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Is climate change actually a big deal anymore? Or is everything, like, totally chill now? Climate scientist Kate Marvel and disinformation researcher Philip Newell join us to sort through the facts, fiction, and fossil fuel money behind conservative media's latest talking point. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

For season one of the HEATED podcast, Tracy and I threw a lot of ideas and formats at the wall. Over 20 episodes in five months, we covered everything from fracking waste to fossil fuel ads to fashion greenwashing to attacks on weather science. We were figuring it all out as we went. But in the end, one episode outperformed all the others: our myth-busting episode about electric vehicles. As of today, it’s gotten more than 90,000 downloads, whereas the rest of our free episodes averaged about 6,400 downloads. Pretty crazy, right? Fortunately, we really liked doing that episode! So for season two, Tracy and I decided to just do a lot more of that—and way less of everything else. Instead of 20 episodes about anything we can think of, we’ll be doing just 6 episodes, audio-only, each taking on a bad climate idea that’s becoming harder to escape. First up: the idea that “forest management” can solve the wildfire crisis. We hear this one all the time, particularly from Republican politicians amid devastating fires. I’ll be honest: I thought this one would be pretty straightforward. I’ve talked to enough scientists over the years to know that, while taking better care of forests can help reduce wildfire risk, it can’t solve the problem by itself. We also have to tackle climate change—and the reason Republican politicians never mention that is because they’re self-muzzled by fossil fuel industry money. I figured I’d explain that and be done.But then I started talking to a scientist who challenged the first part of that assumption; the idea that forest management is even part of the solution to wildfires. He argued that most of the work politicians call “forest management” is just industrial logging, and that this practice is not just ineffective, but actively making wildfires worse. I’d never really heard that argument before. And the more I tried to figure out whether he and scientists like him were right, the deeper I got into a fierce scientific debate I hadn’t even known existed. Fortunately, as I was deep in this rabbit hole thinking I’d never get out, I got a call from Miranda Green, the host of the Los Angeles Times’ Boiling Point podcast, asking if I might like to collaborate on an episode. I told her about the predicament I was in, and a reporting partnership was born. For the first episode of season two, Miranda and I dive into a debate you almost never hear in the political conversation about wildfires. We don’t come close to settling it, or even covering every part of it. But we do learn that the myth of “forest management” is bigger than I thought: It’s the idea that this vague phrase describes one reliable fix for every forest—and that any amount of work in the woods can make up for a warming climate. I’m sure this episode will ruffle some feathers. Listen to it above, or on your favorite podcast app by searching “HEATED.” The HEATED podcast only exists because of individual listeners who choose to support it—we don’t run ads or accept sponsorships. If you have the means, becoming a paid subscriber ensures we can continue this work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

This July 4 weekend has the potential to be soul-crushing. On the East Coast, a brutal heat wave is reminding everyone that the climate crisis is not some future abstraction, but an extremely scary present-tense physical condition. In Europe, extreme heat has resulted in more than 1,300 deaths. Across the U.S., dozens of large wildfires are burning, drought is still gripping much of the Lower 48, and the powers that be are doing everything they can to ensure this is not only the hottest summer on record, but the coldest summer for the rest of our lives. So if your temptation is to give in to doomerism right now, I totally get it. But if you looking for a reason not to—and if you have some free time to dive into fiction over the holiday weekend—I recommend picking up Retro, a novel out last week by author Jessica M. Goldstein. The book’s main character, Ash, is a struggling actress dealing with similar feelings of despair and hopelessness about the future. And then she gets a job at Retro, a travel agency dedicated to taking wealthy tourists on highly-curated trips to the past. And slowly, her perspective begins to shift—but not perhaps for the reasons you’d expect. What I loved about Retro is that it doesn’t answer that feeling with some cheesy conversion to optimism. It offers something I find far more realistic and useful: the idea that you can be cynical, but you don’t have to be an a*****e. You can know the future is uncertain, and still refuse to abandon it. You can be furious, scared, and nostalgic for what we’ve already lost—and still say, basically: screw it. I’m going to try anyway. Bias alert: Jess is also one of my best friends. I don’t really know how to talk about fiction books as a critic, but I do know how to dish with my girl about climate dread, nostalgia, evil tech billionaires, and the romance and power of platonic friendship. That’s what today’s podcast conversation is: a tonic for anyone who wants to be hopeful about the future but is struggling to do it. We talk about why Retro wouldn’t exist without Jess’s own feelings about climate change, why doomerism can feel so seductive, and why the unknowability of the future is not a reason to give up on it—but the very reason not to. You can find our full conversation at the top of this newsletter, on any of your podcast apps, or on YouTube. Just a heads up, we start diving into spoilers about halfway through the conversation, but we give a pretty explicit warning beforehand. You can buy Retro here (or, for U.K. readers, here), or pick it up at your local public library. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit heated.world I tested my pee for plastic chemicals! In today's episode, I go over the results with Dr. Shanna Swan and Jenna Hua, CEO of Million Marker, the company that administered my test, and talk about how my plastic detox has been going so far.

Last year, the Eaton Fire devastated Altadena, California, killing 19 people, destroying more than 9,000 structures, and leaving an entire community trying to rebuild. Now, as Altadena is still recovering, another wildfire season is already underway. In this episode of HEATED, we speak with Savannah Bradley, co-founder of A Resilient Tomorrow, a community-led disaster recovery organization launched after the Eaton Fire by Black women with deep roots in Altadena. They discuss what it means to recover from one climate-fueled disaster while preparing for the next one, and what communities actually need to rebuild safely and justly. Then we head to Capitol Hill to speak with Rep. Judy Chu about the fight for federal disaster aid, climate resilience funding, and who should pay as climate disasters become more destructive and more expensive. HEATED is 100% reader-funded journalism. No ads. No sponsors. No fossil fuel money. Support our work: heated.world This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

For years, Senator Sheldon has been one of Congress’s most relentless climate voices, delivering more than 300 “Time to Wake Up” speeches on the Senate floor about climate change and the fossil fuel industry’s political power. Lately, that persistence has taken a more targeted form: pressing the Trump administration over its extraordinary new favors to the oil and gas industry; investigating its decision to exempt Gulf drilling from endangered species protections; and pushing a windfall profits tax on oil companies at a time when Republicans control Congress and the White House. Whitehouse knows none of it is likely to move through Washington right now. So why does this gentleman from Rhode Island continue this brutal exercise of self-flagellation in the Senate? What is he trying to accomplish? And does he really think that if Democrats were in power, things would be any different? That’s what we wanted to know, and what Emily asked him. So let’s hear from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit heated.world Kate Marvel spent more than a decade at NASA studying the future of life on Earth. Then the Trump administration made that job feel impossible. Marvel, a prominent climate scientist, resigned from NASA last month amid the Trump administration’s sweeping attacks on federal science. Since Trump’s second term started, more than 10,000 federal employees with STEM Ph.D.s have left the government—mostly through layoffs, firings and buyouts—and more than 7,800 research grants were terminated or frozen. In her resignation letter—a masterclass in principled dissent—Marvel wrote that she never expected to voluntarily leave her dream job. However, she wrote, "I’m leaving because I want to tell the truth." In our conversation today, Marvel tells the truth about what’s happening to federal science under the Trump administration. We talk about the work she was doing at NASA before Trump, and why the administration would want to make that work difficult to accomplish. We also talk about one side-effect of Trump’s attack on science that no one is talking about: The loss of nerd culture, and why that culture is important to democracy. Then, for paid subscribers, we keep going into one of the most controversial questions in climate science: geoengineering. We talk about what it means to study technologies that could intentionally alter the climate system, and why the collapse of trusted public science makes those future decisions even more dangerous. We also get into our feelings about the state of federal science, and the strategies we’re deploying to not just cope, but fight back.

Tracy and I go deep about Shein’s purchase of Everlane, fashion industry greenwashing, and what true sustainable fashion looks like. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

What is coming when it comes to hantaviruses and climate change? How are they connected? And how could the rapidly approaching Super El Nino—a phenomenon worsened by climate change—affect the spread of hantavirus and other infectious diseases? That’s what we’re going to explore today. Special thanks to Drs. Kirk Osmond Douglas, James Shepherd, and Angel Desai for sharing their expertise that informed this story. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

Our good friends at the Popular Information newsletter have calculated the real cost of the Iran War so far: $72 billion for the first 60 days, or about $1.2 billion in taxpayer dollars per day. The numbers are revealing, in that they show the Trump administration is perfectly capable of finding money when the goal is destruction. But when it comes to protecting Americans from fossil-fueled extreme weather, suddenly we’re told the cupboard is bare. The Trump administration recently released a proposed budget that would cut NOAA by 26 percent. This proposed $1.6 billion cut—equivalent to about 1.3 days of the war in Iran—would eliminate NOAA climate, weather, and ocean research labs, zero out grants that help improve rainfall and flood prediction, and cut the Integrated Ocean Observing System—our national system for monitoring what is happening in the ocean, where hurricanes strengthen, and where coastal flooding begins. And this comes on top of DOGE-driven layoffs last year that eliminated roughly 880 NOAA jobs, including staff at the National Weather Service. The stupidity of this is almost difficult to overstate. Because Trump is not proposing to gut NOAA during some calm, stable weather period. He’s doing it at the very moment forecasters are warning that a potentially dangerous El Niño may be on the way.In today's episode, we talk to Craig McLean, the former acting chief scientist of NOAA, who spent more than 40 years at the agency. McLean recently wrote that the NOAA budget request “is not streamlining. It’s sabotage.” McLean knows what it looks like when politics corrupts weather science. You might recall, McLean was the NOAA official at the center of “Sharpiegate,” the infamous Trump-era scandal in which the president falsely claimed Hurricane Dorian was threatening Alabama, then displayed a forecast map that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie to make him look right. McLean pushed back after NOAA leadership rebuked its own forecasters for correcting the president, calling for an investigation into whether the agency’s scientific integrity policy had been violated. McLean was then relieved of his position. In our interview, McLean speaks about what these cuts would actually do, why NOAA research matters far beyond “the weather,” what Sharpiegate revealed about scientific integrity under Trump, and why attacking climate science is so dangerous at the exact moment Americans need it most. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit heated.world In our full, subscribers-only interview with Mike Meno, the communications director for the Center for Climate Integrity, we discuss the ins and outs of Big Oil's push for legal immunity, both in and outside the court.

I’ve been trying to “detox my life” from plastic for a few weeks now. In today's episode, we talk about all the ups and downs. I’ll update you all again when I get the results of my pee test back. Make sure you’re subscribed to get it. In related recent news… * Now may actually be a good time to start shifting away from plastic. The American Prospect reports: Petrochemical prices are spiking to four-year highs as the key ingredients, known as feedstocks, cannot get out of the Persian Gulf. Roughly $20 billion to $25 billion worth of petrochemical products moves through the strait annually, and about 40 percent of exports of polyethylene, used mostly in packaging and containers, came from the Middle East last year. Polyethylene prices are up 37 percent since February, and polypropylene prices are up 38 percent. * Oregon passed a law to shift more of the costs of plastic onto producers. But producers are fighting back. Central Oregon Daily reports: The future of Oregon’s Recycling Modernization Act is up in the air after a federal judge said portions of the law may be illegal, and can’t be enforced without full argument. On Feb. 6, Judge Michael Simon issued his initial order in the lawsuit that aimed to overturn the law meant to reform Oregon’s recycling system. * Millions of pre-term births and thousands of infant deaths linked to phthalates: From NYU Langone: Exposure to a chemical commonly used to make plastic more flexible may have contributed to about 1.97 million preterm births in 2018 alone, or more than 8 percent of the world’s total, a new analysis of population surveys shows. The chemical was also linked to the deaths of 74,000 newborns, the researchers further estimate…. According to the new work, [phthalate] exposure may have contributed to 1.2 million years lived with disability, a measure of all the years that people have lived or will live with illnesses, injuries, and other health issues caused by being born prematurely. * New study shows changing your personal care products actually does make a difference. From U.S. Right to Know: The findings, published in the May issue of Environment International, indicate that switching from conventional personal care products to nontoxic alternatives can rapidly and significantly reduce exposure to harmful chemicals. Even a few changes in only a few days can lower body levels of substances linked to hormone disruption, cancer, developmental problems, and reproductive toxicity, the study shows. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

Last week, Big Oil’s top-funded Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Representative Harriet Hageman (R-WY) introduced a bill called the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026. They framed it as a way to “protect American energy from leftist legal crusades punishing lawful activity.” What it actually does is give the fossil fuel industry a permanent shield against lawsuits and state laws that seek to hold the industry financially accountable for climate change, and for misleading the public about the catastrophic health, economic and environmental consequences of using their products. In this episode, I break down what this bill actually does, how it would shut down climate lawsuits across the country, and why the fossil fuel industry is pushing for blanket legal immunity right now. I also walk through the legal arguments their lawyers are using to try to kill these cases—and why those arguments only work if people don’t actually read the lawsuits. Read more and support my work at http://heated.world, or search HEATED in Substack. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

What are plastics actually doing to our bodies—and why is so much of the conversation focused on individual choices? In this episode of HEATED, Emily Atkin interviews Dr. Shanna Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist whose research on chemicals in plastics—like phthalates—has linked them to fertility problems and changes in reproductive development. The conversation is anchored in the new Netflix documentary The Plastic Detox, which follows couples attempting to reduce their plastic exposure in order to conceive. But we go beyond the individual-level “detox” framing to talk about the larger systems that made this problem so widespread. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe

Texas-based journalist Saul Elbein believes solid waste is the most important—and most overlooked—environmental story of our lifetimes. Yes, he argues, climate change, air pollution, and liquid waste from fracking are crucially important issues. But across Texas and Oklahoma, he says fracking companies have been spreading their potentially radioactive, PFAS-filled solid waste on farmland and near communities, largely without scrutiny, for decades. Saul told me he sees this as a modern-day Silent Spring: a slow-moving, mostly invisible contamination story hiding in plain sight, one that will only become undeniable once until the damage is already done. In his latest reporting for The Barbed Wire, that story comes into focus through a whistleblower named Lee Oldham. For years, Lee spread drilling waste across fields in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—waste he didn’t know was radioactive. Over time, he began to suspect something was wrong. Eventually, Lee says, his teeth began to loosen, and his jaw began to break down. It’s a shocking claim that Saul cannot definitively prove was a result of Lee’s exposure to fracking waste. But what he can prove is that, on the very site where Lee once spread that fracking waste, developers built an elementary school where children attend class today. He says the soil has never been comprehensively tested. In our conversation, Saul walks me through how this happens—how millions of tons of drilling waste can be legally classified as “non-hazardous,” spread across land in rapidly developing areas, buried without record, and effectively lost to history. We also talk about what we know, what we don’t, and what it would take to hold anyone accountable if those sites turn out to be unsafe. Finally, we talk about why this might be one of the few climate-adjacent issues that could unite people across political lines.You can listen to our interview at the top of this newsletter or on any podcast app, watch it on Youtube, or read an edited version on Substack. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit heated.world/subscribe