Aarón Cantú

@aaroncantu

California climate accountability reporter @capitalandmain.bsky.social Subscribe for updates: Signal: amc.213 Opinions mine

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Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· 6h

Back on the beat

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· 10d

Does anyone who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time coming?

didn't mean to do anything. That was part of the point. I wanted peace and quiet. Peace! We had it once, in Lower Bin-field. I've told you something about our old life there, before the war. I'm not pretending it was perfect. I dare say it was a dull, sluggish, vegetable kind of life. You can say we were like turnips, if you like. But turnips don't live in terror of the boss, they don't lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and the next war. We had peace inside us. Of course I knew that even in Lower Binfield life would have changed. But the place itself wouldn't have. There'd still be the beech woods round Binfield House, and the towpath down by Burford Weir, and the horse-trough in the market-place. I wanted to get back there, just for a week, and let the feeling of it soak into me. It was a bit like one of these Eastern sages retiring into a desert.
And I should think, the way things are going, there'll be a good many people retiring into the desert during the next few years. It'll be like the time in ancient Rome that old Porteous was telling me about, when there were so many hermits that there was a waiting list for every cave.
But it wasn't that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get my nerve back before the bad times begin. Because does anyone who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's

bad time coming? We don't even know what it'll be, and yet we know it's coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump - no know-ing, except that it'll be something bad. Wherever were going, were going downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool - no knowing. And you can't face that kind of thing unless you've got the right feeling inside you. There's something that's gone out of us in these twenty years since the war. It's a kind of vital juice that we've squirted away until there's nothing left. All this rushing to and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses, bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the marrow ought to be.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· 11d

Orwell, in Coming Up for Air, describing most adults.

Read it in just the same way, and his voice quivered when he got to the same bit - the bit about magic casements, or something. And a curious thought struck me. He's dead. He's a ghost. All people like that are dead.
It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don't stop working-hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste - but he's not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· 14d

Orwell on the religion of nationalism, nearly a century ago. From The Road to Wigan Pier.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you be-come. The histories I was given when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining in the naivest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the superior energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been current for at least a hundred years. 'Better is it for us', writes a Quarterly Reviewer of 1827, 'to be condemned to labour for our country's good than to luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices! 'Olives, vines, and vices' sums up the normal English attitude towards the Latin

races. In the mythology of Garlyle, Creasey, etc., the Northerner ('Teutonic', later 'Nordic') is pictured as a hefty, vigorous chap with blond moustaches and pure morals, while the Southerner is sly, cowardly, and licentious. This theory was never pushed to its logical end, which would have meant assuming that the finest people in the world were the Eskimos, but it did involve admitting that the people who lived to the north of us were superior to ourselves. Hence, partly, the cult of Scotland and of Scotch things which has so deeply marked English life during the past fifty years. But it was the industrialization of the North that gave the North-South antithesis its peculiar slant. Until comparatively recently the northern part of England was the backward and feudal part, and such industry as existed was concentrated in London and the South-East. In the Civil War for instance, roughly speaking a war

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· 17d

18th c. eagle made of silver plundered from Bolivia. Melt it down for solar panels! @lacma.org

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· 25d

Forgot about this wild picture

Gov Schwarzenegger signing a bill on a desk with a sign that says California Leadership Ending Global Warming

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· 26d

People cluster in tiny slivers of shade at LA Live on a 90 degree day.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jul 20

Sloponade

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 30

UPDATE: LA County told me that ER visits for smoke inhalation near the warehouse were three times higher in the week after the fire:

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 29

“For them to say it’s not toxic, it’s such a lie, it’s such a lie.” -Wendy Ramirez, a resident of the Boyle Heights neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 27

Armando Millan, a disabled and unhoused resident of Boyle Heights, sits across the street from the Lineage warehouse. A representative for Councilmember Ysabel Jurado reached out to Millan about assistance with evacuation, but he was reluctant to leave his belongings behind.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 23

Reported from Boyle Heights for an upcoming story and I gotta say: people who live next to this are REALLY angry.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 21

A haze in the direction of the warehouse still apparent yesterday afternoon.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 19

I was surprised to see this cold storage Lineage warehouse is still burning and billowing smoke toward Boyle Heights homes.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 17

Gigantic smoke plume over Downtown Los Angeles, may be from this: www.foxla.com/news/live-ma...

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 13

Covering the wreckage of California’s climate policy regime, this from @matthuber.bsky.social was prescient

This was not just his own belief. When momentum on climate action seemed possible, the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity directed a full frontal attack on all forms of carbon regulation. While most liberal climate activists focused on the group's distortion of climate science, its consistent message focused on the costs of climate policy and the limitations on the freedom of consumer choice. In 2008, Americans for Prosperity launched a campaign called the "No Climate Tax Pledge" which urged elected officials to sign a document ensuring, "I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.".1. The group also sponsored major rallies and events linking high gasoline prices to environmental policy. The group's president said in 2015, "We want the public to know there's a reason these prices are going through the roof: It's because of the environment produced by the regulatory practices of this administration."! The irony, of course, was that Obamas policies did next to nothing to prevent a massive expansion of oil production in the United States, which ultimately led to lower gasoline prices by the end of his second term—something he bragged about at a public event in 2018.!2
In sum, the technocratic construction of emissions as a "social cost" to be internalized through the market ultimately led to a politics that implied climate action will impose that cost on the working class and the economy at large. While the logic of getting the prices right and reducing consumption appealed to professionals, it failed to marshal a popular coalition behind it. In perhaps the death knell for these policy initiatives, the liberal and environmentalist state of Washington voted down carbon-tax proposals in both 2016 and 2018 by large margins. Meanwhile during that fall of 2018, working-class

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 7

This should be a huge scandal. Bari Weiss tried censoring a news report by channeling Trump’s lies about the DHS Minneapolis killings. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/m...

Did you do as she asked? I asked my producers, “Did we leave anything out that’s important? Did we make a mistake here? I don’t think so, but go back and look.” And then I sat down with a video editor, and I went over the video of the Renee Good killing over and over again, and realized that the event was not as the president said and not the way Bari Weiss remembered it. And it’s late. Our deadline was noon. It’s now almost 5 o’clock. That’s dangerous as hell. So I decided that I wouldn’t do those things. I wasn’t going to get in a debate about it. I wasn’t going to call Bari Weiss about it. I was just going to refuse to make those changes.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Jun 3

What a wimp

"You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt," Mr. Bilton wrote. He called it a "performative display of hostility" that
"demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show."

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· May 24

Eco brutalist building (apartment?) in central Quito

Tall concrete tower with units extended outward covered in plants

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· May 4

This is grim arxiv.org/html/2604.22...

Persona distortions from Al writing assistance could have far-reaching consequences across the many domains where written communication shapes social life. If Al writing assistance shifts the perceived extremity of political opinions, making writers seem more moderate or more radical, it could fuel misperceptions of public opinion, deepen partisan animosi-ty, and reduce willingness to engage across ideological lines (Levendusky and Malhotra, 2016; Druckman et al., 2022; Jost et al., 2022). If it elevates perceived writing quality or apparent expertise, it could lend unearned credibility to weak arguments and misinformation by decoupling surface fluency from genuine competence (Pornpitakpan, 2004; Kumkale et al., 2010). If it inflates or dampens the emotional or moral tone of text, it could amplify outrage-driven content and intergroup hostility, or suppress mobilization around genuine grievances (Berger and Milk-man, 2012; Brady et al., 201Z; Rathje et al., 2021). And if it shifts inferences about a writer's demographic background - such as their perceived education, race, age, or gender - it could mask identity signals that writers intend to convey, distort evaluations of competence, and alter the personal and professional opportunities writers are offered (Bertrand and Mul-lainathan, 2004; Moss-Racusin et al., 2012; Quillian et al., 2017). These distortions need not be dramatic to matter: at the scale of billions of user requests for Al writing assistance (Chatterji et al., 2025), even modest systematic shifts in how writers are perceived could accumulate into widespread misattribution of credibility, stance, and identity.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· May 1

California gasoline price average hit $6 today gasprices.aaa.com?state=CA

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· May 1

That’s quite a chart www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Chart showing major rise in Black reps after 1965 Civil Rights Act

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Apr 30

Me to my car: Memento mori…

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Apr 20

Through a sanctions loophole, the U.S. imports fuel made from Russian crude oil refined elsewhere. California’s top foreign refinery supplier of gasoline is the Reliance Industries refinery in western India, whose biggest oil supplier since 2022 has been Russia. Imports corresponded w/ gas prices.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Apr 20

NEW STORY! As a heat wave hit the West and the price of a gasoline gallon rose sharply, California faced the pain of dependence on climate-warming oil priced by the global market. As refineries close, the state is getting a lifeline from a surprising source: Fuel imports made from Russian oil. 🧵:

A news headline with the following text:
The Slick
As Prices Climb, California Imports More Gasoline Made From Russian Oil
The state’s failure to reduce driving and to stockpile fuel led to dependence on sanctioned oil refined elsewhere.
A photo of tankers in the Port of LA is the featured image.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Apr 15

Hopefully ground invasion of Iran won't happen at this point but if it does, soldiers will be facing insanely hot temperatures

Weather and the war
Articles on high-risk US military options often refer to (a) strike forces to seize Iranian enriched uranium supplies,
(b) seizing Kharg Island or (c) seizing Qeshm Island, which at 1,500 sq km is larger than Okinawa and Iwo Jima
where some of the fiercest battles of WWII were fought. The Gulf also has unique weather attributes which
may preclude these options as the region heats up over the next couple of months given potential damage to
equipment and troops. For example: in June as peak temperatures reach 126⁰ F, exposed metal temperatures
can reach 160⁰F and vehicle interiors can reach 176⁰ F.
These dynamics may explain why the Trump Administration is reportedly looking for a near-term exit and letting
the rest of the world figure out what to do about the Strait. No

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Apr 9

According to Kpler analyst Sumit Ritolia, Strait of Hormuz traffic is still at a crawl despite ceasefire.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Apr 9

Sec. Chris Wright of departmentofenergy.bsky.social was in Long Beach today, making the case for California to ramp up oil production and criticizing Newsom for not supporting the industry enough.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Apr 7

NEW: On a climate policy conference call just now, Jamie Court of @consumerwatchdog.bsky.social revealed that @calenergy.bsky.social recently appointed a Shell lobbyist to a deputy director role.

Aarón Cantú@aaroncantu· Apr 7

For years California has projected revenue from taxing lithium production in Imperial Valley. In reality it won’t happen for years, if ever.