Oops! All Climate Hawks

A hot Tuesday deserves hot heroes

Author

Brad Johnson
May 19, 2026

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It’s a gazillion degrees here on the East Coast (also in Estonia, Finland, Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, India, Japan, Honduras, Egypt, Saudia Arabia…) so I’m just gonna put in bonus bird photos and write about good people today—like the indefatigable Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures around the world.

Instagram Post

ExxonKnews, the much better climate politics newsletter than Hill Heat penned by the Center for Climate Integrity’s Emily Sanders, is ending its run after seven years.

Fear not, dear reader: Emily is taking a sabbatical for a month to hike the Camino Norte and coming back with a new reporting endeavor for CCI. Here’s a reverse-Gish gallop (Pallogh sig?) of her reporting coups:

“Over the past few years, my reporting and collaborations have dug up oil industry lobbying to limit pipeline safety regulations and been cited in a (Biden-era) White House advisory council report on carbon management, uncovered how a risky Exxon pipeline got sited just feet away from a community and analyzed the company’s new greenwashing scheme around data centers, helped expose hypocrisies from the law firms representing Big Oil, a covert partnership between industry and government, and a weird partnership between a major media outlet and a major utility, shone a light on the dark money groups behind laws and dark money trails behind fake news, and just last month, got a Louisiana legislator to say he would rewrite a bill that could have halted all lawsuits against polluters over emissions in the state. I’ve also kept close tabs on the oil industry’s growing efforts to escape accountability in court, and reported on what they might have learned from the gun industry.”

Ooh, more good folks!

On Thursday, join Stop the Money Pipeline’s online fundraising gala with coalition director Alec Connon, Bill McKibben, Stand dot Earth’s Amy Gray, Louisiana climate activist Roishetta Ozane, and cellist John Mark Rosendaal, for an evening of celebration and grassroots fundraising.

A photograph of a white wagtail walking over a dead log lying like a bridge on the surface of a pond. The surface of the pond is almost perfectly calm, reflecting the slightly arching, partly moss covered log and the bird. in the foreground are a couple of tufts of bright green out of focus grass with the reflection of the bird between them. The light is warm and soft and the reflections of the surrounding trees and greenery are blurrily reflected in the water.

What a wagtail, amirite?

It’s a Tuesday, so it’s election day! And not all the elections have been cancelled yet—so we still get to keep the competition in our post-Constitutional system of competitive authoritarianism! Erk… getting too negative again… back to the good guys.

Although there aren’t too many climate champions in the Congressional primaries today, there are a ton of local climate hawks on the ballot in Oregon, including:

Eugene, Oregon has Alexi Miller, running for Eugene Water & Electric Board Commissioner At-Large, Jennifer Smith for Eugene City Council Ward 3, and ecologist Athena Aguiar for Eugene City Council Ward 5.

In Pennsylvania:

Kudos to the great folks at Lead Locally, Jane Fonda Climate PAC, and Climate Cabinet for scouring the nation for Green New Dealers and climate champions willing to take on the oil-billionaire-backed AIPAC and the AI PACs and fight for their communities.

River Views #1531: March River Shenanigans 21

Stay cool.

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Hearings on the Hill:

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