Our Big Brutal Box Era

PRESENTED BY A WAREHOUSE NEAR YOU

As techno-neoliberalism collapses into techno-fascism, the Big Box era is giving way to the Big Brutal Box era. For decades, Amazon, IKEA, Wal-Mart, Target, and others hollowed out local economies with warehouse-fed sales plugged into a global fossil-fueled shipping network. The Trump-Musk economy doesn’t bother with the sales: the warehouses are being converted to data centers to warehouse economically “productive” computers and concentration camps to warehouse economically inconvenient people. Both sides of the Big Brutal Box equation are fed by the One Big Brutal Bill Act, a multi-trillion-dollar behemoth of codified anti-human cruelty.

This desecratory death machine is fueled by ever-faster extraction and pollution. The Trump regime’s daily moves—ordering the Pentagon to prop up coal plants, revoking the greenhouse endangerment finding, killing stop-start incentives—all serve the techno-Moloch.

Via Keith Cowing, we’ve got the latest move by Trump vizier Russ Vought and Musk ally Jared Isaacman to eliminate climate science at NASA—a directive to “pause all activities that would create new financial commitments” on various earth science projects.

In another galling move, the Federal Judicial Center deleted a new chapter on climate science from a scientific reference manual for judges, after the state AGs who put the AG in MAGA cried climate denial. The chapter, published in December 2025, was written for the National Academies of Science by climate legal scholar Jessica Wentz and climate scientist Radley Horton, and is still available at the NAS website. The center, a Congressionally created institution, is led by judge Robin Rosenberg. Whose husband Mark McAuliffe was general counsel for Bill Koch’s Oxbow Carbon from 2012 to 2024. Which I’m sure is just a coincidence.

Dare I say, some good news!

Dr. John Kotcher has been named director of the Center for Climate Change Communication, the research center chartered by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University founded by the great Ed Maibach. John had been serving as interim director following Ed’s retirement last June.

Thirty-six Congressional climate hawks have filed an amicus brief in defense of Biden climate funds illegally impounded by the Trump regime. The brief “urges the Court to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) illegal efforts to eliminate the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator programs, both of which are part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).”

Like a message in a bottle washing ashore, a piece of powerful climate journalism completed before the Washington Post purge was published today. Written by Shannon Osaka (now on leave to write her book on microplastics) and climate data journalist John Muyskens, the piece explains how there are troubling indicators that the rate of global warming is accelerating, with the heat of 2023, 2024, and 2025 zooming off the charts. Okay, so maybe it’s not the best of news, but it’s good that it’s news, and not, say, an anonymous editorial publishing climate-denial bilge praising Trump’s murder of the finding that greenhouse pollution is pollution. Fun fact: now-fired Bezos hatchetman Will Lewis had a $3 million salary!

If you’re interested in making the news better: Climate Defiance is hiring a distributed organizing director ($50K-$80K, remote)!

Oakland’s Local Clean Energy Alliance is looking for a campaign manager ($72K, Oakland).

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: House Appropriations Committee

  Homeland Security Subcommittee
  Potential DHS Shutdown Impacts

• 1:45 PM: House Natural Resources Committee
  Markup of Mining Deregulation, Seafood Country of Origin Standards, Wildfire Study, National Parks, and Other Bills

• 2 PM: House Foreign Affairs Committee

  South and Central Asia Subcommittee
  South Asia: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Region

• 2 PM: House Science, Space, and Technology Committee

  Research and Technology Subcommittee
  U.S. Surface Transportation Research

• 2 PM: House Homeland Security Committee

  Emergency Management and Technology Subcommittee
  Surveying the Threat of Agroterrorism, Part II: Assessing Federal Government Efforts

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