On May 2, 2008, the Chaitén volcano in Chile awoke with unexpected fury after more than 9,000 years of dormancy. The eruption blasted rocks and ash a dozen miles into the air, and then heavy rainfall swept the fallen debris up in immense mudflows. A river of rubble carved a destructive path through the nearby town of Chaitén before surging into the sea. The town, practically split in two by the torrent that cut through its middle, was evacuated as ash blanketed over 200,000 square kilometers of surrounding land.
While the terrestrial aftermath was plain to see, captured by both the local media and satellites, the impact on the sea was unknown.
Mists shroud the hillsides at the entrance to Chaitén Bay, as seen from aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s <em>Falkor (too)</em> research vessel.
Credit:
Alex Ingle / Schmidt Ocean Institute
The eruption released over 750 billion liters of lava—enough to fill more than 300,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools—mainly in the form of rock fragments. The debris flowed through rivers into the Northern Patagonian Sea, just six miles away.
© United States Geological Survey
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, researchers and policymakers have proposed solutions like installing renewable energy, replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and developing technology to suck carbon out of the air. But these policies often address climate change in isolation—without regard for other pressing issues like a decline in biodiversity, the contamination of freshwater sources, and the pollution of agricultural soils.
A new report released Tuesday by the United Nations’ expert panel on biodiversity makes the case for a different approach based on addressing the “nexus” between two or more out of five essential issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, food, human health, and water. Such an approach is not only more likely to help the world meet various UN targets on biodiversity, sustainable development, and climate mitigation; it’s also more cost-effective.
“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos,” said Paula Harrison, a professor of land and water modeling at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a co-chair of the report, in a statement. Other scientific reports have studied the interlinkages between two or three of these issues, but she told reporters on Tuesday that this latest report is the “most ambitious” to date.
The new report was the result of three years of work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, an expert body that’s analogous to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which periodically assesses the state of the science on global warming.
The report centers on biodiversity—that’s the IPBES’s remit, after all—describing how the variety of life on Earth is “essential to our very existence.” But it goes out of its way to show how rapidly accelerating biodiversity loss is both contributing to and being exacerbated by other crises. Climate change, for instance, is making some habitats inhospitable to their erstwhile animal populations, while the loss of those populations can have impacts on freshwater availability and carbon storage. The five interlinking issues were selected by representatives of the 147 IPBES’s member countries.
Meanwhile, solutions that focus on just one issue may have detrimental effects on other elements. Pete Smith, a professor of soils and global change at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, gave the example of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, a climate solution in which crops are grown to draw CO2 out of the air and then burned to generate energy. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions are captured and stored in rock formations, with the aim of removing them from the carbon cycle permanently.
The problem, Smith said, is that to implement this process on a large scale would require vast tracts of land that might otherwise have been used to grow food crops—so BECCS can unintentionally harm food security. Devoting land to single-variety crops can also use up lots of water and jeopardize biodiversity.
“When you just focus on climate change,” he told Grist, “you might end up with some solutions that damage other elements of the nexus.”
In other scenarios, it’s not the solution itself that’s problematic; it’s the way it’s implemented. Planting trees, for example, can be done in consultation with local communities and taking into account unique ecosystem needs. Or, as Smith described, a big company seeking to generate carbon credits could evict Native peoples from their land and start a plantation of fast-growing, nonnative tree species.
The latter situation might benefit climate change in the narrowest sense, Smith said, but “with a whole bunch of negative impacts on people, on health, on water.”
The assessment finds that, between 2001 and 2021, every one of the five issues analyzed has been damaged by factors including urbanization, war, and growing per capita consumption—except for food availability. That could be explained by a kind of decision-making the report describes as “food first,” in which more food is grown to benefit human health at the expense of biodiversity, freshwater availability, and climate change.
Decision-making built solely around climate change or conservation could be similarly counterproductive, the report says, based on an analysis of 186 future scenarios crafted from 52 scientific studies. The most promising alternative is a “nature-oriented nexus” focused on all five target areas, emphasizing “strong environmental regulation, sustainable agricultural practices, lower rates of global per capita consumption, and strong development of green technologies.”
More than 160 scientists from 57 countries contributed to the report, which was formally adopted this weekend at IPBES’s annual conference in Windhoek, Namibia. During a press conference on Tuesday, the authors said they were ending the year “on a high note for multilateralism,” in contrast to the stalemates that defined other intergovernmental negotiations in 2024, like the global plastics treaty and the climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
In addition to the nexus report, IPBES member states also approved a report on the “transformative change” that is needed to address global crises connected to biodiversity, including climate change. Notably, that report says that “disconnection from and domination over nature and people” is at the root of toxic chemical pollution, deforestation, the burning of fossil fuels, and other causes of climate and environmental degradation.
Both reports highlight the need to address the inequitable concentration of wealth and power and the prioritization of short-term material gains in order to “prevent triggering the potentially irreversible decline and projected collapse of key ecosystem functions.”
“Right now, our economic and financial system is not fit for purpose; it does not value nature,” Pamela McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University and a co-chair of the nexus report, told reporters on Tuesday.
The nexus report finds that $7 trillion a year in public subsidies and private financial incentives go toward activities that directly damage the five issue areas. Only $200 billion—less than 3 percent of that total—is spent directly on improving biodiversity.
Because the nexus report was requested directly by the governments of IPBES’s 147 member countries—among them, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the United States, and most of Europe—the scientists who contributed to it are hopeful that their recommendations will be adopted by policymakers. In the report, they highlight 71 cross-cutting responses to interlinked global problems, ranging from reducing plastic pollution to conserving wetland ecosystems to providing universal health coverage.
Smith, who is a soil researcher and has also contributed to reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said working on the report has changed his own outlook. “I’ve tried to apply the nexus thinking on a couple of projects on how climate change affects the food system, and people in disadvantaged communities,” he said. “All of these things are leading me to take a broader, less siloed view than I would have done 10 years ago.”
Previous IPBES reports have shown how biodiversity is “declining faster than at any time in human history.” At the group’s next conference in 2025, it’s expected to present a new assessment of businesses’ impact and dependence on biodiversity, and IPBES plans to release its second global assessment of the state of biodiversity in 2028.
On Wednesday, California became the first state to issue a declaration of emergency regarding the avian flu (H5N1). That same day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the first severe case of the flu in a human on US soil and outbreaks in cow herds were detected in Southern California.
Still, the threat to humans is low according to the CDC. The agency has traced most human infections back to those handling livestock, and there’s been no reported transmission between people.
“I have dairies that are never coming back from this.”
But for cows and the dairy they produce, it’s a different story. This year was the first time the flu was detected in cows in the US, and it has ripped through many Western states’ dairy farms with startling speed. Since March, the virus has been found in cow herds of 16 states. For the last few months, infected herds have largely been concentrated in California—the state that makes up about 20 percent of the nation’s dairy industry. Last week, Texas, another one of the nation’s top dairy producing states, saw the reappearance of bird flu after two months without a detected outbreak.
In the industry hit hardest by bird flu, the poultry industry, the virus’ spread has resulted in the culling of entire flocks which has lead to higher egg prices on supermarket shelves. Will milk and butter prices soon go the same route? And how worried should you be about consuming dairy?
Some farmers are first identifying outbreaks in their herds through the color and density of the milk, in what they are coining “golden mastitis,” according to Milkweed, a dairy news publication. As early studies by University of Copenhagen researchers found, the virus latches onto dairy cows mammary glands, creating complications for the dairy industry beyond just the cow fatalities.
The virus is proving deadly to cows. According to Colorado State University Professor Jason Lombard, an infectious disease specialist for cattle, the case fatality rates based on a limited set of herds was zero to 15 percent. But California saw an even higher rate of up to 20 percent during a late summer heatwave in the states Central Valley. It was a warning for how the rising number of heatwaves and temps across the country could result in deadlier herd outbreaks in upcoming summers.
For some of the cows that survived, there was a dip in their dairy production of around 25 percent according to multiple experts I spoke with. As a farmer told Bloomberg News, some of the cows aren’t returning to full production levels, an indication of longer lasting effects of the virus. It’s a finding experts are seeing in other parts of the US, too. According to Lombard, this may be due to the severity of the virus in the cow. According to reporting in Milkweed, there may also be “long-tail” bird flu impacts on a cow’s dairy production, health, and reproduction. Additional research is likely needed to understand the extent of these potential longterm effects of the virus and whether they could spell trouble ahead for recovering farms.
A spokesperson with the California Department of Food and Agriculture told Mother Jones, “it’s too soon to know how production has been impacted.”
As of today, more than half of the people who’ve contracted H5N1 are dairy farmworkers, according to the CDC. This population is particularly vulnerable because they are often the ones handling milking or milking equipment which can lead to spreading the virus. The CDC is recommending employers take steps to reduce their workers’ exposure to the virus by creating health and safety plans.
The CDC is working with organizations like the National Center for Farm Worker Health to expand testing, PPE availability, and training. According to Bethany Alcauter, a director at the organization, ensuring dairy farmworkers have access to testing is a tricky situation. The 100,000-some workforce faces barriers to accessing health care and testing, such as an inability to take paid-time off to get themselves tested if they are sick. And the system depends on the producer to decide to bring in the health department to oversee potential outbreaks within herds and staff, which doesn’t always happen because there’s no government mandate.
“It’s all recommendations and kindness—that’s what we’re running on. It’s not regulation and enforcement.”
“It’s all recommendations and kindness—that’s what we’re running on,” Alcauter says. “It’s not regulation and enforcement.” She believes the testing infrastructure could be strengthened by “recognizing that farm workers can be public-health first responders if they have the knowledge and the access to the right contacts, in the right system.”
Outside of navigating farmworker health, farmers face economic impacts when the virus spreads through their herds. “What you’re losing at the end of the day is revenue for your farm when it rolls through,” says Will Loux, vice president of economic affairs for the National Milk Producers Federation. “Depending on the financial situation of an individual farm it can certainly be devastating.”
There are a handful of variables and factors that shape the financial losses of a dairy hit with an outbreak. Luckily, agriculture economist Charles Nicholson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and some colleagues created a calculator to estimate this financial impact of a bird flu outbreak. Based on Nicholson’s estimates for California, a typical farm of 1500 cattle will lose $120,000 annually. For context, this is about $10,000 more than the median household income of a dairy farmer. Based on those estimates, that would mean California’s farmers have collectively lost about $80 million at most due to avian flu so far. The US Department of Agriculture is providing support for farmers who are impacted by H5N1 outbreaks.
In reviewing a few herd datasets in Michigan, Phillip Durst, a dairy and cattle expert, noted that about half a year after an outbreak, herds were producing around 10 percent less than before. Not only do farmers face massive short term losses, they also struggle to return to full capacity again. And, there are high costs associated with putting resources into taking care of sick animals too.
Even strong diaries that had “tip top” biosecurity measures, or comprehensive environmental protection measures in place, are shutting down, according to Anja Raudabaugh, CEO of Western Untied Dairies, a trade organization overseeing farms across California. “I have dairies that are never coming back from this,” Raudabaugh says. “This was just so cataclysmic for them. They’re not going to be able to get over that loss in production hump.”
There is some hope around the corner. A vaccine for cows, which the USDA claims is in the works, could help stop the spread and protect remaining uninfected herds. “Until we have a vaccine that we can inoculate them with at an early age, we have no choices except to hope that herd immunity sets in soon,” Raudabaugh says.
In June, the US dropped 1.5 percent in production, around 278 million pounds of milk, compared to 2023. It was one of the early potential indicators of the industry’s vulnerability to this virus. However, since then, the nation’s production rebounded to above 2023 numbers. It’s largely why consumers are not seeing the same impact on the price and availability of dairy products like they are with eggs.
“When one state gets H5N1 there are a lot of other states that tend to pick up the slack. So in general, when you look at the national numbers, you really have to squint to kind of find where H5N1 is in the milk production”,” says Loux.
California produces around a fifth of the nation’s dairy, and since August over half of the state’s herds had an outbreak. In October, California saw a near four percent drop in milk production compared to 2023, equating to about 127 million pounds of milk.
On Thursday, the USDA released November’s data on milk production showing California with the largest decrease this year of 301 million fewer gallons of milk compared to 2023. That is more than double the decrease of last month. Still, the nation only saw a near 1 percent decrease since 2023.
How the next administration handles this virus may spell a different story for the dairy industry and the country. With Trump’s history of downplaying infectious diseases and promoting unfounded cures, and public health cabinet nominations who decry vaccine effectiveness, a human-to-human outbreak could lead to another pandemic. Likely to take over the USDA is Brooke Rollins, who, according to Politico, had less experience in agriculture than others on Trump’s shortlist (though she does have a degree in agriculture development). It’s currently unclear what her plans are for handling this virus and supporting farmers and the industry at large. Rollins did not respond to my request for an interview.
Drinking pasteurized milk is safe. For more than 100 years, pasteurization has kept the public safe by killing harmful bacteria and viruses.
The CDC is warning against raw milk consumption, on the other hand, due to it potentially having high-levels of bird flu. While there’s yet to be a human case of bird flu traced to raw milk consumption, there is fear that the unpasteurized product could lead to illness. And raw milk loaded with the virus has been linked to deaths in other mammals, like cats.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the likely soon-to-be director of Health and Human Services under Trump, has a history of promoting raw milk. Earlier this month, Kennedy’s favorite raw milk brand was recalled by California after testing positive for bird flu. Kennedy’s rise to public health power comes at time when raw milk is rising in popularity on TikTok.
In response to the spread of bird flu in raw milk, the USDA announced a national strategy requiring milk samples nationwide be tested by the agency. Since officially beginning testing on Monday, 16 new bird flu outbreaks in cow herds have been identified in two states.
For now, as the nation continues to work on controlling the spread of bird flu, consider tossing your raw milk out before it does more than just spoil.
On a long flight in the mid-aughts, I decided to read The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz. I thought of it like giving myself an assignment, the kind of thing I tended do when I was younger. I wanted to understand an argument I expected to disagree with.
But this proved to be a mistake. The Case for Israel is not a good enough book to reward that kind of exercise. I found it chock-full of conventional pro-Israel arguments that avoid the most difficult questions about Zionism.
And yet it an important book, maybe more so now than in 2003, when Alan Dershowitz was not advising the White House.
I had occasion to reconsider the Case for Israel in 2018, when Dershowitz let it be known that he had recently begun counseling Donald Trump on Middle East policy. I reported that Dershowitz had also recently agreed to a contract to provide advice to an American lobbyist who represented Qatar, an arrangement that arguably undermined the independence of the advice he offered the White House. Asked about this, Dershowitz hotly volunteered, unprompted, that he was an “expert” on Israel because he had written books, most notably, The Case for Israel, on the subject.
The problem with this argument is that the book, which I reread this year, is terrible. It would be bad even if you agreed with it. It is, first all of, kind of a gimmick. Like one of those famous coaches hawking business tips, Dershowitz tapped his fame as a defense lawyer to structure his book as a “defense of Israel…in the court of public opinion.” There are 32 chapters where he outlines what he says are common anti-Israel arguments, which he rebuts in sections that largely summarize what even then were well-worn pro-Israeli bromides.
And the book does not actually address the most compelling pro-Palestinian arguments. You might, for example, expect a chapter titled “Did European Jews Displace Palestinians?” to answer that question. The reader may look here for the author acknowledge that yes, Israelis expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli War in 1947-1948, even if he then attempted to justify that ethnic cleansing.
But Dershowitz doesn’t do any of that. Instead he details the historical presence of some Jews in Palestine, which is not responsive to his own question. He says many Jews, prior to the war, bought land in Palestine from absentee landlords, which is also off topic. And he downplays the extent of the Palestinian population in Israel at the time. He just ignores the well-documented Israeli efforts to expel Palestinians. (This policy was detailed in Benny Morris’ 1988 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which Dershowitz cites, for other purposes, in the same chapter.)
Dershowitz has been accused of plagiarizing material in this book, from Joan Peters’ 1984 book From Time Immemorial, a claim he denied so hard he once reportedly tried to get then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to suppress publication of a book detailing the accusation. (Dershowitz has not responded to my request for comment regarding these accusations.) Regardless, the book seems hastily written. Like other Dershowitz writing, it sounds like he dictated parts in an airport bathroom and never revised.
But despite its shortcomings, this is book which informs the views of people who are about to resume making US policy on Israel. Expert or not, Dershowitz really did advise Trump on Israel during the president-elect’s first term. And he also offered advice to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner that informed the so-called Abraham Accords. (Dershowitz later nominated Kushner and his deputy Avi Berkowitz for the Nobel Peace prize, a proposal substantially undermined by Hamas’ October 7 attack and ensuing war.)
Dershowitz last month claimed he is assembling “legal dream team” to defend Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant in the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for the men. The former OJ Simpson defender is still very much making the case for Israel. Dershowitz is also a confidant of Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick for ambassador and a frequent guest on Huckabee’s YouTube show. So his views continue to have influence.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting reading this book. From Time Immemorial might be a better choice. But it’s worth considering that this lazy, reflexively pro-Israel thinking is again informing Middle East policy. The Case for Israel is important. And it’s really bad.
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.
In the final months of his presidency, Joe Biden visited Angola. He was there to tout billions in US investment in a project called the Lobito Corridor—a railway linking the country to Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo—and, in turn, land a light punch in our new cold war with China.
As I read about the visit, I had been listening repeatedly to “Red Dust” by billy woods, the idiosyncratic rapper from New York City. He may not be a household name, but woods is increasingly the face of a certain strain of hip-hop—even if he blurs his actual face in all public photos and videos.
Woods has been hailed in the Oxford American (“brilliant”), New York magazine (“a master of his craft”), and the Guardian (“the awesome mind of billy woods”), among others. As a solo artist, head of the label Backwoodz Studioz, and collaborator, woods has been working for decades. Mostly, he’s created underground, off-the-beaten-path rap. But more notoriety came in recent years—especially because of collaborations with ELUCID as Armand Hammer.
He famously grew up moving between Zimbabwe and the United States. His mother was a professor of English literature, and his father was a Marxist scholar who worked in politics. Perhaps this background is what leads his songs to hit on a dissonance that has been heavily on my mind in 2024: the difference between what the US says about the world and what the world says about itself.
As with most woods’ songs, I cannot sum up a clear meaning in “Red Dust”; it’s a menagerie. But a few lines had stuck in my head. Early on, woods raps:
Knock the plane out the sky
Spark the genocide
Let’s see who gives who a place to hideYou might be surprised (you might not!)
Woods here is referencing the 1994 killing of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, which ultimately led to the genocide of over 1 million people. (This year marked the 30th anniversary.) Upon first hearing the line, I was struck by the haunting parenthetical about who would aid who in a crisis (you might not!). When I was listening this year, I thought a lot about the “you.” It makes the listener complicit in the horror. You ask yourself: Where would I hide? Who would I hide? Would I be surprised in myself? In others?
In “Red Dust,” the speed at which woods moves from the global historical to the personal always stuns me. And this year, this particular gift struck me as an important one—it provided clarity as world events hit home. For how long, and for how many years, have (certain) Americans convinced themselves that history happens to other people? The consequences of this solipsism have been stunning.
In woods, I often hear the aching sadness perched as nonchalance—the barely restrained rage—of someone who knows that tragedy in textbooks happens to real people: your neighbors, your friends, and you.
As I read about Biden’s visit to Angola, woods was stuck in my head once more. As I skimmed the usual raft of clips in the mainstream press, I could not help but notice how the past relationship between the two countries was discussed. Some articles mentioned battles between the former Soviet Union and the US in Angola and the new “rivalry” with China. But I saw almost no mention of how—rather famously—the United States helped the apartheid regime of South Africa invade Angola during the 1970s.
I wouldn’t call this elision repression of a known truth or even self-censorship. Instead, it seems as if we are choosing to let the truth slip away from laziness. Our role in Angola was simply another piece of Cold War realpolitik—one of many fights, a few more foreign deaths, masses of money and arms spent sprinkled in some far-off land—which, at the end of the day, was so common it’s a bit hard to keep track of how it all happened.
After reading about Angola, I came back to his song “Cuito Cuanavale,” about a late 1980s battle in the country.
In it, Cuba fights alongside Angola against South African forces. In his writing, woods connects that warfare to Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, China’s modern push into Africa, oil, and Robert Mugabe. The most punching line for me in the song is a sigh: “History will absolve me,” woods says, maybe referencing the famous speech by Fidel Castro, followed by a half-thought: “Probably.”
Woods is the only rapper I know who writes about that part of American history. And this year, it was impossible not to see the US in that light.
It was woods I thought about while editing our coverage of the US’ role in Israel’s war in Gaza. In particular, I thought nearly every day of these lyrics to “Soft Landing”:
A single death is a tragedy, but eggs make omelets
Statistics how he look at war casualties
Killin’ is one thing, what sticks is how casually
Nonchalant, 5 in the morning, what I grew up on
I listened to woods on a long bike ride home after seeing the film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which poetically explains America’s role in the death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Democratic Republic of Congo. (If you’re interested, I have been following up on the film by reading The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid; it is a fantastic look at CIA meddling in the name of the Cold War.)
Put simply, this is the gift of woods. He is an obsessive, but cautious, raiser of the history many want to forget. I have continually sent around a long quote he gave in a recent interview on how random the rules of our current order can be. These few paragraphs might best explain this year—and many years to come:
Things seem like they can only be so until they’re not, you know?
My family left Zimbabwe in late 1989. In 1988—again, I was a child, but from a very political family—there was no sense in my mind that South Africa was any closer to collapsing than Israel. And within a few years apartheid rule had collapsed in South Africa. We can have a separate conversation about what came after it, but apartheid rule did indeed collapse. Majority rule came into effect, and for that to happen a lot of people died throughout the entire southern Africa region. And here we are, however many years later, and Israel is actually bigger and more powerful than it was at that time. So it just goes to show that sometimes things are not as far away as they seem, and sometimes things that seem on the verge of happening end up being far away—or they’re never going to happen. [Laughs.] Nobody knows what is under the surface.Think of all the forces, energies, and waves of history that it took to bring about the transformation of the Republican Party into a Donald Trump cult of personality. It goes back through the Tea Party to when talk radio was dominant in the nineties. I remember going into a friend’s house, and their mom would be listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would just be droning on for hours, and I’d be like, “Is this for real?” The presentation was different from the traditional presentation of right-wing politics that I had seen up to that point. At that time Bill Clinton was president, but before that, there had been three straight terms of Republican presidencies. So all of these forces are happening, and it just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land.
When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.
Elon Musk appears to be leaning even further into a full neo-Nazi embrace. Following his social media assault to block a congressional spending bill meant to avoid a government shutdown, the tech billionaire took to X and described the racist, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as Germany’s last, best hope.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” he posted on X early Friday. He was responding to Naomi Seibt, a young German right-wing influencer—the Washington Post dubbed her the anti-Greta Thunberg for her climate change denialism—whose caption in part read, “The presumptive next chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) is horrified by the idea that Germany should follow Elon Musk’s and Javier Milei’s example.” Similar to Argentina President Javier Milei’s “chainsaw” policies, Musk has promised $2 trillion in cuts to federal spending as co-lead of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor of Germany, dismissed Musk’s remarks in an unrelated press conference on Friday. “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multibillionaires,” Scholz said. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain good political advice.”
The AfD is controversial even among other European far-right parties because many of its leaders are not shy about expressing Nazi sympathies. In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitlter’s paramilitary organization.
As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, many Germans consider the AfD party as ethnonationalists who want to mass deport all “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The country’s domestic intelligence agency designated the AfD as a “suspected extremist group” back in 2021 and is currently holding the party under observation.
Reports that AfD members held a covert meeting regarding the mass deportation plan led to protests earlier this year, but despite this, the party is polling in second place at 19 percent —behind Merz’s CDU/CSU political alliance at 31 percent—in the lead-up to Germany’s snap election in February 2025.
Musk has been amplifying right-wing, anti-immigration voices on X for years and has already questioned criticism aimed at the AfD back in June. In September 2023, he denounced Germany for giving money to charities and rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.
In the US, many Republicans support Musk’s growing political influence. “The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said on X early Thursday. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk.”
“I’d be open to supporting @elonmusk for Speaker of the House,” wrote Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, who reposted Paul. “The establishment needs to be shattered.”
In a world of oligarchies, the richest man in the world is pushing the most destructive policies possible, and it’s marginalized communities like immigrants who inevitably will suffer the consequences. With a looming Donald Trump administration, a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, and a conservative Supreme Court, this spells trouble for US immigrants—GOP government officials say they intend to end birthright citizenship, limit legal immigration, and enact mass deportation.
Musk is also increasingly going global with his attempts to influence elections. He previously has shown interest in funding other anti-immigration parties, such as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, in which reports suggest he has contributed as much as $100 million. Musk met with Farage earlier this week at Mar-a-Lago to discuss the donation.
The bacon in your BLT now costs nearly twice as much as it did 15 years ago, but inflation is only part of the reason. Broadly speaking, food and drink prices only grew by about 50 percent during that time. So, what’s up with the meat?
The answer may have to do with Agri Stats, a small data venture based in Indiana. In 2023, the Department of Justice, backed by a coalition of state attorneys general, sued the company, accusing it of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act by enabling the exchange of anticompetitive information, leading to artificially high meat prices. (Agri Stats has denied wrongdoing.)
The exchange works like this: For two decades, Agri Stats has been collecting metrics from the country’s largest meat processors on all kinds of things—pork and chicken-thigh inventories, production speeds, meatpacking wages. It analyzes the intel and creates reports that it distributes back to its members—dominant players that can afford to pay millions for a subscription—which use the info to set prices. Agri Stats had been running this exchange within Federal Trade Commission antitrust “safety zones” guidelines that permitted “reasonable” sharing of information between rivals in a given sector.
Those guidelines were rescinded in 2023, which opened the door for the DOJ to claim the information exchanges harm competition, in part because Agri Stats focuses on boosting the industry’s profitability—in some cases, it allegedly encouraged companies to restrict output, thereby reducing supply, and jack up their prices. (Agri Stats argues that it helps protein producers identify ways to keep production costs, and prices, low.)
“Consumers have very little choice for where to purchase meat, and farmers have very little choice for where to sell it.”
Agri Stats isn’t solely to blame, of course. Just four conglomerates—JBS Foods, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and Marfrig—control up to 85 percent of the meat industry’s supply chain. For many years, Agri Stats’ member firms accounted for more than 90 percent of broiler chicken, 80 percent of pork, and 90 percent of turkey sold in the United States. As long as the giants all raised their prices, the DOJ argues, there was little competitive risk in doing so.
This is not the first time the big meatpackers have faced scrutiny for monopolistic behavior. In the early 20th century, a federal investigation concluded that the era’s five biggest players were colluding, which threatened competition. The resulting Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 aimed to end such behavior by prohibiting unfair pricing, manipulation of supply chains, and other noncompetitive activities.
But in the 1980s, a shift in the courts and the election of President Ronald Reagan led the DOJ to abandon aspects of antitrust enforcement as the new administration embraced conservative economist Milton Friedman’s belief that markets will self-correct. A flurry of mergers followed. And tech advancements allowed large slaughterhouses to process meat faster and more cheaply than the smaller plants.
Consolidation, combined with sophisticated data tools, has created an environment ripe for manipulation, according to antitrust scholar Austin Frerick, author of the 2024 book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. As companies amass power, he told me, “data brokers become more effective,” thereby encouraging more consolidation: “It’s a system that reinforces itself.
“This isn’t rocket science—it’s really just a question of political courage.”
As a result, “consumers have very little choice for where to purchase meat, and farmers have very little choice for where to sell it,” says Jennifer Curtis, co-founder of North Carolina’s Firsthand Foods, which buys animals from local farmers, coordinates processing, and sells the meat to restaurants and grocers. With the right support, regional supply chains could loosen Big Meat’s grip on the market. Curtis says her state is making headway on boosting the little guys: A recent program, for instance, tapped into Covid relief funds to provide grants for small-scale meat processors that help them serve more farmers and get more of their products to market.
Reining in Big Meat will require bolder federal action. On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris proposed a federal ban on price gouging that could provide a legal framework to challenge market manipulators. But the most important move, Frerick says, is simply to en-force existing laws: “In the meat industry, we already did this all a century ago. This isn’t rocket science—it’s really just a question of political courage.”
Donald Trump has promised to carry out the biggest mass deportations in history during his second term—which would not only be cruel to the millions directly affected, but also disastrous for the country as a whole. As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote earlier this year:
The nation’s undocumented immigrants grow and harvest the food we eat, construct our homes, and care for our young and elderly. They pay billions in taxes, start businesses that employ Americans, and help rebuild in the wake of climate disasters.
Not only would Trump’s plan rip families and communities apart, but it also would have devastating effects for years to come, including on US citizens who perhaps have overlooked how integral undocumented immigrants are to their everyday life. Trump frames immigration as an existential threat to the United States. He has said immigrants are “taking our jobs,” are “not people,” and are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The reality is that if his plan were implemented, American life as we know it would be ruined—even for those cheering for mass deportation.
The Trump administration’s ability to carry out those plans will be determined, in part, by how willing local officials are to cooperate with immigration enforcement. While states and cities can’t outright prevent the federal government from arresting and deporting people, they can slow them down by refusing to help. Many Democratic leaders across the country, often in regions that have already limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have responded to Trump’s win by strengthening their commitment to their undocumented constituents and further restricting local resources from flowing to ICE.
Within weeks of the election, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted for an ordinance prohibiting the use of resources to assist in federal immigration enforcement; Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said the city will not “bend or break” under pressure from the administration, and will continue restricting police collaboration with ICE; Denver Mayor Mike Johnston even said he was willing to go to jail to stop Trump’s mass deportations. “I’m willing to put him in jail,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, responded.
But one blue-city Democrat—among the highest-profile mayors in the world—has taken the opposite approach, cozying up to Trump on immigration and setting a worrying precedent for other sanctuary cities, which will face pressure from the incoming administration, including the threat of losing federal funds.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is currently battling bribery and fraud charges in a federal corruption investigation, has already taken a decidedly more adversarial approach to the Biden administration. Shortly after being indicted, Adams suggested, without evidence, that the administration was targeting him for his criticism of Biden’s immigration policies. He has since largely avoided criticizing Trump, fueling speculation that he is angling for a pardon in his corruption case—as has a recent press conference in which Adams seemed to suggest a “politicized” Justice Department had unfairly targeted him. Trump finally said on Monday that he is considering a pardon for the mayor, saying Adams “was treated pretty unfairly.”
When I asked Adams’ press office whether the mayor was seeking a pardon from Donald Trump, they didn’t directly answer the question, but referred me to an interview earlier this month where the mayor said, “I did nothing wrong. I have a great team of attorneys and any pathway to justice, we’re going to seek that.”
New York City’s response to Trump’s mass deportation plan will not only affect the city’s over 400,000 undocumented residents, but potentially millions more in the region—and beyond, as other cities and towns look to NYC, whose size and power make it a leading example of how cities can respond to the Trump administration. Unlike, for instance, California or Washington State, New York state law does not prevent local officials from cooperating with immigration enforcement—cooperation that could also free up resources for ICE to arrest and deport more people nationwide.
Adams has repeatedly called on the City Council—which in 2014 passed laws limiting police cooperation with immigration enforcement unless a person is convicted of a serious crime—to roll back those restrictions. In February, Adams told the press he opposed New York’s current sanctuary law; advocates said a rollback would strip people of due process protections, allowing deportation without a conviction, and the council rejected the effort. “The Mayor has now made it clear that he wants to gut our detainer laws…and exile people based on their place of birth,” said Rosa Cohen-Cruz of legal defense nonprofit The Bronx Defenders at the time. Adams’ press office pointed me to previous comments by the mayor on targeting those who commit crimes, but did not directly respond to questions on the fact that rolling back sanctuary laws would lead to deportations without convictions. Current laws already allow those convicted of serious crimes like homicide and rape to be turned over to immigration agents who get a judicial warrant.
Recently Adams says his team has been looking into whether he can tweak the city’s sanctuary laws through executive orders. In a CBS New York interview, Adams said the council “stated they’re not willing to change the sanctuary city law. I think they’re wrong. I have my teams looking at my power as executive orders.” Following a meeting with Adams last week, incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan told the New York Post that Adams wants to reopen the ICE office at Rikers Island jail—which was closed down by the City Council in 2014—possibly through an executive order.
Democratic councilmember Lincoln Restler of Brooklyn told the Post that legal challenges should be expected if Adams tries to go through with the plan—and that “it’s clear Mayor Adams is more interested in securing a pardon…than protecting immigrant New Yorkers and upholding our sanctuary city laws.”
At the same press conference earlier this month Adams used to suggest that his indictment was politically motivated, he was asked whether a migrant charged but not convicted of a crime was a criminal—given that he himself is facing charges.
“Americans have certain rights,” Adams responded. “The Constitution is for Americans. I’m not a person that snuck into this country.”
This is, of course, not true: the Constitution affords due process to everyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status. Adams walked those comments back after pushback, acknowledging to New York Public Radio that the Constitution is for everyone—“even for undocumented immigrants.”
It’s not clear whether a mayor charged with, but not yet convicted of, crimes will be able to roll back due process protections for undocumented immigrants in a similar position. But if Adams is successful—especially if he also obtains a pardon—it sets a dangerous precedent for other cities to follow as pressure from the Trump administration grows.
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.
When you start walking around a city with a small child, you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller.
It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy, either.
The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Donald Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways.
After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.
Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year, upward of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence or as justification for mass deportation.
“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain.
For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers.
The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed, too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited congestion pricing toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House.
It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?), but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful, too.
One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called Election Freedom Inc. It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ad said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:
This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz
— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024
It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.
This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Conservation experts have criticized a decision by London fashion week to ban exotic animal skins from its 2025 shows as “ridiculous,” warning that it is ill-informed and could harm the protection of many snakes, crocodiles, and reptile species.
Last month, the British Fashion Council’s deputy director for policy and engagement, David Leigh-Pemberton, told parliament that next year’s fashion shows would prohibit the use of skins from alligators, snakes, and other animals. In a statement, the council said the ban was part of a wider range of standards to promote sustainable practices in the fashion industry.
But scientific experts from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), one of the world’s leading conservation bodies, have condemned the decision, saying exotic skins are often far more sustainable choices than leather and synthetic materials. They say a ban would undermine economic incentives for communities to conserve species–warning that claims the decision was made for sustainability reasons were “wrong.”
“If designers were serious and informed themselves, we’d all be wearing snakeskin underpants.”
Luxury bags made from exotic skins can sell for tens of thousands of dollars, with some of the money going to the conservation of the species from which they are made.
Daniel Natusch, chair of the IUCN snake specialist group, questioned the basis of the decision. He pointed to examples of community groups in Papua New Guinea and along the Zambezi River that had developed sustainable harvesting systems for exotic skins that benefited communities and wildlife overall.
“If you don’t like using animals to produce a skin or whatever it may be, that’s fine. But don’t tell the world that it’s because you care about sustainability. All of the life cycle analysis has been done. There is not a single raw material that we know of, apart from pineapple leather, that is more sustainable than exotic skin, particularly python. It’s ridiculous. If designers were serious and informed themselves, we’d all be wearing snakeskin underpants,” he said.
In making the decision, London become the first of the “big four” fashion weeks—Paris, Milan, New York, and London—to ban exotic skins. It attracted praise from animal rights campaigners who said their use was unnecessary and unethical. Fur has previously been banned from the event.
Dr Dilys Roe, chair of IUCN’s sustainable use and livelihoods specialist group, said London fashion week organizers were misguided. “There is an assumption that it’s unethical because it’s wild. If they are concerned about animal welfare, what’s the difference with a domestic animal? The snakes are not endangered. For some species, such as crocodiles, the fact that people can get money for collecting eggs…creates an incentive to protect them,” she said.
“From an overall sustainability perspective, it’s a false assumption that fake fur, fake skin is somehow better. If you look at what goes into them, you’ve still got the carbon emissions and chemicals associated with that. I think there is a kneejerk reaction.
“If you buy a Hermès crocodile skin handbag, you’re not going to buy it and chuck it in a landfill. The opposite to all this is fast fashion,” she said.
The British Fashion Council did not respond to a request for comment.
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