Dave Levitan

Photo via Office of the President of the United States/Wikimedia Commons

Super typhoon Man-yi tore into the largest island of the Philippines over the weekend, killing at least eight people and causing widespread damage. The tragedy isn’t an unusual one for this country, except that it is the fourth typhoon to hit in the last two weeks, and sixth in a month.

Splinter is your home for news and opinions that challenge power in our political and economic system that's becoming more unhinged each and every day.

With a few days left in basically any of the 28 previous U.N. climate talks, the eventual agreement that emerged would have been tough to make out. Seasoned delegates to the COPs have long known to either book flexible return flights or simply wait for a Sunday or Monday trip, a few days into “overtime,” officially, as basically every one of these multilateral negotiations has gone longer than planned. But amongst all that struggle, in all cases but one (COP6 in 2000, when negotiators reconvened six months later in Bonn to hammer out an agreement; COP15 in Copenhagen ended with a non-official document from a few major economies), that foggy mid-COP outlook did eventually resolve into a tangible consensus.

Splinter is your home for news and opinions that challenge power in our political and economic system that's becoming more unhinged each and every day.

In some ways the impact of hurricane-force winds is binary: either your roof comes flying off, or it doesn’t. As such, though it is now well understood and widely disseminated that water is the deadliest aspect of tropical cyclones, the specific wind speed that hits populated parts of land really makes a difference. At 100 mph, maybe important things hold; at 105, or 110, or 118.57 mph, maybe they don’t.

If I found myself on the same side of certain issues today as the governments of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Egypt, and Iran, I might at least ponder the priors that dropped me into that camp.

There has been some bitter disagreement in Congress over the potential release of a House Ethics Committee report on now-former Rep. Matt Gaetz. The report, which apparently delves into the accusations and witness statements about Gaetz having sex with a minor, seems to have led the Florida rep to first resign from Congress in order to quash the committee investigation, and then on Thursday to withdraw from Donald Trump’s nomination for Attorney General.

For much of the last ten days, the draft documents out of the U.N. climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan offered a smorgasbord of possible outcomes. The primary goal, an international climate finance target at least marginally in line with the extreme costs the developing world is facing, seemed far off — activists and those poor countries were calling for a number in the trillions, while the rich countries that would provide it dithered about their responsibilities. On Friday, the official last day of COP29 (most of these go into overtime), a draft with an actual number emerged: $250 billion per year from rich to poor, by 2035.

Back in 2016, Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Energy famously didn’t know what the job actually entailed. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry believed “he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry,” per a New York Times report at the time. Trump undoubtedly agreed; I mean it’s right there in the title, “Energy,” what else could we be dealing with here.