Indholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2023 i Mother Jones

On the Cover In 2008, Bill McKibben wrote “The Most Important Number on Earth” for us and launched 350.org. Now, he says progressives must learn to embrace a green building boom. Justin Metz whimsically captures the paradigm shift. Contributors Other than the work you do now, what was your dream job growing up? I actually thought I wanted to be a librarian, which I’m looking back at in a new light after having written this piece. —Isabela Dias, author, “Teacher’s Pest” I wanted to follow in Spike Lee’s footsteps. He told stories with New York City as a backdrop. I was hoping to do the same for Washington, DC. —Octavio Jones, photographer, “Teacher’s Pest” I wanted to be a magician, but I was never smooth enough. Still can’t properly shuffle a deck.—Maggie Duffy, co-author, “Watching the…

IN NOVEMBER 2021, Victoria Conklin, a 23-year-old shift supervisor at a Starbucks near Buffalo, was talking to Rossann Williams, then the company’s president of North American retail. Workers at three nearby stores had recently petitioned to become the chain’s only unionized locations in the United States, but Conklin’s hadn’t. Williams wanted to keep it that way. As the company wrapped up its anti-union campaign, Williams told Conklin that a “special guest” was coming in for a big event. “It’s Howard Schultz,” Conklin responded. “Don’t act like it’s Taylor Swift or something.” Almost four decades before, Schultz had joined Starbucks as an operations and marketing executive. In 1987, he bought the company for $3.8 million, serving as CEO as it grew into the world’s largest coffee business. Starbucks is now worth…

ON A RECENT MORNING, researcher Dominick Dusseau offers a glimpse into the future of Chelsea, Massachusetts, a small, industrial city just across the Mystic River from Boston. On digital maps he displays over Zoom, great blue splashes cover large swaths of the city—areas where, by his calculations, climate-driven flooding is likely to occur. The maps depict a world where the locals who can least afford it will get hit the hardest. Dusseau’s analysis is a collaboration between the city and his employer, the Woodwell Climate Research Center, a nonprofit founded by a prominent ecologist who sounded early alarms about the hazards of DDT and climate change. Its mission is to put actionable data into the hands of decision makers, which is why it doesn’t charge for the climate risk assessments…

ON THE MORNING of January 23, Jean Faulk opened her inbox to find an email labeled “urgent” from her principal at Bayshore High School in Bradenton, Florida. “Based on clarifications from the state in December, teacher-created classroom libraries fall under what the state is defining as library material,” Wendell Butler Jr. wrote to his staff of 75 or so teachers. Faulk and her colleagues suddenly were expected to cross-check their books against an online catalog of district-approved titles. If a book wasn’t in the system, it would have to be inspected by a librarian. The email instructed Bayshore’s faculty to “remove or cover” classroom libraries until the materials had been reviewed. As Faulk, a 65-year-old world history teacher and former journalist who oversees the school’s student newspaper, read the guidance, her…

THE TORAH TELLS its followers to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” so that’s what Lisa Sobel, a devout Jewish woman from Louisville, Kentucky, set out to do. It wasn’t easy. After more than three years of infertility, she and her husband embarked on a $50,000 IVF journey. Finally, after having to discard four embryos with genetic abnormalities, in April 2019, she delivered a healthy baby girl—and quickly began hemorrhaging. Sobel almost died. Now 39, Sobel wants another child. But after all that, what she says is keeping her from moving forward are the anti-abortion laws Kentucky enacted in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. It’s why she and two other Jewish women—both of whom also depend on in vitro…

IN THE LATE ’60s and early ’70s, when runaway development with little study or oversight led to the draining of the Everglades, the Santa Barbara oil spill, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire, to name but a few catastrophes, the National Environmental Policy Act and its state-level counterparts, like the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), were passed to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony.” These laws demanded that the environmental impacts of proposed projects be thoroughly studied, discussed with the public, and mitigated where feasible. Sounds totally reasonable, right? But as policymakers grapple with climate change and a national housing crisis, there’s a growing recognition that, as law professors J.B. Ruhl and Jim Salzman put it, the Green New Deal is an…

ONE NIGHT IN late January, Los Angeles’ brand new controller, Kenneth Mejia, zipped up an official windbreaker with a city seal on the left breast, and walked out of City Hall to police headquarters. Mejia, an athletic 32-year-old with a background in left-wing organizing, stood watching at the edge of a vigil to memorialize Tyre Nichols, whose deadly beating by Memphis cops had just been released on video. Officers and cruisers showed up en masse at the gathering, as they would at a series of demonstrations that unfolded over the next several days. Through it all, Mejia and his team did their job: They conducted “on-the-ground” monitoring, keeping eyes on the cops’ expensive show of force. In November, Mejia, who is Filipino American, won a sweeping victory with a data-based…

I’M AN ENVIRONMENTALIST, which means I’ve got some practice in saying no. It’s what we do: John Muir saying no to the destruction of Yosemite helped kick off environmentalism; Rachel Carson said no to DDT; the Sierra Club said no to the damming of the Grand Canyon. We’re often quite good at it, and thank heaven; I’ll go to my grave satisfied by, if nothing else, having played some part in stopping Big Oil from building the Keystone XL pipeline 1,700 miles across the heart of the continent. Right now I’m deeply engaged with American colleagues in trying to stop our big banks from funding fossil fuel expansion, and rooting on friends in Africa as they battle the giant EACOP pipeline, and watching with admiration as European confreres fight plans…

ON THE LONG LIST of things standing in the way of the green energy transition, utilities are up at the top. So says a recent report from the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute, whose executive director, David Pomerantz, sat down with journalist David Roberts to discuss the details. You can hear the full, unedited exchange on Roberts’ podcast, Volts. David Roberts: Gas and electric utilities are major lobbyists. What are they pushing for? David Pomerantz: They’re often the same company. But the gas utility sector is united in its aggressive political effort to stave off electrification of new buildings. They see that as an existential threat. Electric utilities not only have a role to play in the energy transition, but really the very central role. I wish more of them would…

I’VE ALWAYS LOVED racing games. I first got addicted way back in the ’90s, when I’d jam quarters into arcade cabinets with the full-sized car seat and stick shift, and hurtle around virtual tracks. During the ’00s and early ’10s I became a narcotic partisan of the Burnout racing series on my PlayStation—games in which you drove at such a frantic pace that the landscape blurred. And what, precisely, was the allure of all this pell-mell driving? I think it activated some latent Walter Mitty mechanics in my soul. My day job is sufficiently sedate (I sit around talking with people and typing up what they say) that I needed some romantically intense escape: split-second decision-making at 200 mph. Most importantly, though, racing games gave me a wonderful feeling of…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, one of the nation’s most influential medical associations released a new set of guidelines for treating childhood obesity. And it nearly broke the internet. The recommendations, issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics for the first time in 16 years, say that pediatricians should stop taking a “watchful waiting” approach and instead embrace early, aggressive action to treat children and teens with obesity, which AAP defines as having a body mass index, or BMI, at or above the 95th percentile for a child’s age and sex. The group recommends “intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment” for families with children as young as 2 years old, and in addition, weight-loss drugs for children 12 and up, and surgery for children 13 and up with severe obesity. The reason…