kaplan wrote it in May 2023, when he presided over one of the trials against Trump. And he reminded jurors of the rape this week, during the latest proceedings in the multi-layered, winding rape and defamation cases brought against Trump by Carroll.  

Last spring, author and journalist Carroll sued Trump, testifying that he had raped her decades ago and had defamed her since by denying the accusations. Carroll won that suit. The jury found Trump liable for sexual assault and said he must pay $5 million—but they came short of saying he had raped her due to the legal scope of New York State’s penal code.  

In New York, someone can only be convicted of rape if they can prove vaginal penetration by a penis. In Carroll’s testimony, which mirrored what she had described privately for decades and publicly for the first time in 2019, she said Trump used both his fingers and his penis in the assault. But during the trial, the jury had only concluded that Trump had “deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” Kaplan’s decision from last year reads.   

That the jurors did not find that Carroll had proven rape, Kaplan explained, “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” 

Federally, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This broader explanation, while still dependent on penetration, would include assaults using fingers.  

The police response to the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which killed two teachers and 19 elementary school students at Robb Elementary School, was significantly botched by “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training,” a damning review from the Justice Department found on Thursday.

The long-awaited report detailed systemic failures by both state and local law enforcement surrounding the massacre, one of the worst school shootings in US history, including the events that contributed to the 77-minute delay between the arrival of first responders and when the shooter was killed.

“The victims and survivors should’ve never been trapped with that shooter for more than an hour as they waited for their rescue,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said during a Thursday press conference discussing the contents of the report. “The families of the victims deserved more than incomplete, inaccurate, and conflicting communications from officials of their loved ones.”

According to the DOJ, several failures laid the groundwork for the much-scrutinized delay, including officers spending more than 40 minutes searching for a key to a door that investigators say had likely been unlocked. Investigators wrote: “Though the entry team puts the key in the door, turns the key, and opens it, pulling the door toward them, the CIR Team concludes that the door is likely already unlocked, as the shooter gained entry through the door and it is unlikely that he locked it thereafter.”

The report, based on a review of more than 14,000 pieces of data and more than 260 interviews, also directly called out Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department officials, including former police chief Pete Arredondo for instructing officers not to enter some classrooms until keys had been secured.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Puerto Rico has begun using batteries connected to residents’ rooftop solar panels to provide backup power for its grid, helping prevent blackouts and offering an alternative to fossil fuel-burning peaker plants. It could be the first step toward building one of the largest virtual power plants of its kind.

The yearlong pilot, launched late last year by Puerto Rico’s utility Luma Energy, will pull power from up to 6,500 households during energy shortages. It is part of a transformational effort to modernize a deteriorating grid and transition to clean energy. 

If the program is successful, it could lead to a much larger virtual power plant with the potential to make peaker plants, which run only when demand spikes, unnecessary. “It could be really significant,” said Ben Hertz-Shargel, a grid expert at the research firm Wood Mackenzie, adding that if it were expanded to include all home batteries on the island, it would be larger than any residential-storage virtual power plant in North America.  

Virtual power plants, or VPPs, are networks of distributed energy resources—like home batteries, electric water heaters, or heat pumps—that can help the grid. They can manage energy demand, such as by adjusting smart thermostats during peak hours. Some can also supply power to the grid, by drawing from home or even EV batteries.

Idaho has among the strictest abortion bans in the country. It’s so strict, in fact, that in 2022, the Biden administration sued the state, arguing that it violates a federal law regulating medical emergencies. The legal battle went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which said on Friday that Idaho’s law could go into effect—at least until the court reviews the case in April.

In Idaho, it’s illegal to perform an abortion—punishable by up to five years in prison—except when “necessary to prevent the death of a pregnant woman.” But doctors have faced confusion over when, if ever, they can step in to perform emergency abortions: What if, as US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar poses, a patient’s condition isn’t life-threatening, but could become so? How long are doctors supposed to watch their patients’ conditions deteriorate before stepping in?

“Doctors in Idaho are afraid,” Julie Lyons, a family physician who sued the state over the law, told the Idaho Capital Sun in December. “We are afraid to provide simple obstetric care because of the fear that what we do with our patient could lead to prosecution.” Similarly, an Idaho OB/GYN told the Washington Post following the court’s decision on Friday, “I could take care of a patient in [a life-threatening] scenario tomorrow—and now I have to wait for months to figure out what I can do. It just makes me question what I am doing in this state anymore.”

It’s not just Idaho. As my colleague Madison Pauly wrote in July 2022:

The ambiguity in Wisconsin’s state abortion ban, for instance, has left doctors like Abigail Cutler, an OBGYN in Wisconsin, in an impossible bind. Wisconsin’s law, written in 1849, allows abortions to “save the life of the mother.”

When Donald Trump’s lawyers head to the Supreme Court next month, they’ll be making their case to some familiar faces: three justices that Trump appointed.

On Friday, the court agreed to hear the ex-president’s appeal of a recent Colorado ruling that Trump, due to his role in fomenting the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, is prohibited by the 14th Amendment from running for office again. The case—which could impact the presidential election in other states, as well—will likely be one of the most important that SCOTUS has ever considered. The constitutional issues are incredibly complex, and the stakes are as high as they get. The right answer isn’t obvious. Some influential conservative legal scholars have argued that Trump should be legally barred from the ballot; some high-profile liberals have countered that in a democracy, the decision should be left to the voters.

No one knows how the case will come out, and it’s entirely possible that the court will rule overwhelmingly, perhaps even unanimously, to let Trump run for office. But one thing seems reasonably clear: If the Supreme Court does decide to ban Trump from running (or to allow individual states to keep him off their ballots), it will likely be because at least one of the justices Trump appointed votes to do so.

The math is fairly simple. Assuming Clarence Thomas doesn’t recuse himself, it will take five votes to uphold the Colorado decision. Three of those would presumably come from the three Democratic appointees. The two most conservative justices on the court—Thomas and Samuel Alito—are probably the least likely to vote against Trump. So to win, Trump will probably need to convince three of the remaining four jurists, a group that includes Chief Justice John Roberts and the three associate justices that Trump himself put on the court.

Trump’s team is well aware of this dynamic. Appearing on Fox News this week, Trump attorney Alina Habba said, “I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. I have faith in them.”

On Friday, ahead of the third anniversary of the January 6 Capitol attack, President Joe Biden delivered an impassioned campaign speech on what he framed as an urgent matter: This year, “democracy is on the ballot.” 

Much of the 30-minute speech—delivered near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and available to watch in full here—stayed true to Biden’s familiar brand of American patriotism. The president revisited the day we “nearly lost America,” condemned political violence, and praised the “ordinary citizens, state election officials,” and “the American judicial system,” which, he said, “put the Constitution first” in the fallout from the 2020 election.

“Because of them, because of you,” he said, “The will of the people prevailed.”

But the address was also a searing indictment of Donald Trump—and a warning. Biden reminded viewers of Trump’s plans if he wins the presidency in 2024, repeatedly invoking the former president’s own words and actions. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past,” Biden said. “It’s what he’s promising for the future. He’s been straightforward.”

“His first rally for the 2024 campaign,” Biden said of Trump, “opened with a choir of January 6th insurrectionists singing from prison on a cellphone while images of the January 6th riot played on the big screen behind him at his rally.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last year, climate change came into sharp relief for much of the world: The planet experienced its hottest 12-month period in 125,000 years. Flooding events inundated communities from California to East Africa to India. A heat wave in South America caused temperatures to spike above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of winter, and a heat dome across much of the southern United States spurred a 31-day streak in Phoenix of 110 degree-plus temperatures. The formation of an El Niño, the natural phenomenon that raises temperatures globally, intensified extreme weather already strengthened by climate change. The US alone counted 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023—more than any other year. 

Yet this devastation was met by some of the largest gains in climate action to date. World leaders agreed for the first time to “transition away” from oil and gas at the annual United Nations climate summit, hosted last month by the United Arab Emirates. Funds and incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, started to roll out to companies and municipalities. Electric vehicle sales skyrocketed, thousands of young people signed up for the first-ever American Climate Corps, and companies agreed to pay billions of dollars to remove harmful chemicals called PFAS from drinking water supplies.

As we enter a new year, we asked Grist reporters what big stories they’re watching on their beats, 24 predictions for 2024. Their forecasts depict a world on the cusp of change in regard to climate—both good and bad, and often in tandem. Here’s what we’re keeping an eye on, from hard-won international financial commitments, to battles over mining in-demand minerals like lithium, to the expansion of renewable energy.

 

One student has died and four others, as well as an administrator, have been injured in Perry, Iowa early Thursday, in what appears to be the year’s first mass school shooting. 

The attack, which unfolded at Perry High School just after 7:30 a.m. local time, led to the death of an unnamed sixth-grader, according to Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Division of Criminal Investigation at the Iowa Department of Public Safety. It was not immediately clear why that victim, a student at Perry Middle School, was at the high school; NBC News reported that the shooting unfolded during a breakfast program, before classes began, and that students of different ages may have been on campus. 

The five injured people are being treated at local hospitals, Mortvedt told reporters Thursday afternoon. Their conditions weren’t immediately clear Thursday night. 

The attacker, a 17-year-old student at the high school, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Mortvedt said, adding that authorities believe the shooter acted alone, employing a pump-action shotgun and small-caliber handgun. Authorities who swarmed the school following reports of gunshots also found an improvised explosive device on campus, which officials from the State Fire Marshal and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms “rendered…safe,” Mortvedt said. 

The shooting came on the first school day of 2024 in Perry, some 40 miles northwest of Des Moines. 

Republicans are standing with Donald Trump in record numbers—and a majority consider him to be a “person of faith,” according to two polls that dropped this week. 

Republicans today are more likely to be sympathetic to Trump regarding his involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, compared to the week after the insurrection, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found. Fourteen percent of GOP-identified respondents said last month that Trump bears a great or good amount of responsibility for the deadly insurrection, compared to 27 percent who said the same nearly three years ago. Only 18 percent of Republicans in that survey said the insurrection was “mostly violent,” compared to 26 percent who said so in 2021. (As a reminder, the insurrection led to injuries to approximately 140 police officers.)

The Washington Post reports that, in follow-up interviews, some participants said their views changed over the past couple years—because they’ve grown to believe the conspiracy theory that January 6 was an inside job. (GOP presidential candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has espoused this theory during his campaign and did so again today in response to the Post story.) 

Additionally, only 31 percent of Republicans surveyed said they believed President Biden was legitimately elected in 2020, compared to 39 percent in 2021; overall, the poll found, 36 percent of Americans don’t accept Biden’s presidency as legitimate. 

“From a historical perspective, these results would be chilling to many analysts,” Michael J. Hanmer, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, told the Post. But the results also provide some insight into why polling continues to show Trump as the likely GOP presidential nominee; that is, his role in the insurrection isn’t hurting him. Among his base, it appears to be helping cement his image as a martyr unfairly targeted by the DC establishment.