The death toll from last week's flash flooding disaster in the Nepal-Tibet border region rose to at least 955 people as of Monday.
Page A11From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
Climate deaths mount from Colorado to Nepal while a landmark climate liability case reaches the Supreme Court.
As it ran on the front
They keep asking why we call it a con and not a policy, and here's the tell: the same week Grand Canyon floodwaters kill at least two people and a flood across Nepal and Tibet puts the death toll past nine hundred with over four thousand people still missing, a genuinely novel lawsuit about who pays for a warming planet heads to the Supreme Court, and the smart money in this town is already betting on how the Court finds a procedural reason not to touch it.
Notice the language does the work before anyone testifies. It's not a flood, it's a 'catastrophic' flood, an adjective that shows up right before the story ends, right before the bill for cleanup lands on a county government instead of a company balance sheet. It's not a fire, it's Colorado 'burning,' present tense, ongoing, like weather, like something nobody did.…
…(cont) But somebody's name is on this lawsuit. Somebody sat down, built a case, and said: this is not weather, this is a product working exactly as designed, and here's the receipt. That's what 'novel' means in a headline about a court case — it means nobody's made it stick in quite this way before, which means it's the first time the actual bill has had a face on it.
The Court doesn't have to rule against anybody. It just has to decide whether the question gets asked at all. That's the whole ballgame. Not guilty or not guilty, just: does the question get to exist in a courtroom, or does it stay where it's comfortable, in a press release calling a nine-hundred-person death toll a 'disaster' instead of a bill.
I'm not telling you the Court is bought. I'm telling you that every time the bill for one of these events lands on a taxpayer and not a shareholder, that was also a decision, made by someone, upstream, quietly, the same way the missile money gets found and the vaccine money doesn't. You don't need a motive. You just need to watch who's holding the bill when the water goes down.
“Two dead in the Grand Canyon, nine hundred and climbing in Nepal, and the one thing that might actually put a price tag on any of it just landed in front of nine people in robes. Watch what they do with the question before you worry about the answer.”
“Weather has always been unpredictable, that's what makes it weather, and turning a flood into a legal liability case sets a precedent that any company could be sued for — okay, that is in fact the point of the lawsuit, I see that now, but it's still frivolous.”
The receipts
Officials say at least two people are dead and over a dozen others are missing after catastrophic floods struck a remote area of the Grand Canyon. KPNX's Kyle Simchuk reports with a live look at the current state of the canyon.
Boulder, Colorado, seeks to hold oil companies accountable for the costs of adapting to climate change and wildfires in a lawsuit heading to the Supreme Court.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.