Press freedom groups have a stark warning for Americans: Trump could pose a serious threat to fact-based journalism during his next term in office if he does not change course.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom of the Press Foundation all issued statements in the aftermath of Trump’s win this week, urging the ex- and soon-to-be president and his administration to commit to respecting the free press during the next four years. “Attacking the press is really an attack on American citizens’ right to know,” Reporters Without Borders Executive Director Clayton Weimers said in a statement. “Trump’s new administration can and must change its tune with the media and take concrete steps to protect journalists and develop a climate conducive to a robust and pluralistic news media.”

This will be a tall order for Trump: At a rally just last weekend, he said he would be OK with a crowd of journalists being shot at, as I reported at the time. His communications director, Steven Cheung, tried to clean up his comments by implausibly alleging that Trump “was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!” From early September until the end of October, Trump verbally attacked the media more than 100 times, Reporters Without Borders found in an analysis published last month. Trump has repeatedly derided journalists as “fake news” and the media as “the enemy of the people.” And as my colleague Pema Levy reported, Trump also launched what experts said was a frivolous lawsuit against CBS News last month, alleging that producers unfairly edited a 60 Minutes interview with his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to make her look better. His campaign also submitted a complaint to the Federal Election Commission claiming that the Washington Post was running a paid advertising campaign to boost stories critical of Trump; a Post spokesperson said the allegations were “improper” and “without merit.” CNN also reported that Trump has called at least 15 times for the Federal Communications Commission to revoke the broadcast licenses of networks he dislikes.

All this makes it no wonder, then, that Reporters Without Borders said Trump’s reelection “marks a dangerous moment for American journalism and global press freedom.” The Committee to Protect Journalists struck a similar tone. “Legal persecution, imprisonment, physical violence, and even killings have sadly become familiar threats for journalists across the world,” its statement said. “They must not now also become commonplace in the United States, where threats of violence and online harassment have in recent years become routine.” And Freedom of the Press Foundation claimed that Trump “will try to destroy press freedom”; as the group noted, Trump will have an ally in Elon Musk, who has spread pro-Trump disinformation on his platform to the tune of billions of views in the lead-up to Election Day. More recently, Musk has taken to telling everyday X users that they are the media now and “citizen journalism is the future.” (Apparently his conception of journalism sees conspiracy theories as acceptable and fact-checks as unnecessary.)

This all comes at a time when Republicans, and young people, are as likely to trust social media as a news source as they are to trust national news outlets, according to data published last month from Pew Research Center. The Trump campaign and the GOP have both contributed to and capitalized on this distrust, with Trump launching his own social media network, Truth Social, in 2022, and eschewing the cable news sit-downs Harris did during the campaign for interviews with right-wing male podcasters, who likely helped him make massive gains among young men this year. Media outlets hoping to win back the trust of these voters, though, will not just have podcasters and social media to compete with: One of their biggest adversaries will likely be Trump himself.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Sunday.

Members of Elon Musk’s so-called “Election Integrity Community” have turned their attention from stoking paranoia about voter fraud in the presidential race, now that Trump won, to alleging it in Arizona, where a closely watched Senate race looks like it could result in a GOP loss.

As of early Sunday, major news outlets had yet to call the race between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Republican candidate Kari Lake, though Gallego was leading with an estimated 88 percent of ballots counted. But in the “Election Integrity Community” on X—billed as a space for its 65,000 members to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election,” and backed by Musk’s pro-Trump PAC—such a close race, and potentially a GOP loss, can mean only one thing: The election was stolen.

One of the main mysteries among members of the X community seems to be how a Democrat could potentially win a Senate seat in a state Trump won. (The Associated Press called Arizona for Trump on Saturday, reporting that he led Harris in the state by about 185,000 votes.) “This is as egregious an example of election fraud as when Biden allegedly had the dead voting for him in 2020,” one user claimed, without evidence. But in fact, split-ticket voting—in which people do not cast all their votes for candidates in the same party—is a thing, and should not come as a surprise in Arizona, given that Lake has long polled poorly in the Senate race and still refuses to concede her 2022 loss in the governor’s race, as my colleague Tim Murphy has written.

Other members point to an alleged clerical error in Pima County—in which the number of uncounted ballots appeared to increase on Friday—as evidence of a conspiracy, urging Lake to “fight” the “election steal.” A lawyer for Lake sent a letter to the county demanding an explanation on Friday; Mark Evans, the county’s public communications manager, told the Arizona Capitol Times it was a “clerical error,” adding, “in this age of conspiracy, everything gets blown up into inserted votes.”

This context, though, appears absent from the X feed—as were fact-checks to false claims of voter fraud that percolated on Election Day, as I reported then. But this is not a surprise, given that research shows Musk’s so-called crowd-sourced fact-checking mechanism on X, known as “community notes,” did not actually address most false and misleading claims about the US elections circulating on the platform during the campaign. And with Musk poised to become even more powerful following Trump’s win, don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tucked away in the most extreme nooks and crannies of the Earth are biodiverse galaxies of microorganisms—some that might help scour the atmosphere of the carbon dioxide mankind has pumped into it.

One microorganism in particular has captured scientists’ attention. UTEX 3222, nicknamed “Chonkus” for the way it guzzles carbon dioxide, is a previously unknown cyanobacterium found in volcanic ocean vents. A recent paper in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology found it boasts exceptional atmosphere-cleaning potential—even among its well-studied peers. If scientists can figure out how to genetically engineer it, this single-celled organism’s natural quirks could become supercharged into a low-waste carbon capture system.

Cyanobacteria like Chonkus, sometimes referred to by the misnomer blue-green algae, are aquatic organisms that, suck up light and carbon dioxide and turn it into food, photosynthesizing like plants. But tucked away inside their single-celled bodies are compartments that allow them to concentrate and gobble up more CO2 than their distant leafy relatives. When found in exotic environments, they can evolve unique characteristics not often found in nature. For microorganism researchers, whose field has long revolved around a handful of easy-to-manage organisms like yeast and E. coli, the untapped biodiversity heralds new possibilities.

“There’s no question we’ll keep finding really, really interesting biology in these vents. I can’t stress enough that this was just the first expedition.”

“There’s more and more excitement about isolating new organisms,” said Braden Tierney, a microbiologist and one of the lead authors of the paper that identified Chonkus. On an expedition in September 2022, Tierney and researchers from the University of Palermo in Italy dove into the waters surrounding Vulcano, an island off the coast of Sicily where volcanic vents in shallow waters provide an unusual habitat—illuminated by sunlight and yet rich with plumes of carbon-dioxide. The location yielded a veritable soup of microbial life, including Chonkus.

After Tierney retrieved flasks of the seawater, Max Schubert, the other lead author of the cyanobacteria paper and a lead project scientist at the scientific nonprofit Align to Innovate, got to work identifying the different organisms in it. Schubert said that out in the open ocean, cyanobacteria like Chonkus grow slowly and are thinly dispersed. “But if we wanted to use them to pull down carbon dioxide, we would want to grow them a lot faster,” he said, “and grow in concentrations that don’t exist in the open ocean.”

Back in the lab, Chonkus did just that—growing faster and thicker than other previously discovered cyanobacteria candidates for carbon capture systems. “When you grow a culture of bacteria, it looks like broth and the bacteria are very dilute in the culture,” Schubert said, “but we found that Chonkus would settle into this stuff that is much more dense, like a green peanut butter.”

Chonkus’ peanut butter consistency is important for the strain’s potential in green biotechnologies. Typically, biotech industries that use cyanobacteria and algae need to separate them from the water they grow in. Because Chonkus does so naturally with gravity, Schubert says, it could make the process more efficient. But there are plenty of other puzzles to solve before a discovery like Chonkus can be used for carbon capture.

CyanoCapture, a cyanobacteria carbon capture startup based in the United Kingdom, has developed a low-cost method of catching carbon dioxide that runs on biomass, housing algae and cyanobacteria in clear tubes where they can grow and filter CO2. Although Chonkus shows unique promise, David Kim, the company’s CEO and founder, said biotechnology companies need to have more control over its traits, like carbon storage, to use it successfully, and that requires finding a way to crack open its DNA.

“Oftentimes we’ll find in nature that a microbe can do something kind of cool, but it doesn’t do it as well as we need to,” said Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium, a nonprofit biotech startup in Watertown, Massachusetts, that specializes in genetically engineering microbes. Cultivarium has been working with CyanoCapture to help them study Chonkus but has yet to figure out how to tinker with its DNA and improve its carbon capturing attributes. “Everybody wants to juice it up and tweak it,” he said.

Since the expedition to Vulcano where Tierney scooped up Chonkus, the nonprofit he founded to explore more extreme environments around the world, the Two Frontiers Project, has also sampled hot springs in Colorado, volcanic chimneys in the Tyrrhenian Sea near Italy, and coral reefs in the Red Sea. Perhaps out there, researchers will find a chunkier Chonkus that can pack away even more carbon, microbes that can help regrow corals, or more organisms that can ease the pains of a rapidly warming world. “There’s no question we’ll keep finding really, really interesting biology in these vents,” Tierney said. “I can’t stress enough that this was just the first expedition.”

Kim noted that out of all the microbes out there, less than 0.01 percent have been studied. “They don’t represent the true arsenal of microbes that we could potentially work with to achieve humanity’s goals.”

Donald Trump’s win on Tuesday has sent private prison company stocks soaring as investors anticipate that the president-elect’s promises of mass deportation will increase the need for immigration detention.

Stocks for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison operators, increased 42 percent and 29 percent respectively on Wednesday. Financial news site Sherwood News concluded that GEO Group “was the single biggest winner in the US stock market — among companies of any size.”

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment,” said GEO Group founder and executive chairman George Zoley on an earnings call on Thursday. He called Trump’s plans an “unprecedented opportunity.”

Zoley also noted, according to HuffPost, that GEO Group is well positioned to scale up its ICE detention bed count from 13,500 to more than 31,000. Contracts with federal, state, and local governments—which include 85,000 beds—could also be redirected towards federal needs. There would likely be a “scramble” for beds, he said, “and we believe ICE will have top priority on all available beds around the country.”

Mass deportation was a pillar of Trump’s campaign. As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias wrote:

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

Private prisons weren’t the only industry with soaring stock prices after the election. Other big winners, CNN reports, include crypto stocks, credit card companies and banks, and Tesla.

Nicole Chase was a young mom with a six-year-old daughter to support when she was sexually assaulted by her boss while working at a Canton, Connecticut restaurant. When she decided to report the attack, she knew she was risking a lot—her livelihood, for one, but also the reputation she’d build in her small, close-knit town.

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

What happened next went beyond even her worst fears. Her case triggered a legal battle that dragged on for years, eventually reaching the US Supreme Court. Rather than treating her as a victim of sexual assault, the police investigated Chase and charged her with making a false statement to the police. “This man has caused me to lose so much money that I had to move out of my place,” Chase says. “I went to a doctor, I had to get put on more medicine for my PTSD and my anxiety attacks and all that. My whole life has been flipped upside down.” 

Chase wasn’t alone. In this week’s episode, which originally aired in March 2023, Reveal reporter Rachel de Leon investigates the disturbing trend of interrogating victims instead of alleged perpetrators. Listen to the whole episode at Reveal, and watch Victim/Suspect, a documentary about the investigation, on Netflix.

Jacky Rosen, Nevada’s incumbent Democratic senator, has won reelection in the battleground state, defeating Republican Sam Brown.

Though Republicans haven’t won a Nevada senate seat in a dozen years and Rosen had a considerable cash advantage, the race was unexpectedly tight, emblematic of the rightward shift in Nevada and across the country. Trump won Nevada on Friday.

Rosen, a former synagogue president and computer programmer, campaigned as an “independent voice” who isn’t beholden to “party leaders.” She also promoted her support of abortion rights, bombarding the airwaves with previous comments that Brown made opposing abortion. (Brown has said he is against federal funding for the procedure, but supports Nevada’s current law protecting abortion rights.) Rosen was a political newcomer when she was asked by longtime Nevada Senate majority leader Harry Reid to run as in 2016.

Brown, a retired Army captain who moved from Texas to Nevada in 2018, has never held elected office. He was awarded a Purple Heart for his tour in Afghanistan, where he was nearly killed by a roadside bomb. In ads, he repeatedly mentioned that his face remains scarred from the attack. After his tour, he founded a company that provides medications to veterans.

“Thank you, Nevada!,” Rosen posted on X. “I’m honored and grateful to continue serving as your United States Senator.”

Members of Elon Musk’s so-called “Election Integrity Community” have turned their attention from stoking paranoia about voter fraud in the presidential race, now that Trump won, to alleging it in Arizona, where a closely watched Senate race looks like it could result in a GOP loss.

As of early Sunday, major news outlets had yet to call the race between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Republican candidate Kari Lake, though Gallego was leading with an estimated 88 percent of ballots counted. But in the “Election Integrity Community” on X—billed as a space for its 65,000 members to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election,” and backed by Musk’s pro-Trump PAC—such a close race, and potentially a GOP loss, can mean only one thing: The election was stolen.

One of the main mysteries among members of the X community seems to be how a Democrat could potentially win a Senate seat in a state Trump won. (The Associated Press called Arizona for Trump on Saturday, reporting that he led Harris in the state by about 185,000 votes.) “This is as egregious an example of election fraud as when Biden allegedly had the dead voting for him in 2020,” one user claimed, without evidence. But in fact, split-ticket voting—in which people do not cast all their votes for candidates in the same party—is a thing, and should not come as a surprise in Arizona, given that Lake has long polled poorly in the Senate race and still refuses to concede her 2022 loss in the governor’s race, as my colleague Tim Murphy has written.

Other members point to an alleged clerical error in Pima County—in which the number of uncounted ballots appeared to increase on Friday—as evidence of a conspiracy, urging Lake to “fight” the “election steal.” A lawyer for Lake sent a letter to the county demanding an explanation on Friday; Mark Evans, the county’s public communications manager, told the Arizona Capitol Times it was a “clerical error,” adding, “in this age of conspiracy, everything gets blown up into inserted votes.”

This context, though, appears absent from the X feed—as were fact-checks to false claims of voter fraud that percolated on Election Day, as I reported then. But this is not a surprise, given that research shows Musk’s so-called crowd-sourced fact-checking mechanism on X, known as “community notes,” did not actually address most false and misleading claims about the US elections circulating on the platform during the campaign. And with Musk poised to become even more powerful following Trump’s win, don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tucked away in the most extreme nooks and crannies of the Earth are biodiverse galaxies of microorganisms—some that might help scour the atmosphere of the carbon dioxide mankind has pumped into it.

One microorganism in particular has captured scientists’ attention. UTEX 3222, nicknamed “Chonkus” for the way it guzzles carbon dioxide, is a previously unknown cyanobacterium found in volcanic ocean vents. A recent paper in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology found it boasts exceptional atmosphere-cleaning potential—even among its well-studied peers. If scientists can figure out how to genetically engineer it, this single-celled organism’s natural quirks could become supercharged into a low-waste carbon capture system.

Cyanobacteria like Chonkus, sometimes referred to by the misnomer blue-green algae, are aquatic organisms that, suck up light and carbon dioxide and turn it into food, photosynthesizing like plants. But tucked away inside their single-celled bodies are compartments that allow them to concentrate and gobble up more CO2 than their distant leafy relatives. When found in exotic environments, they can evolve unique characteristics not often found in nature. For microorganism researchers, whose field has long revolved around a handful of easy-to-manage organisms like yeast and E. coli, the untapped biodiversity heralds new possibilities.

“There’s no question we’ll keep finding really, really interesting biology in these vents. I can’t stress enough that this was just the first expedition.”

“There’s more and more excitement about isolating new organisms,” said Braden Tierney, a microbiologist and one of the lead authors of the paper that identified Chonkus. On an expedition in September 2022, Tierney and researchers from the University of Palermo in Italy dove into the waters surrounding Vulcano, an island off the coast of Sicily where volcanic vents in shallow waters provide an unusual habitat—illuminated by sunlight and yet rich with plumes of carbon-dioxide. The location yielded a veritable soup of microbial life, including Chonkus.

After Tierney retrieved flasks of the seawater, Max Schubert, the other lead author of the cyanobacteria paper and a lead project scientist at the scientific nonprofit Align to Innovate, got to work identifying the different organisms in it. Schubert said that out in the open ocean, cyanobacteria like Chonkus grow slowly and are thinly dispersed. “But if we wanted to use them to pull down carbon dioxide, we would want to grow them a lot faster,” he said, “and grow in concentrations that don’t exist in the open ocean.”

Back in the lab, Chonkus did just that—growing faster and thicker than other previously discovered cyanobacteria candidates for carbon capture systems. “When you grow a culture of bacteria, it looks like broth and the bacteria are very dilute in the culture,” Schubert said, “but we found that Chonkus would settle into this stuff that is much more dense, like a green peanut butter.”

Chonkus’ peanut butter consistency is important for the strain’s potential in green biotechnologies. Typically, biotech industries that use cyanobacteria and algae need to separate them from the water they grow in. Because Chonkus does so naturally with gravity, Schubert says, it could make the process more efficient. But there are plenty of other puzzles to solve before a discovery like Chonkus can be used for carbon capture.

CyanoCapture, a cyanobacteria carbon capture startup based in the United Kingdom, has developed a low-cost method of catching carbon dioxide that runs on biomass, housing algae and cyanobacteria in clear tubes where they can grow and filter CO2. Although Chonkus shows unique promise, David Kim, the company’s CEO and founder, said biotechnology companies need to have more control over its traits, like carbon storage, to use it successfully, and that requires finding a way to crack open its DNA.

“Oftentimes we’ll find in nature that a microbe can do something kind of cool, but it doesn’t do it as well as we need to,” said Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium, a nonprofit biotech startup in Watertown, Massachusetts, that specializes in genetically engineering microbes. Cultivarium has been working with CyanoCapture to help them study Chonkus but has yet to figure out how to tinker with its DNA and improve its carbon capturing attributes. “Everybody wants to juice it up and tweak it,” he said.

Since the expedition to Vulcano where Tierney scooped up Chonkus, the nonprofit he founded to explore more extreme environments around the world, the Two Frontiers Project, has also sampled hot springs in Colorado, volcanic chimneys in the Tyrrhenian Sea near Italy, and coral reefs in the Red Sea. Perhaps out there, researchers will find a chunkier Chonkus that can pack away even more carbon, microbes that can help regrow corals, or more organisms that can ease the pains of a rapidly warming world. “There’s no question we’ll keep finding really, really interesting biology in these vents,” Tierney said. “I can’t stress enough that this was just the first expedition.”

Kim noted that out of all the microbes out there, less than 0.01 percent have been studied. “They don’t represent the true arsenal of microbes that we could potentially work with to achieve humanity’s goals.”

Donald Trump’s win on Tuesday has sent private prison company stocks soaring as investors anticipate that the president-elect’s promises of mass deportation will increase the need for immigration detention.

Stocks for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison operators, increased 42 percent and 29 percent respectively on Wednesday. Financial news site Sherwood News concluded that GEO Group “was the single biggest winner in the US stock market — among companies of any size.”

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment,” said GEO Group founder and executive chairman George Zoley on an earnings call on Thursday. He called Trump’s plans an “unprecedented opportunity.”

Zoley also noted, according to HuffPost, that GEO Group is well positioned to scale up its ICE detention bed count from 13,500 to more than 31,000. Contracts with federal, state, and local governments—which include 85,000 beds—could also be redirected towards federal needs. There would likely be a “scramble” for beds, he said, “and we believe ICE will have top priority on all available beds around the country.”

Mass deportation was a pillar of Trump’s campaign. As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias wrote:

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

Private prisons weren’t the only industry with soaring stock prices after the election. Other big winners, CNN reports, include crypto stocks, credit card companies and banks, and Tesla.

Nicole Chase was a young mom with a six-year-old daughter to support when she was sexually assaulted by her boss while working at a Canton, Connecticut restaurant. When she decided to report the attack, she knew she was risking a lot—her livelihood, for one, but also the reputation she’d build in her small, close-knit town.

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

What happened next went beyond even her worst fears. Her case triggered a legal battle that dragged on for years, eventually reaching the US Supreme Court. Rather than treating her as a victim of sexual assault, the police investigated Chase and charged her with making a false statement to the police. “This man has caused me to lose so much money that I had to move out of my place,” Chase says. “I went to a doctor, I had to get put on more medicine for my PTSD and my anxiety attacks and all that. My whole life has been flipped upside down.” 

Chase wasn’t alone. In this week’s episode, which originally aired in March 2023, Reveal reporter Rachel de Leon investigates the disturbing trend of interrogating victims instead of alleged perpetrators. Listen to the whole episode at Reveal, and watch Victim/Suspect, a documentary about the investigation, on Netflix.

Disabled and chronically ill voters: What was your experience casting a ballot in person, either this week or in early voting?

Civil and voting rights protections like the Voting Rights Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act are supposed to protect disabled people’s right to vote in person, which means having the right accommodations: wheelchair-accessible entrances; lower voting booths; and chairs for people who have trouble standing for long periods. But polling stations often fall short, in both Democratic- and Republican-leaning areas.

Disabled and chronically ill voters: What was your experience casting a ballot in person, either this week or in early voting?@metraux_julia on voting access pic.twitter.com/D1Pck8tSmv

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 9, 2024

Disabled people don’t all have the same preferences—or needs—when it comes to voting. Some people with fatiguing conditions like Long Covid may prefer mail voting to conserve energy and minimize Covid exposure; some Blind people may prefer to vote in person in order to cast an unassisted ballot with an accessible voting machine.

As I wrote for Mother Jones in April:

Counties are responsible for choosing the locations where their residents vote. The right response to inaccessible voting locations is not to have fewer of them—polling place closures disproportionately impact voters of color—but to find more locations that are accessible. The Department of Justice also provides guidance on temporary solutions to make sure disabled people can vote, such as installing a ramp and keeping doors propped open…As of now, no state mandates that poll workers be trained in accommodating disabled voters.

What may be accessible to some disabled people may not be for others. That’s why it’s crucial to move towards more accessible options both in-person and by mail—mail-in voting with paper ballots isn’t accessible, for example, to people who are Blind and have low vision, the subject of a lawsuit filed in Wisconsin…arguing that disabled voters should be able to vote electronically. 

If accessible voting—and disabled voters—were taken more seriously in America, more disabled people would take part in the electoral process. It’s that simple.

Jacky Rosen, Nevada’s incumbent Democratic senator, has won reelection in the battleground state, defeating Republican Sam Brown.

Though Republicans haven’t won a Nevada senate seat in a dozen years and Rosen had a considerable cash advantage, the race was unexpectedly tight, emblematic of the rightward shift in Nevada and across the country. Trump won Nevada on Friday.

Rosen, a former synagogue president and computer programmer, campaigned as an “independent voice” who isn’t beholden to “party leaders.” She also promoted her support of abortion rights, bombarding the airwaves with previous comments that Brown made opposing abortion. (Brown has said he is against federal funding for the procedure, but supports Nevada’s current law protecting abortion rights.) Rosen was a political newcomer when she was asked by longtime Nevada Senate majority leader Harry Reid to run as in 2016.

Brown, a retired Army captain who moved from Texas to Nevada in 2018, has never held elected office. He was awarded a Purple Heart for his tour in Afghanistan, where he was nearly killed by a roadside bomb. In ads, he repeatedly mentioned that his face remains scarred from the attack. After his tour, he founded a company that provides medications to veterans.

“Thank you, Nevada!,” Rosen posted on X. “I’m honored and grateful to continue serving as your United States Senator.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Johnny Appleseed’s heart was in the right place when he walked all over the early United States planting fruit trees. Ecologically, though, he had room for improvement: To create truly dynamic ecosystems that host a lot of biodiversity, benefit local people, and produce lots of different foods, a forest needs a wide variety of species. Left on their own, some deforested areas can rebound surprisingly fast with minimal help from humans, sequestering loads of atmospheric carbon as they grow.

New research from an international team of scientists, recently published in the journal Nature, finds that 830,000 square miles of deforested land in humid tropical regions—an area larger than Mexico—could regrow naturally if left on its own. Five countries—Brazil, China, Colombia, Indonesia, and Mexico—account for 52 percent of the estimated potential regrowth. According to the researchers, that would boost biodiversity, improve water quality and availability, and suck up 23.4 gigatons of carbon over the next three decades. 

“A rainforest can spring up in one to three years—it can be brushy and hard to walk through,” said Matthew Fagan, a conservation scientist and geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a coauthor of the paper. “In five years, you can have a completely closed canopy that’s 20 feet high. I have walked in rainforests 80 feet high that are 10 to 15 years old. It just blows your mind.” 

That sort of regrowth isn’t a given, though. First of all, humans would have to stop using the land for intensive agriculture—think big yields thanks to fertilizers and other chemicals—or raising hoards of cattle, the sheer weight of which compacts the soil and makes it hard for new plants to take root. Cows, of course, also tend to nosh on young plants. 

“Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”

Secondly, it helps for tropical soil to have a high carbon content to nourish plants. “Organic carbon, as any person who loves composting knows, really helps the soil to be nutritious and bulk itself up in terms of its ability to hold water,” Fagan said. “We found that places with soils like that are much more likely to have forests pop up.”

And it’s also beneficial for a degraded area to be near a standing tropical forest. That way, birds can fly across the area, pooping out seeds they have eaten in the forest. And once those plants get established, other tree-dwelling animal species like monkeys can feast on their fruits and spread seeds, too. This initiates a self-reinforcing cycle of biodiversity, resulting in one of those 80-foot-tall forests that’s only a decade old. 

The more biodiversity, the more a forest can withstand shocks. If one species disappears because of disease, for instance, another similar one might fill the void. That’s why planting a bunch of the same species of tree—à la Johnny Appleseed— pales in comparison to a diverse rainforest that comes back naturally. 

“When you have that biodiversity in the system, it tends to be more functional in an ecological sense, and it tends to be more robust,” said Peter Roopnarine, a paleoecologist at the California Academy of Sciences, who studies the impact of the climate on ecosystems but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”

Governments and nonprofits can now use the data gathered from this research to identify places to prioritize for cost-effective restoration, according to Brooke Williams, a research fellow at the University of Queensland and the paper’s lead author. “Importantly, our dataset doesn’t inform on where should and should not be restored,” she said, because that’s a question best left to local governments.

One community, for instance, might rely on a crop that requires open spaces to grow. But if the locals can thrive with a regrown tropical forest—by, say, earning money from tourism and growing crops like coffee and cocoa within the canopy, a practice known as agroforestry—their government might pay them to leave the area alone. 

Susan Cook-Patton, senior forest restoration scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that more than 1,500 species have been used in agroforestry worldwide. “There’s a lot of fruit trees, for example, that people use, and trees that provide medicinal services,” Cook-Patton said. “Are there ways that we can help shift the agricultural production towards more trees and boost the carbon value, the biodiversity value, and livelihoods of the people living there?”

The tricky bit here is that the world is warming and droughts are worsening, so a naturally regrowing forest may soon find itself in different circumstances. “We know the climate conditions are going to change, but there’s still uncertainty with some of that change, uncertainty in our climate projection models,” Roopnarine said.

So while a forest is very much stationary, reforestation is, in a sense, a moving target for environmental groups and governments. A global goal known as the Bonn Challenge aims to restore 1.3 million square miles of degraded and deforested land by 2030. So far, more than 70 governments and organizations from 60 countries, including the United States, have signed on to contribute 810,000 square miles toward that target.

Sequestering 23.4 gigatons of carbon over three decades may not sound like much in the context of humanity’s 37 gigatons of emissions every year. But these are just the forests in tropical regions. Protecting temperate forests and sea grasses would capture still more carbon, in addition to newfangled techniques like growing cyanobacteria. “This is one tool in a toolbox—it is not a silver bullet,” Fagan said. “It’s one of 40 bullets needed to fight climate change. But we need to use all available options.” 

The day after Election Day, predominantly Black recipients received racist, trollish text messages telling them they had been “selected” to “pick cotton at the nearest plantation.” The messages were sent from varying numbers and area codes, and sent to recipients in at least eight states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, and Alabama. Students at both Alabama State University and the University of Alabama reported getting the messages; some Twitter users reported that children or teens too young to vote also received them.

The foul texts generated anger, fear, and a somewhat muted response from law enforcement, with the FBI confirming in a statement that it was “aware” of the incident and is in communication with the Justice Department and “other federal authorities” on the matter. Now, political violence researchers at Princeton University have a theory about how the messages targeted Black recipients, and advice for those who received them. 

Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.

“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.” 

The Princeton researchers also wrote that they consider the security risk posed by the messages to be “low,” considering they didn’t contain other personally identifying information targeting the recipients, like their addresses. They advise recipients not to post screenshots of the messages that could inadvertently expose identifying information like phone numbers. They also recommend reporting the texts to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has condemned the messages and said it’s investigating their origin, or to local law enforcement.

Along with the FBI, Virginia’s attorney general has condemned the messages; a spokesperson with the Federal Communications Commission told Virginia’s 13News Now that the agency is also looking into the messages “alongside federal and state law enforcement.” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson explicitly tied them to the election results, writing in a statement: “The unfortunate reality of electing a President who, historically has embraced, and at times encouraged hate, is unfolding before our eyes.  These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday’s election results.”

Johnson added that the threat contained in the messages “is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.” The NAACP also said it’s encouraging the FBI and local law enforcement “to take these messages seriously and respond appropriately.”

Just days after former President Donald Trump won the presidential election, his onetime-opponent turned supporter, the anti-vaccine superstar Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has set up a website to solicit suggestions for key Cabinet roles. Anyone can submit a name and vote for their favorite nominees across 12 areas of government, including health, food and agriculture, education, technology, and more. “Trump has stated that he was not able to ‘drain the swamp’ during his first term, and he’s welcomed Bobby’s expertise in getting the job done in his second term,” the site’s “About” section states. “But Bobby cannot do this alone, so he is now turning to the wisdom and expertise of his supporters.”

In the food and agriculture category, the current leading nominee is Zen Honeycutt, executive director of the anti-GMO group Moms Across America. In September, Honeycutt told me about how her group’s followers have changed over the years—many of them moving from being staunch Democrats to supporting Trump. As she said back then:

“I marched in the parade for gays to be able to get married,” she recalled. But she became disillusioned with what she saw as government overreach around school vaccine requirements. Mostly for that reason, she, her husband, and their three sons relocated a few years ago to a farm in North Carolina. Since then, she said, she has heard from “thousands and thousands” of other parents who had become disillusioned with what she described as “the fascism of the Democratic party,” such as “mandatory vaccines or maybe medication down the road.” she said. “We already have mandatory chemotherapy that kids have to get—you can get your kid taken away from you if you don’t give them chemo if they have cancer.” For these reasons, many former Democrats she has talked to “have found in the Independent party or the Republican party a home they can connect with around their personal health freedoms.” 

Now, with the party she has championed earning a powerful electoral mandate, I checked back in with Honeycutt. She said she has been in touch with Kennedy’s team (which did not immediately respond to my request for comment) about a potential role that would allow her to “make a difference in transforming the food supply and health with the new administration.” In such a position, her goal, she explained, would be to rid the food supply of what she sees as toxins: pesticides—including the ubiquitous weedkiller glyphosate—food dyes, and genetically modified ingredients. She blames these impurities for rising autism and Alzheimer’s disease rates, as well as infertility, which she believes is in some ways a more pressing issue than abortion. Why? Because, she says, it affects 11 percent of women. “The Democrats in this past election made abortion a huge issue,” she said, “but the issue of infertility is actually seven times greater than the abortion issue.”

Honeycutt’s assertions about the direct contribution of food additives to illness aren’t backed by a robust body of high-quality scientific evidence, though some research suggests exposure to pesticides in utero could contribute to autism diagnoses. Some pesticides also have been shown to disrupt the endocrine system, which could in theory affect fertility, but robust studies showing a direct connection don’t exist.

For Honeycutt, however, the prospect of finally eliminating the additives she considers unhealthy is an exciting possibility. She believes that the lifestyle benefits of such a move could bring the fractured nation some peace. “When we do get the poison out of our food, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, you’re going to sleep better,” she said. “You’re going to lose weight, you’re going to feel better, you have better relationships, you’re going to have better sex.”

Aside from Honeycutt, so far, some of the most popular nominees for other roles on the Kennedy website include:

Dr. Simone Gold for the Department of Health and Human Services. Gold, who founded the Covid-denialist and anti-vaccine group America’s Frontline Doctors, participated in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, an offense for which she spent 60 days in prison.

Sherri Tenpenny for the Department of Health and Human Services. Tenpenny is an anti-vaccine activist who promoted the disproven idea that vaccines turn people magnetic. She is currently being sued by the Department of Justice for failing to pay $650,000 in taxes.

Joel Salatin for a job at the Department of Agriculture. Salatin, a libertarian farmer and staunch critic of overregulation of agriculture, has become embroiled in controversies around Covid and remarks about Black Americans, including that “the Black community is in dysfunctional collapse.”

Mike Rowe for the Department of Labor. Rowe, the creator and host of the Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs, has emerged as a critic of unions and as an anti-vaccine activist.

Tulsi Gabbard for “Peace Abroad.” Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in Congress as a Democrat, has become a registered Independent and a strong supporter of President-elect Trump, endorsing him frequently in the conservative media.

Vivek Ramaswamy for a possible position within the Department of Education. A pharma executive who positioned himself to the right of Trump during his short-lived campaign for president, Ramaswamy in this role would be a leader in an agency that Trump has vowed to destroy.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) is a possibility for secretary of the Department of Agriculture. Massie has advocated for fewer regulations around farm and food issues such as raw milk. Trump criticized him in 2020 for his antics around passing the coronavirus stimulus bill—but Massie found his way back into Trump’s good graces following the 2020 election by voting against reaffirming the peaceful transfer of power.

Honeycutt said she was particularly excited about the prospect of Massie, whom she described as “honest and smart and funny and really cares about people, and has a huge amount of experience with ranching and farmers and politics.” She said she’s aware of several other people who have been talking to the Kennedy team about potential roles, but she declined to name them. She did note that they nearly all had in common “the courage to speak out and speak up for health and be a part of the food movement.”

Over the last few months leading up to the election, I’ve been writing about an ascendant fundamentalist religious movement whose leaders believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the Constitution is based on the Bible, and that Christians are called to take over the government. These figures have found a powerful ally in President-elect Donald Trump. Just last week, days before the election, I attended one of his campaign events at a church in Georgia, where Trump promised the assembled crowd that he intended to put Christian leaders “directly in the Oval Office.”

He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that would look like, but my past few months of reporting on the Christian right have given me some ideas. Here are a few things I’ll be tracking as Trump’s second term begins.

Erosion of the Establishment Clause

At the Trump event for Christian leaders I attended, one of the most protracted standing ovations came after Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, proclaimed that the US Supreme Court’s three-part 1971 “Lemon” test for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”

His hopes may be realized. A few months ago, I wrote about the creeping religiosity of the Supreme Court. In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled that a public high school football coach who lost his job after he prayed during a game had been subject to discrimination. In the 6–3 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. In February, Justice Samuel Alito issued an unusual individual statement after the court declined to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong. Alito wrote that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.” 

The crusade against the establishment clause will continue as myriad cases challenging the separation of church and state work their way through Trump-appointed judges to get to the Supreme Court.

Increased Funding for “Natural Family Planning”

Over the last few years, Christian anti-abortion groups have spread the false claim that both hormonal birth control and artificial reproduction techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) are unhealthy and unnecessary. Instead, they promote what they call an alternative method: “natural family planning.” Essentially, this is a rebranding of rhythm methods, in which women track their menstrual cycles to identify windows of fertility to either prevent or achieve pregnancy. The effectiveness of these methods depends on many factors, including how rigorously the users track their cycles.

During Trump’s last administration, the federal government promoted natural family planning. In 2019, my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote about a cycle tracking webinar hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And just this year, as I wrote, Senate Republicans put forth a bill that would designate federal funds for “restorative reproductive medicine,” a loose group of therapies relying heavily on cycle tracking to help treat infertility without the use of IVF or artificial insemination. A press release about the bill on the website of Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith quotes Dr. Patrick Yeung, a St. Louis gynecologist who “supports the legislation, noting that the status quo of offering symptomatic (band-aid) treatment for pain, or IVF (that bypasses the problem) for fertility is not satisfactory for most women.” The press release doesn’t mention that Yeung is a Catholic anti-abortion advocate who has also referred to birth control as an attempt to “disinvite the author of life” from the “marital embrace.”

Over the next four years, watch carefully as anti-abortion groups shy away from explicitly opposing abortion and IVF—which has proven to be a poor political strategy—and instead promote these “natural” alternatives, while Tump’s HHS further champions these options.  

Further Incursion of Religion Into Schools—and Defunding of Public Education as We Know It

Much of the recent press around explicit Christianity in public schools has focused on some states’ efforts to require Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. While those initiatives are important to track, there’s another way in which conservative activist Christian leaders are aiming to blur the line between church and state. They tout voucher programs, which have spread over the past two years to 29 states, and redirect public school money to fund private schools—with religious schools receiving upward of 90 percent of that money. As I wrote a few months back:

In 2001, Betsy DeVos, who later became the secretary of education under Trump, framed her advocacy for voucher programs and other school choice programs as an effort to “advance God’s kingdom.” In recent years, a super-PAC run by the American Federation for Children, which is DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, has spent millions of dollars to defeat Republican legislators who oppose private school vouchers, according to reporting by Open Secrets. A prerequisite for students and their families to attend some of the schools that currently receive voucher money is that they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. 

Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me about other religious initiatives in the works. One of them is a suite of bills that would allow public schools to employ chaplains. And in Oklahoma, a Catholic school called St. Isidore of Seville is trying become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The overarching goal of these initiatives, she says, is to “bestow a power and privilege on Christians in our country at the expense of all the other religions in America.” Meanwhile, public education is robbed “of the funding that it’s entitled to.”

For years now, conservative Christians, including DeVos when she was in charge, have been calling for the dismantling of the US Department of Education, and Trump has said he intends to heed their advice. In a conversation this week, Laser told me, “We can count on Trump to attempt to seriously undermine, if not destroy, the Department of Education.”

“We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

Attack on Same-Sex Marriage

Chief among the Christian right’s values is “biblical marriage,” the idea that any union other than that between a heterosexual biological male and female is against God’s will. Charismatic Christian leaders repeat these ideas often, and they’ve made it into the political mainstream. Christian broadcaster Mario Murillo, who partnered with fundamentalist Christian superstar Lance Wallnau in hosting a series of pro-MAGA religious rallies, said at a Colorado conference of Christian leaders in 2022, “We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”

In the coming months, watch for an intensification of the campaign by leading right-wing Christian groups to reverse the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The powerful think tank Family Research Council says on its website, “Properly understood, ‘families’ are formed only by ties of blood, marriage, or adoption, and ‘marriage’ is a union of one man and one woman.” Perhaps most significantly, Project 2025—the blueprint for Trump’s second term that Trump supporters finally admit really “is the agenda”—calls for the US government to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” Naturally, another priority for these groups will be a continued attack on transgender rights.

Hawkish Israel Policy

During his campaign, Trump ran on promises to end the war in the Middle East, and exit polls suggest that some voters believed him. In the majority-Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, 42 percent of residents voted for Trump, while 36 percent voted for Kamala Harris and 18 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Yet the likelihood that Trump will help Palestinians is low, considering that many of his key spiritual advisers are fervently pro-Israel. Many of these charismatic Christians see Israel as the linchpin in their end-times scenario of choice. As Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, recently explained to me, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.”

Trump’s spiritual advisers don’t believe that Palestine is part of that plan. In a 2019 YouTube broadcast, Wallnau excoriated the idea of a two-state solution. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”

During this election, Wallnau has worked closely with the Trump campaign. In October, for example, he hosted then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance at an event and appeared with Trump a few days before the election in Georgia. In an October 2023 broadcast, Wallnau suggested that Hamas had attacked Israel as a form of retribution for the United States having abandoned Trump. In September, he lit into Harris on X for her support for a two-state solution. “This is why Trump said Israel won’t exist in 3-4 years,” he wrote. “AND that is why the US will be under judgment with President Harris in office.”

This week, the Times of Israel reported, Trump spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko told an Israeli TV interviewer that Trump “wants the wars to end as soon as possible, but he wants it to end with a decisive victory” for Israel.

Meanwhile, you can expect to hear fundamentalist leaders insist that Christian nationalism isn’t real, that it’s a figment of the overwrought progressive imagination. Yet evidence to the contrary abounds. At the event in Georgia, Wallnau elicited whoops of appreciation from the audience when he declared, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Private jet flights have soared in recent years, with the resulting climate-heating emissions rising by 50 percent, the most comprehensive global analysis to date has revealed.

The assessment tracked more than 25,000 private jets and almost 19 million flights between 2019 and 2023. It found almost half the jets traveled less than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles) and 900,000 were used “like taxis” for trips of less than 31 miles. Many flights were for holidays, arriving in sunny locations in the summertime. The FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022 attracted more than 1,800 private flights.

Private flights, used by just 0.003 percent of the world’s population, are the most polluting form of transport. The researchers found that passengers in larger private jets caused more CO₂ emissions in an hour than the average person did in a year.

The US dominated private jet travel, representing 69 percent of flights, and Canada, the UK, and Australia were all in the top 10. A private jet takes off every six minutes in the UK. The total emissions from private jet flights in 2023 were more than 15 million metric tons, more than the 60 million people of Tanzania emitted.

The jets “are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget…and their emissions are soaring.”

Industry expectations are that another 8,500 business jets will enter service by 2033, far outstripping efficiency gains and indicating that private flight emissions will rise even further. The researchers said their work highlighted the vast global inequality in emissions between wealthier and poorer people, and tackling the emissions of the wealthy minority was critical to ending global heating.

Stefan Gössling, the professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden who led the research, said: “The wealthy are a very small share of the population but are increasing their emissions very quickly and by very large levels of magnitude.” He added: “The growth in global emissions that we are experiencing at this point in time is coming from the top.”

The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, took data from the ADS-B Exchange platform, which records the signals sent once a minute by transponders on every plane, recording its position and altitude. This huge dataset—1.8 terabytes—was then filtered for the 72 plane models marketed by their manufacturers as “business jets.” The emissions figures are most likely an underestimate, as smaller planes and emissions from taxiing on the ground were not included.

The analysis found the number of private jets increased by 28 percent and the distance flown jumped by 53 percent between 2019 and 2023. Fewer than a third of the flights were longer than 620 miles and almost 900,000 flights were less than 31 miles.

“We know some people use them as taxis, really,” Gössling said. “If it’s just [31 miles], you could definitely do that by car.” Outside the US and Europe, Brazil, the Middle East, and the Caribbean are private jet hotspots.

Much of the use is for leisure, the researchers found. For example, private jet use to Ibiza in Spain and Nice in France peaked in the summer and was concentrated around weekends. In the US, Taylor Swift, Drake, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey are among those who have been criticized for heavy private jet use.

The researchers also looked at some business events in 2023, with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, resulting in 660 private jet flights and the COP28 climate summit in Dubai having 291 flights.

Gössling said the driving factors behind the large recent increase in private jet use have not been analyzed but might include an increasing reluctance to share cabins on commercial flights that began during the Covid pandemic. Industry documents describe private jet users as “ultra-high net worth,” comprising about 250,000 individuals with an average wealth of $123 million. US private jet users are increasingly using “privacy ICAO addresses,” which mask the identity of the plane and could make tracking them much harder in the future.

According to Gössling, passengers should pay for the climate damage resulting from each ton of CO₂ emitted, estimated at about $216: “Very basically, it would seem fair that people paid for the damage they are causing by their behavior.”

A second step would be to increase the landing fees for private aircraft, which are currently very low, he added. A landing fee of $5,400 could be an effective deterrent, roughly doubling the cost of common private flights.

Alethea Warrington, head of aviation at the climate charity Possible, said: “Private jets, used by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people, are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget to avoid climate breakdown, and their emissions are soaring, even as the impacts of the climate crisis escalate.”

“It’s time for governments to act,” she said. “We need…a supertax, rapidly arriving at an outright ban on private jets.”

The US Private Aviation Association did not respond to a request for comment.

Donald Trump announced Thursday that Susie Wiles, who as his de facto campaign manager is credited with imposing a measure of discipline that helped him win on Tuesday, will serve as his chief of staff.

Wiles has earned a reputation as a smart, pragmatic, and effective campaign operative. For critics of Trump’s agenda—which includes deporting millions of immigrants, imposing tariffs likely to increase inflation, firing vast swaths of civil servants and using the Justice Department to prosecute critics—her appointment is bad news.

“Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected,” Trump said in a statement Thursday. “Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America great again,”

Wiles will not be John Kelly, who, along with labeling Trump a fascist, has let it be known that as Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, he worked to prevent Trump from indulging his worst instincts.

Wiles is not going to the White House to stop Trump implementing his plans—she will be there to help him more effectively impose them. Wiles may be a reason that Trump, a bumbling, wanna-be authoritarian in his first term, will be a more effective one in his second.

Nor is Wiles likely to go too far in stopping Trump from pursuing some of his worst impulses.

As Tim Alberta reported recently in the Atlantic, Wiles was occasionally willing to push back on Trump’s bad ideas, but not too often. Here is Alberta describing how Wiles handled Trump’s insistence on allowing far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer to travel with Trump in September, a decision that drew embarrassing headlines when Loomer, who has claimed the 9/11 attack was an “inside job,” joined Trump at a 9/11 memorial event.

“Wiles knew that nothing good could come of this. Still, after one more round of gentle pushback, she acquiesced. (Even people like Wiles, who have a track record of talking Trump out of certain reckless ideas, learn that you cannot retain a seat at the table if you tell the man ‘no’ one time too many.) Wiles decided that allowing Loomer on the trip was not a hill to die on. Perhaps, she would later remark to friends, it should have been.”

The daughter of late NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, Wiles is a longtime GOP operative in Florida with a history of working for rich candidates. She ran Sen. Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign for Florida’s governorship, worked as former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign manager in 2012, and ran Trump’s campaign in Florida in 2016 and 2020. She also worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before a falling out with him.

Wiles has also worked as a lobbyist, and held onto a senior lobbying position with the Republican-leaning advocacy firm Mercury Public Affairs during the campaign, according to the New York Times. She was registered as a lobbyist for a tobacco company as recently as this year.

Wiles also worked from 2017 through 2019 as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, formerly a Florida-based firm that built a thriving DC practice after Trump’s 2016 election—based in part on perceived access to him.

While Wiles worked there, the firm signed up a colorful roster of clients that included a Russian billionaire, a firm run by a man linked to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and a solar company controlled by a state-owned Chinese firm. Wiles wasn’t a registered lobbyist for all of those clients. But she registered to represent a host of outfits, including General Motors and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Wiles also lobbied on behalf of Globovisión, a Venezuelan firm that was looking to expand into US markets. That plan hit a hitch in 2018, when the Justice Department indicted its founder, Raul Gorrin, on corruption charges. Ballard said it cut ties with the firm after learning of the federal probe. Last month, the Justice Department indicted Gorrin again, alleging that he helped “to launder funds corruptly obtained from Venezuela’s state-owned and state-controlled energy company… in exchange for hundreds of millions in bribe payments to Venezuelan officials.”

A Trump spokesperson didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment on Wiles’ lobbying work.

The elites of the anti-vaccine, “medical freedom” world saw the presidential election unfold at a hotel watch party in West Palm Beach, with a giddy, rising sense of what was unfolding.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most famous anti-vaccine activist turned presidential candidate turned Trump booster, turned up at the event before heading to Mar a Lago; at the hotel, he sat alongside Del Bigtree, his campaign’s communications manager and the founder of Informed Consent Action Network, another major anti-vax group. They were joined by people like Aaron Siri, a prominent litigator who focuses on vaccine injury cases, educators who advocate for “vaccine choice” in schools, and others who have devoted their adult lives to opposing a basic tenet of public health.

“This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in medical freedom.” 

The group watched on screen as President-elect Donald Trump praised Kennedy, their longtime friend and fellow traveler. “He’s going to make America healthy again,” a glistening, freshly bronzed Trump promised in his victory remarks. From the crowd, a chorus broke out chanting: “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!” 

Trump smiled. “Go have fun, Bobby,” he said. 

These are heady times for Kennedy and his anti-vaccine allies. While his own presidential campaign failed spectacularly, his choice to suspend it and endorse Trump’s has resulted in a promise from the soon-to-be-president that Kennedy will serve some role in the second Trump administration relevant to what Kennedy has called his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

Kennedy is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the largest such group in the nation. While he’s currently described by the organization as its “chairman on leave,” its staff have spent the time since Trump’s win discussing their hopes for what Kennedy will do for the cause in Washington.

The day after the election, in a morning show on CHD’s web-only TV channel, a group of people affiliated with the organization celebrated their surreal good fortune. The show was hosted by Mary Holland, an attorney and CHD’s CEO, and Polly Tommey, a longtime anti-vaccine campaigner from England and the mother of a child she says was injured by a vaccine. 

“One of us is going to be in the White House,” said Tommey. “Or around the White House. And that, for us, is a major breakthrough.” 

The two women beamed as they interviewed John Gilmore, a teacher in New York and the executive director of a smaller, decades-old anti-vaccine group, the Autism Action Network. “This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in medical freedom in my lifetime,” Gilmore told Tommey and Holland. “Everything is going to be different.” 

Gilmore added that he believes Trump is “sincere” in his support for the so-called medical freedom movement. “There are real incidents of vaccine injury in his own family that I think he wants to address,” he explained, without specifying who he believes to be affected by those injuries. “And this is finally his opportunity to do it.” 

Gilmore recounted how he’d been at the West Palm Beach hotel watch party, and how Kennedy had told the room “how confident he is that his agenda is going to be fully represented in Washington D.C.”

One huge shift, Gilmore added, is that the movement is “no longer on the fringe…Our people will be at the CDC and the NIH and the HHS and all the other alphabet agencies in Washington. Not just being there, but we’re going to be in a policymaking position.” 

Gilmore also expressed a common view in the anti-vaccine world: that the federal government is “sitting on” data showing that vaccine injuries exist, and showing “the connection between vaccines and autism.” With Trump at the helm and Kennedy in place, he said, “that data is going to be unleashed and that will hit the medical establishment like a tsunami. It’s going to be huge.” (Vaccine injuries, while rare, do exist, and a federal compensation program and specialized court system has existed since the late 1980s to pay settlements to people who can document harms. CHD has opposed the program and called for vaccine manufacturers to once again be sued in civil court, which would prove a massive windfall for the many personal injury lawyers involved in the movement. In an omnibus hearing, the vaccine court system, whose judges are experts in vaccine safety law, ruled in 2010 that vaccines definitively cannot be shown to cause autism.)

Holland agreed with Gilmore that their movement was entering a new era, and voiced a hope that what she called “the new press”—“the podcasters, the independent journalists on the internet”—would cover vaccine safety issues the way CHD prefers. “That’s what the zeitgeist is, finally,” she said. 

Dawn Richardson of the National Vaccine Information Center, another anti-vaccine group, also appeared on the program. She said she’d wept while watching Trump’s acceptance speech. “We have to break up the CDC,” she added. “We have to take vaccine safety out of the CDC.” Such a goal seems in line with Project 2025, the Trump-linked policy agenda, which calls for splitting the CDC into two agencies. The American Public Health Association has called the proposal “concerning,” and warned it would “slow down emergency responses and take away the already limited authority for CDC to provide public health guidance.” 

Amid all the excitement, there is precedent that casts doubt whether Kennedy can move the needle on their pet issue. The first time Trump was elected president, the two met, after which Kennedy claimed that he’d been asked to serve on a “vaccine safety and scientific integrity” commission. But that never happened. No particular vaccine “disclosures” or reforms were made during his first administration, despite his promise during one debate to “slow down” the childhood vaccine schedule. Many anti-vaccine activists were also bitterly disappointed in Trump for his Operation Warp Speed program. During his own 2024 presidential run, Kennedy assailed Trump for supporting a Covid vaccine.

“Donald Trump clearly hasn’t learned from his Covid era mistakes,” Kennedy tweeted in March, citing “documented harm being caused by the shot to so many innocent children and adults who are suffering myocarditis, pericarditis and brain inflammation.” (Covid vaccines have exceedingly rare side effects for a small number of people.)

Kennedy’s tune quickly changed when he was drawn into the Trumpverse, but there are signs that CHD is aware that Trump could easily reverse course. In a fundraising email, Holland, CHD’s CEO, cheered that Kennedy is “headed to Washington, D.C. to serve in President Trump’s inner circle.” But, with that, she added, CHD’s work remained more important than ever, “to cheerlead the administration’s efforts to make kids healthy again, and to hold their feet to the fire if they fall down on promises to make children’s health one of their top priorities.”