Evening, Meteor readers,

The Robed Ones have been busy this week, so let’s jump straight into it and save you a little time (since we’ve all got a debate to attend).

In today’s newsletter, we’re talking about the latest decisions coming down from SCOTUS, plus Scarlett Harris gives us a primer on climate fiction, a sci-fi genre which deals with the climate crisis. Just in time for the fiery apocalypse… I mean, July.

Makin’ popcorn,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

The Supreme Court is dismantling the government: As SCOTUS winds up before the summer break, its late-term decisions are increasingly aimed at federal regulatory agencies. In this week’s decisions alone, SCOTUS ruled that the EPA can’t regulate interstate air pollution (Ohio v. EPA); that the SEC can’t impose civil penalties on a violator without a jury trial, limiting the agency’s ability to punish securities fraud (SEC v. Jarkesy); and that a federal law preventing elected officials from accepting bribes should be weaker to make way for a “gratuity” loophole. (In a rare break from this trend, SCOTUS dismissed the case about whether pregnant people in Idaho could obtain an emergency-room abortion if they were not yet on their deathbed, but by punting it, Justice Jackson argued they abnegated their duty.)

All of these decisions chip away at government agencies and rules designed to protect Americans. What’s more, these agency-weakening decisions dovetail with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s anti-democracy, Christian nationalist proposal for Trump’s second term and the far-right government his acolytes have been dreaming about. One of Project 2025’s major goals is eliminating some federal regulatory agencies, like the Department of Education, and stripping others for parts, including the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency. To be clear, these aren’t liberal agencies by any means—the EPA was formed in 1970 by President Nixon in response to out-of-control air and water pollution, and President Taft (a hero of none other than Justice Scalia) created the DOL. But by ruling against agencies meant to curb corruption and otherwise protect the public, SCOTUS’s right-wing majority is already handing the far-right the tools to dismantle them.

These decisions restrain the actions of everyday Americans while allowing wealthy corporations to run amok. And the right’s usual argument that they’re just advocating for smaller government isn’t particularly believable given that they’re perfectly fine with state legislators deciding when doctors can save pregnant people’s lives, or whether a parent can help their teen access healthcare. What they really mean is that protecting the people doesn’t matter, and they’re going to gut the laws that make it mandatory.

AND:

• The United States Women’s National Team Olympic roster has been announced, and much of the soccer world is shocked to see that veteran Alex Morgan will not be donning the crest this year. But perhaps the least welcome surprise for fans is the inclusion of Korbin Albert— a talented midfielder who had to issue an apology after engaging with homophobic social media posts about Megan Rapinoe.

• And while we’re on the Olympics, take a look at this year’s official Pride House on the Seine. The Pride House will be a safe space for queer athletes and fans from all over the world to eat, drink, be merry, and watch the Games in community. “Nobody has to hide who they are,” one of the organizers told Time.

• The trial for FKA Twigs’s lawsuit against former boyfriend Shia LeBeouf for sexual battery, assault, and emotional distress is scheduled for October in Los Angeles, but discovery is ongoing and going poorly: LeBeouf’s lawyers have asked for Twigs’s complete medical history and financial statements from 2017 to the present—which implies they may be making the argument that her emotional distress is tied to whether she is making money, rather than whether he repeatedly abused her during their relationship as she claims. As Twigs’s attorneys wrote in court documents, “A person’s ability to make money, particularly how much money, is not correlated to a person’s emotional distress damages.”

• Executive producers from The Bachelor are finally owning up to the years of racism that created a firestorm around Matt James, the first Black Bachelor, and one of the most uncomfortable seasons in the franchise’s history.

IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE

Reading for the End of the World

Your summer “cli-fi”—that’s climate fiction—guide.

BY SCARLETT HARRIS

A NON-FICTION CLIMATE MARCH IN BRUSSELS. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)  

Climate fiction—or “cli-fi,” a subgenre of sci-fi and speculative fiction that deals with the climate apocalypse—has cropped up in the last 15 years or so, with authors like Alexandra Kleeman and C Pam Zhang writing about the ways we might deal with our shared future. It’s a newish development in fiction, though Octavia E. Butler presaged the cli-fi movement by 30 years with Parable of the Sower, her classic novel of the post-apocalypse. And recently, an emerging topic within cli-fi is how the climate crisis intersects with parenthood, particularly as the planet’s worsening conditions play a huge role in real-life decisions around having children. For instance, in author Alison Stine’s 2021 novel, Trashlands, she tackles the question of just how much we can protect our children when it feels like we’re approaching the end of the world (which is the setting of her book). “I’m interested in the ones who don’t give up—who can’t give up,” Stine told me. “And often, that’s a mother.”

It makes sense that cli-fi authors like Stine—as well as those included in The Meteor’s cli-fi reading list, below—would focus on the role of parenting in the climate apocalypse; climate change most grievously affects mothers and pregnant people, with extreme weather events linked to premature- and still-births. The UN characterizes climate change as a “threat multiplier,” having cumulative effects on gender-based violence, sex trafficking, and poverty. Stine sees some of this in her work as a climate justice editor at Non-Profit Quarterly, and it shaped Trashlands. I won’t give too much away, but the novel’s protagonist, Coral, is forced into birthing her son, Shanghai. (Stine’s characters are all named for places and things that climate change has or will affect.) “Forced parenting is an arena where I hadn’t read much fiction,” Stine says. “The same is true of fiction about difficult parenting situations: where a mother loves their child very much, but they’re living in poverty, or they’re alone, unsupported. So much writing idealizes motherhood, which isn’t realistic or sometimes very helpful.”

The difficulties of parenting in a time of extreme weather also inform Sarah Ruiz-Grossman’s recent novel A Fire So Wild. The book centers on three families in the lead-up to and aftermath of a wildfire in Berkeley: a family of wealthy lesbians and their son who are able to rebuild their mansion in the hills; a Latine family who are struggling with divorce, relocation, co-parenting, and the housing crisis; and an unhoused couple living out of a van with their dog. “The fire itself doesn’t discriminate in terms of who it impacts, but we discriminate as a society in terms of…who is able to come back from a fire like this,” says Ruiz-Grossman, who has a background in investigative journalism and climate reporting. “Fiction was a better way to be able to tell this whole story.”

Though Ruiz-Grossman says she’s a proud aunt to many of her friends’ kids, climate change was a big factor in her own decision to be child-free. But she’s not hopeless: She says that activist movements, such as landback initiatives and the Sunrise Movement, give her optimism —and so does cli-fi. She calls it “a gift of a medium through which we can explore the injustices of the world… but also the…more radical, beautiful future we can…reach for.”

SCARLETT’S CLI-FI RECOMMENDATIONS 📚

• Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun 

Kleeman’s 2021 novel is about a screenwriter who abandons his family to join forces with a former child star to uncover the conspiracy at the center of the climate crisis—which also involves cults, because of course it does!

• Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

Former magazine editor Korn uses her experience in the girlboss world of women’s media as inspiration for a feminist billionaire who creates women-only refuges throughout the country.

• C Pam Zhang, The Land of Milk & Honey

In a world ravaged by climate change, a young, nameless chef mourns both the death of her estranged mother and the death of her profession as crops die and animals go all but extinct.

• Nick Fuller Googins, The Great Transition

It will take a drastic response to halt climate change and restore the damage we’ve already done. Fuller Googins shows the aftermath of that response, known as the titular Great Transition, in his futuristic novel.

• Diane Cook, The New Wilderness

In a similar vein, Cook’s 2020 novel is a mother-daughter story set in a markedly different future where the rare wilderness that is left is protected from humans. Mom Bea and daughter Agnes are part of a cohort sent into that wilderness to see whether humans can be trusted not to fuck it up—again.

• Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

An oldie and a goodie. The queen of sci-fi was an early pioneer of cli-fi, writing about an unrecognizable Los Angeles impacted by the climate apocalypse. We’ll try not to read too much into the fact that Butler’s 1993 opus is set in 2024…

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