“I May Be a Republican. I’m Not an Idiot.”

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Lancaster, California is the state’s 30th largest city, with a population of more than 150,000. Its Republican mayor, class-action attorney and alleged “unstoppable control freak” R. Rex Parris, has big plans for solar and clean energy. Lancaster requires virtually all new homes to either install solar panels or be built in subdivisions that generate a kilowatt of solar energy per house. The mandate is the first of its kind in the United States.

When asked by New York Times reporter Felicity Barringer if he views global warming as an imminent threat, Parris replied “absolutely.” He continued: “I may be a Republican. I’m not an idiot.”

Parris may be going out on a political limb, but science is on his side. Only about 0.17 percent of peer-reviewed papers on the subject actually question the science behind global warming or whether carbon emissions are causing it.

Parris has been on the solar-energy warpath for a while. In a ClimateWire story published last month, he is quoted as describing climate change as the biggest threat to the planet: “There isn’t any greater crisis facing the world today. We’re going to see the displacement of millions and millions of people. Whether we can survive the wars that that’s going to cause is an open question.”

“[Our mandate] serves as a model,” he later told E&E News. “Here I am in an extremely conservative area, and there was almost no push-back.”

h/t Taegan Goddard

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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