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News for the public, not the powerful.
Will the Supreme Court Let Big Oil Walk Away From Its Climate Bill?
The Supreme Court opened its new term Monday with a case that could decide who pays for a burning planet. Boulder, Colorado is suing Exxon Mobil and Canadian oil giant Suncor, saying they deceived the public about what their products do to the climate. Boulder wants its case heard in Colorado courts. The oil companies want the justices to kill it, claiming climate belongs to Congress and the White House. Dozens of similar lawsuits hang on the outcome. Brett Kavanaugh worried aloud that damages could drive some oil companies into bankruptcy. Elena Kagan compared the case to the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s. Boulder’s lawyer Kevin Russell told the court, “This is not an effort to reduce emissions.” Samuel Alito recused himself, so a 4 to 4 tie would send the case home to Colorado. A ruling’s months away. Somebody always pays for a disaster. The only question is whether it’s the people who lied or the people who got burned.
Washingtonians Rise Up at 19 Events to Stop Big Tech’s Data Center Invasion
Out in Washington State, regular people are doing what their legislature wouldn’t. Hundreds turned out Sunday at 19 events from Seattle to Spokane, demanding a statewide moratorium on new data centers. The group Washington AI Resistance organized the day of action. They want construction paused until there are rules covering what these giant facilities cost residents in electricity, water and pollution. State Representative Beth Doglio introduced basic data center regulations this year. The tech lobby watered her bill down, and then it died in committee. So cities are acting on their own. Seattle passed a one-year moratorium in June, and at least 10 other cities and counties have followed. Organizers say lawmakers who side with the industry over their own constituents will be held accountable. Tina Simcich of Olympia’s Democratic Socialists put it bluntly. “Washington needs to halt the out-of-control tech oligarchs.” Billionaires want our power, our water and our land for their AI machines. Turns out we still get a vote.
Can American Solar Makers Break China’s Grip With a Panel That Makes 25% More Power?
Here’s some good news on energy. American solar manufacturers say they’re on the edge of a breakthrough called tandem solar. Think of a layer cake. Stack second and third layers of material on a panel and it turns more sunlight into electricity, about 25% more than most panels today. Tandem PV, First Solar and Hanwha Qcells, which has spent billions on factories in Georgia, all say they’re close to selling them. Mike Carr of the solar manufacturers’ coalition says, “It is the next frontier.” China controls about 80% of the solar market and gutted American panel makers with rock-bottom prices. Get there first and we could win that industry back. The hurdles are real. The new panels may cost three times as much, buyers want proof they’ll last 20 to 30 years, and Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration are choking off permits for solar farms while pushing fossil fuels. America invented the solar panel in 1954. We shouldn’t let oil-soaked politics give the future away twice.
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Why Are the Women of One Tiny Sardinian Village Living to 100?
Speaking of the future, how’d you like to see 100? In Bolotana, a mountain village of about 2,300 people on the Italian island of Sardinia, researchers say they may have found a new blue zone, where people live extraordinarily long. A study in the journal Frontiers in Aging found that 13.8% of Bolotana’s women who reach 70 go on to reach 100. In the rest of Italy it’s about 3.5%. For the village’s men it’s under 5%. Only Hong Kong’s women do better. The team, including blue zone pioneers Dan Buettner and Gianni Pes, checked birth, baptism and marriage records to verify the ages. The traditional diet’s about 90% plants, with beans, pasta, olive oil and garden vegetables. Families live several generations together. The hills are steep and there’s no gym. As researcher Jay Olshansky put it, “Nobody there works out.” No miracle pills. Just real food, daily movement and people who take care of each other.
Who Built Louisiana’s Mystery Mounds Centuries Before the Great Pyramid?
And finally, a mystery in the Louisiana woods. Near Monroe, 11 earthen mounds linked by ridges form an oval nearly 900 feet across. The tallest stands 25 feet high. It’s called Watson Brake, and it’s about 5,400 years old. That’s older than Stonehenge and older than Egypt’s Great Pyramid, making it the oldest known mound complex in North America. Local resident Reca Jones brought it to archaeologists’ attention in the early 1980s after loggers cleared the land. Dating published in the journal Science in 1997 stunned the field. The builders weren’t farmers with kings. They were hunter-gatherers who fished the Ouachita River and kept building for roughly 500 years. Nobody was buried there. Nobody knows why they did it. Archaeologist Joe Saunders, who led the dating, offered one guess. “Perhaps constructing the mounds was the purpose.” Much of the site sits on private land, closed to the public. Long before Europeans arrived, the first Americans were organizing, cooperating and building things meant to last. We could stand to remember how.
And that's the way it is, Today Friday, October 9, 2026. I'm Thom Hartmann.
