The difficult task

Edgar McGregor building trust, fossil-fueled reporters and politicians tearing it down

Author

Brad Johnson
January 14, 2025

PRESENTED BY A DOLLOP OF DESPOT

It was hotter in Alaska than Washington D.C. today, I guess because Hell is freezing over. There’s also record-shattering heat in Mozambique, the Azores, Micronesia, the Philippines, and Patagonia, and bone-dry drought in Suriname, Greece, and Zambia.

Edgar McGregor is a 24-year-old climate activist and independent meteorologist living in Altadena, Calif., who for 2,000 straight days has been picking up trash in Eaton Canyon, documenting his work each day. By the end of 2024, his canyon was thick with vegetation fed by years of extreme rains and then desiccated by a year of epic drought and heat, fed by climate pollution.

For the past three years, he has also been running an Altadena weather and climate Facebook group and offering hyperlocal weather forecasts for Los Angeles neighborhoods.

As forecasts for extreme Santa Ana winds in his beloved canyon grew stronger last week, he warned his neighbors to prepare. Soon after the Eaton Fire began, he alerted his community to evacuate well before official evacuation orders, ending with the two words: “Get out!”

He saved untold lives from the holocaust that swept through Altadena on hurricane-force winds, obliterating thousands of homes and killing 16 residents.

“How do you balance keeping people informed of what you perceive as a very real mass threat without causing mass panic?” NPR reporter Ailsa Chang asked McGregor yesterday. “I mean, were you a little worried that you were being a little too,panicky?”

Edgar replied:

“The difficult job here was not standing in the middle of the street at 6:30 p.m. that night telling everybody to get out as the mountains behind me were on fire. The difficult task was spending three years building trust in my community, whereby that when I made a forecast, people could be confident that that would come true.”

The difficult task is building trust.

Okay, enough of heroes. Let’s return to the cretins and cowards working hard at the easier job of destroying democracy.

You can read more about the fires in Politico Power Switch, presented by the American Petroleum Institute!

Politico Power Switch, presented by the American Petroleum Institute.

The fossil-fueled Politico team is moderating the Democratic National Committee’s in-person officer candidate forum this Thursday in Detroit.

Checking now on how the Paper of RecordTM is responding to the fossil-fueled Los Angeles fires: Amy Chozick pines for leader with a “dollop of despot” and a history of sexual misconduct, and Bret “Bedbug” Stephens reminds everyone he’s a racist climate denier:

“it’s way too soon for political arguments and ideological score settling, whether the alleged culprit is climate change or D.E.I.”

Heckuva job, Kathleen Kingsbury, you’re making A.G. proud.

Another round of deadly winds is hitting Southern California from Los Angeles down to the Mexico border through tomorrow.

We Buy Junk Cars

New Senate Energy and Natural Resources chair Mike Lee (R-Utah) is working hard to jam through Trump’s Cabinet nominees, but he’s having paperwork trouble. Lee had scheduled the confirmation hearing of Gov. Doug Burgum (R-N.D.), or, as my autocorrect tells me, Dog Button, for Secretary of the Interior for this morning, but he’s had to reschedule it to Thursday. Fracking executive and climate denier Chris Wright’s Secretary of Energy hearing is scheduled for tomorrow morning, but he has the same problem that his background check and financial disclosures aren’t in yet. Lee hasn’t yet officially delayed Wright’s hearing.

As I discussed in yesterday’s newsletter, Sunrise activists have plenty of climate deniers to protest Wednesday morning at the U.S. Capitol on behalf of the Los Angeles Fires survivors even if Wright is pushed back.

Heron on ice

Wingnutty Texas judge Reed O’Connor ruled that American Airlines somehow violated federal law by investing pensions with BlackRock, because BlackRock mentions climate and environmental/social/governance (ESG) principles, even though none of American’s 401(k) assets were in ESG funds. If this ruling stands, it could blow up the entire 401(k) market. Matt Levine reax: “Maybe ESG is illegal now.”

In 2024, there were 27 individual weather and climate disasters with at least $1 billion in damages, trailing only the record-setting 28 events analyzed in 2023.

Hearings on the Hill:

Climate Action Today:

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