Raquel Garcia has been fighting for years to clean up the air in her neighborhood southwest of downtown Detroit.
Living a little over a mile from the Ambassador Bridge, which thousands of freight trucks cross every day en route to the Port of Detroit, Garcia said she and her neighbors are frequently cleaning soot off their homes.
“You can literally write your name in it,” she said. “My house is completely covered.”
Earlier this week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. used a Zoom call to tell his supporters that Donald Trump had promised him "control" of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal agency that includes the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, as well as the Department of Agriculture. Given Kennedy's support for debunked anti-vaccine nonsense, this represents a potential public health nightmare.
A few days after, Howard Lutnick, a co-chair of Trump's transition team, appeared on CNN to deny that RFK Jr. would be put in charge of HHS. But he followed that with a long rant in which he echoed Kennedy's spurious claims about vaccines. This provides yet another indication of how anti-vaccine activism has become deeply enmeshed with Republican politics, to the point where it may be just as bad even if Kennedy isn't appointed.
Trump as Kennedy’s route to power
Kennedy has a long history of misinformation regarding health, with a special focus on vaccines. This includes the extensively debunked suggestion that there is a correlation between vaccinations and autism incidence, and it extends to a general skepticism about vaccine safety. That's mixed with conspiracy theories regarding collusion between federal regulators and pharmaceutical companies.
As the Popo Agie River wends its way down from the glaciers atop Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains toward the city of Lander, it flows into a limestone cave and disappears. The formation, known as the Sinks, spits the river back out at another feature called the Rise a quarter of a mile east, a little more voluminous and a little warmer, with brown and rainbow trout weighing as much as 10 pounds mingling in its now smooth pools. The quarter-mile journey from the Sinks to the Rise takes the river two hours.
Scientists first discovered this quirk of the middle fork of the Popo Agie (pronounced puh-po zuh) in 1983 by pouring red dye into the river upstream and waiting for it to resurface. Geologists attribute the river’s mysterious delay to the water passing through exceedingly small crevasses in the rock that slow its flow.
Like many rivers in the arid West, the Popo Agie is an important aquifer. Ranchers, farmers, businesses, and recreationists rely on detailed data about it—especially day-to-day streamflow measurements. That’s exactly the type of empirical information collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.
Five years ago, Donald Trump told Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to go ahead and invade Syria—an unexpected capitulation to personal pressure from the Turkish strongman that upended US policy, allowing Turkish attacks on Kurdish fighters seen as staunch US allies.
Trump’s green light to Erdogan during an October 6, 2019, phone call forced US troops in Syria to hastily flee from posts near the Turkish border and shocked Washington, drawing bipartisan condemnation of the president’s decision.
The Turkish troops who invaded went on to display “shameful disregard for civilian life, carrying out serious violations and war crimes, including summary killings and unlawful attacks that have killed and injured civilians,” Amnesty International charged. News reports said at least 70 civilians were killed while hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by the invasion.
The okay to invade was one of various ways that Trump helped Erdogan while in office. Trump intervened with the Justice Department to aid a Turkish national bank, Halkbank, which was accused of helping Iran evade US sanctions. Prosecutors haveargued the bank helped to finance Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The case against the bank implicated allies of Erdogan, who had authorized the sanctions-evasion scheme, a witness in the case said. Under personal pressure from Erdogan, Trump also pressed his advisers, including DOJ officials, to drop a case against the bank built by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, according to accounts of former Trump administration officials.
Geoffrey Berman, at the time the US attorney in Manhattan, later said in a book that he received pressure from acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker in 2018 and that Whitaker’s successor, Bill Barr, pressed him to settle the case on terms favorable to Halkbank. Berman charged that Barr urged him to grant immunity to Turkish officials with ties to Erdogan and suggested hiding those deals from a federal court—a step Berman said would be illegal. Berman and Barr did not respond to requests for comment.
Turkey’s invasion of Syria, oddly, caused problems Halkbank. The criticism Trump faced for allowing Erdogan to invade appeared to embarrass the US president. He responded by attempting to reverse course. In a bizarre public letter, he threatened to “destroy” Turkey’s economy. “Don’t be a tough guy,” Trump wrote. During this spat, Trump and his advisers, including Barr, dropped their opposition to indicting Halkbank. Berman later recounted that Trump’s “falling out” with Erdogan resulted in a “green light to indict Halkbank. And we did it within 24 hours.”
Trump’s approval of Turkey’s invasion of Syria, and his reaction to the criticism it drew, has received limited attention during the 2024 campaign. But it highlights several of Trump’s weaknesses in managing US foreign policy.
Though he casts himself as an effective negotiator, in office Trump consistently accommodated autocrats, offering concessions without winning concomitant benefits, former aides said. “He would interfere in the regular government process to do something for a foreign leader,” John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told the Times in 2020. “In anticipation of what? In anticipation of another favor from that person down the road.”
Bolton wrote in a book that Trump in 2019 told Chinese President Xi Jinping that his decision to detain Uighur Muslims in concentration camps was “exactly the right thing to do” and urged Xi to “go ahead with building the camps.” In another meeting that year, Bolton wrote, Trump “pleaded” with Xi to help Trump’s electoral prospects by purchasing US soybeans and wheat. Trump apparently hoped the trade would win him votes in rural states hurt by his trade war with China.
This tendency to appease autocrats who flatter him is part of Trump’s personalization of foreign policy, a tendency to make diplomacy about his own interests, rather than those of Americans.
Then there are the conflicts of interest. Trump, in late 2015, acknowledged that “I have a little conflict of interest” in dealing with Turkey, due to his licensing deal that paid him for his name to appear on two glass towers in Istanbul. The 2020 leak of some of Trump’s tax returns revealed that he had in fact received at least $13 million, including at least $1 million while he was the president, through the deal. A man who helped broker Trump’s licensing deal later lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Turkish interests.
If he is elected again, Trump’s business interests will result in similar conflicts with Vietnam, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, among others. Through his family, he would also have business-related conflicts with Albania, Qatar, Serbia, and Saudi Arabia, which has paid $87 million to a fund set up by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
It is not clear to what extent financial interests—as opposed to flattery or a wish for the approval of autocrats—influences Trump. The problem is that Americans don’t know what interests he follows.
But it is likely that Erdogan expects Trump will be accommodating if he wins, perhaps starting with Halkbank. A federal appeals court recently ruled that the bank’s prosecution can proceed, following the bank’s effort to claim sovereign immunity.
Turkish interests allegedly spent heavily to corruptly influence New York Mayor Eric Adams, who is accused of ordering that Turkey’s 36-story consulate be allowed to open despite safety concerns. If Adams would help fix a fire code issue, what might Trump do for Erdogan?
On Thursday, the United Nations' Environmental Programme (UNEP) released a report on what it terms the "emissions gap"—the difference between where we're heading and where we'd need to be to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. It makes for some pretty grim reading. Given last year's greenhouse gas emissions, we can afford fewer than four similar years before we would exceed the total emissions compatible with limiting the planet's warming to 1.5° C above pre-industrial conditions. Following existing policies out to the turn of the century would leave us facing over 3° C of warming.
The report ascribes this situation to two distinct emissions gaps: between the goals of the Paris Agreement and what countries have pledged to do and between their pledges and the policies they've actually put in place. There are some reasons to think that rapid progress could be made—the six largest greenhouse gas emitters accounted for nearly two-thirds of the global emissions, so it wouldn't take many policy changes to make a big difference. And the report suggests increased deployment of wind and solar could handle over a quarter of the needed emissions reductions.
But so far, progress has been far too limited to cut into global emissions.
The legal saga over Martin Shkreli's infamous 5,000 percent price hike of a life-saving anti-parasitic drug has ended with a flat denial from the highest court in the land.
On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected Shkreli's petition to appeal an order to return $64.6 million in profits from the pricing scheme of Daraprim, a decades-old drug used to treat toxoplasmosis. The condition is caused by a single-celled parasite that can be deadly for newborns and people with compromised immune systems, such as people who have HIV, cancer, or an organ transplant.
Federal prosecutors successfully argued in courts that Shkreli orchestrated an illegal anticompetitive scheme that allowed him to dramatically raise the price of Daraprim overnight. When Shkreli and his pharmaceutical company, Vyera (formerly Turing), bought the rights to the drug in 2015, the price of a single pill jumped to $750 after being priced between $13.50 and $17.50 earlier that year. And Shkreli quickly came to epitomize callous greed in the pharmaceutical industry.
There has been a lot of research on the types of people who believe conspiracy theories, and their reasons for doing so. But there’s a wrinkle: My colleagues and I have found that there are a number of people sharing conspiracies online who don’t believe their own content.
They are opportunists. These people share conspiracy theories to promote conflict, cause chaos, recruit and radicalize potential followers, make money, harass, or even just to get attention.
There are several types of this sort of conspiracy-spreader trying to influence you.
Readers of a certain age might remember Dolly, a Finn-Dorset sheep born in 1996 to three mothers and some proud Scottish scientists. Dolly generated global headlines just by being alive, as she was the first mammal to be cloned using DNA taken from body (somatic) cells.
In this form of cloning, a somatic cell provides the cloned animal's complete DNA, which is then injected into an unfertilized egg cell that has had its existing genetic material removed. Zap the egg with a bit of current, implant it into the womb of a surrogate mother, wait a few months, and bam—out pops Dolly.
The process proved that the magic of embryonic development wasn't hidden only in eggs and sperm; even somatic cells from mature animals were capable of reproducing the whole creature and of generating any cell needed by the developing embryo.
Readers of a certain age might remember Dolly, a Finn-Dorset sheep born in 1996 to three mothers and some proud Scottish scientists. Dolly generated global headlines just by being alive, as she was the first mammal to be cloned using DNA taken from body (somatic) cells.
In this form of cloning, a somatic cell provides the cloned animal's complete DNA, which is then injected into an unfertilized egg cell that has had its existing genetic material removed. Zap the egg with a bit of current, implant it into the womb of a surrogate mother, wait a few months, and bam—out pops Dolly.
The process proved that the magic of embryonic development wasn't hidden only in eggs and sperm; even somatic cells from mature animals were capable of reproducing the whole creature and of generating any cell needed by the developing embryo.
Enlarge/ Ralph de la Torre, founder and chief executive officer of Steward Health Care System LLC, speaks during a summit in New York on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2016. (credit: Getty | )
A Senate committee on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to hold the wealthy CEO of a failed hospital chain in civil and criminal contempt for rejecting a rare subpoena from the lawmakers.
In July, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) subpoenaed Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre to testify before the lawmakers on the deterioration and eventual bankruptcy of the system, which included more than 30 hospitals across eight states. The resulting dire conditions in the hospitals, described as providing "third-world medicine," allegedly led to the deaths of at least 15 patients and imperiled more than 2,000 others.
The committee, chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), highlighted that amid the system's collapse, de la Torre was paid at least $250 million, bought a $40 million yacht, and owned a $15 million luxury fishing boat. Meanwhile, Steward executives jetted around on two private jets collectively worth $95 million.
Enlarge/ Harvard Business School was targeted by a faculty member's lawsuit. (credit: APCortizasJr)
Earlier this year, we got a look at something unusual: the results of an internal investigation conducted by Harvard Business School that concluded one of its star faculty members had committed research misconduct. Normally, these reports are kept confidential, leaving questions regarding the methods and extent of data manipulations.
But in this case, the report became public because the researcher had filed a lawsuit that alleged defamation on the part of the team of data detectives that had first identified potential cases of fabricated data, as well as Harvard Business School itself. Now, the court has ruled on motions to dismiss the case. While the suit against Harvard will go on, the court has ruled that evidence-backed conclusions regarding fabricated data cannot constitute defamation—which is probably a very good thing for science.
Data and defamation
The researchers who had been sued, Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joe Simmons, run a blog called Data Colada where, among other things, they note cases of suspicious-looking data in the behavioral sciences. As we detailed in our earlier coverage, they published a series of blog posts describing an apparent case of fabricated data in four different papers published by the high-profile researcher Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School.
On July 28, millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote in the country’s highly anticipated presidential election. For the first time in years, there was hope that the opposition would unseat the long-ruling antidemocratic leader Nicolás Maduro and restore a sense of future post-Chavismo—late President Hugo Chávez’s populist political project of a “socialist revolution” that has slid into authoritarianism—to a once-prosperousnation wrecked by prolonged economic collapse, political repression, and a massive exodus of people that has had repercussions across the region.
But in the wake of the vote came terror. The electoral authority—controlled by a pro-government majority—declared Maduro, the political successor of Chávez, the winner, despite questions about the integrity of the process. The opposition disputedMaduro’s claim with evidence that their candidate, little-known former diplomat Edmundo González, had won by a wide margin. (The United States government agreed.) The Carter Center, which sent an expert group to Venezuela to observe the election, said it “did not meet international standards” and couldn’t “be considered democratic.”
The fraudulent election has sharpened the focus on the utter collapse of what used to be the richest nation in South America.Deadly antigovernment protests have since erupted across Venezuela, and several countries have pressured the Maduro government to present verifiable proof of his reelection to no avail. “Venezuelans are ready to throw off the dictatorship,” the popular leader of the opposition, María Corina Machado, who was barred from running and backed González, wrote in an op-ed. “Will the international community support us?” Back in 2023, Machado had predicted two possible outcomes for the election: “landslide victory or an obscene fraud.”
Antigovernment protesters try to run from tear gas fired by police in Caracas after Maduro was declared the winner of the presidential election.Kyodo/AP
Venezuela’s fate is not restricted to South America but has been bound up in the US election this year. Withthe southern border as a central issue, much has been made of the spike in migration from Venezuela to the United States during the administration of President Joe Biden. On the right, the surgehas been played up as a way to hit the left twice: a socialist government in Latin America failed; the poor policies of a Democratic administration led to the border being overrun. At the Republican National Convention in July, Donald Trump suggested Venezuela—as well as El Salvador—was sending “criminals” to the United States.
But that misses a far more complex story, one that ranges from the long history of US involvement in the region to the specifics of the Trump era, when, as the Washington Post recently reported, despite warnings that it would cause massive migration, President Donald Trump pushed devastating sanctions onto Venezuela. (Trump also appointed Elliott Abrams, who played a role in the Iran-Contra affair and was linked to a failed coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, as the special envoy to Venezuela.)
“I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration,” Thomas Shannon told the Washington Post.
The results of years of economic mismanagement, exacerbated by US policies cracking down on the country, have been dramatic. One poll suggested as many as one-third of Venezuela’s population was considering migrating if Maduro, who has been president for more than a decade, held onto power for another six years. They would join the more than 7.7 million Venezuelans who have already left the country of fewer than 30 million since 2014. Most have fled to neighboring countries such as Colombia and Brazil, but thousands of others have made their way through the treacherous Darien Gap to the US-Mexico border. Many have been bused to cities like New York and Denver, where politicians have turned them into political pawns.
Since fiscal year 2021, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has registered more than 837,000 encounters with Venezuelan nationals. (The number of migrant apprehensions at the border has fallen significantly as of late in part as a result of increased enforcement by the Mexican government.) There are also currently 242,000 Venezuelans in the United States who benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and hundreds of thousands more who, according to the Department of Homeland Security, are potentially eligible based on “Venezuela’s increased instability and lack of safety due to the enduring humanitarian, security, political, and environmental conditions.”
Given all these factors, how did one of the region’s most prosperous and stable nations fall apart? The answer is more complicated than “extreme socialism,” as Elon Musk tweeted.
OnceVenezuela was one of the richest countries in the world. By 1970, it had a higher income per capita than many European nations. But during the last quarter of the 20th century, Venezuela entered a period of economic contraction.
“There were a number of things that happened during that very long period,” says Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and author of the forthcoming book The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020. “Mostly they had to do with the country not being able to adopt reasonable economic policies and policy reforms because of conflict between its elites.”
Home to the most proven oil reserves in the world, Venezuela enjoyed a boom from exporting its oil. But then global prices plunged, going from $100 a barrel in 2014 to less than $30 two years later. Chávez, who led Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, directed oil revenue to massive social spending programs that benefited the poor. But heavily dependent on that commodity, the country hadn’t sufficientlysaved or invested and fell into debt. After Maduro took over in 2013, the economy went into free fall.
In the years since, Venezuela has experienced some of the highest inflation rates worldwide—with a staggering 130,060 percent in 2018. Compounding the crisis for Venezuelans has beena devastating shortage of basic goods, food, and medicine. An estimated 80 percent of the population lives in poverty and the monthly minimum wage of 130 bolivars is equivalent to about $3.60 in the United States. A survey in 2017 found that 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds due to lack of nutrition. Between 2012 and 2020, the economy contracted by 71 percent—more than any other country in modern history not in war and more than double the magnitude of the Great Depression. Crude oil production by the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) also plummeted, reaching a 75-year low during the pandemic.
Adding to the economic downward spiral was government mismanagement and corruption. As Marcela Escobari, who served as assistant administrator for USAID’s Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, explained, years of “expropriations, underinvestment in the oil industry, massive foreign indebtedness, and the gradual undermining of institutions overseeing government expenditures” have hurt the economy badly.
A US government watchdog report concluded that sanctions “likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy, primarily by limiting revenue from oil production.”
But so did the various sanctions imposed by the United States over almost 20 years. While the Obama administration resorted to targeted sanctions against Maduro’s allies, Trump opted for a “maximum pressure” strategy. He broadened economic sanctions in response to escalating human rights abuses and corruption by the Maduro government. In 2018, Maduro secured a second term after what was generally considered illegitimate elections. Dozens of countries, including the United States, recognized Juan Guaidó as interim president. In late 2022, amid waning support for Guaidó, Venezuela’s opposition National Assembly voted to dissolve the shadow government. Guaidó went to exile in Miami, while an unpopular Maduro has stayed in power and replicated his 2018 response to the 2024 elections.
Starting in 2017, Trump barred the Venezuelan government from borrowing from financial markets, blocked assets, and prohibited US businesses from dealing with PDVSA, the state’s largest source of revenue. At the time, then–national security adviser John Bolton said the measures were necessary to mitigate “the poverty and the starvation and the humanitarian crisis.” But the United Nations human rights chief warned even then that the sweeping sanctions would more likely have the opposite effect and harm the most vulnerable groups.
“It’s one thing to sanction certain regime officials and not let them travel internationally and freeze their bank accounts in the United States,” Rodríguez, who estimates sanctions have contributed to around half of Venezuela’s economic contraction, says. “It’s another thing to hurt the Venezuelan economy because if you hurt the Venezuelan economy, you are hurting ordinary Venezuelans. You’re not hurting Maduro.”
According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration had been warned that sanctions could heighten Venezuela’s economic and social crises and incentivize more migration, including potentially to the United States. “This is the point I made at the time: I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration,” Thomas Shannon, undersecretary of state for political affairs under Trump, told thePost.
Empty shelves at a national supermarket in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2018.The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP
Just how much the sanctions have pushed Venezuela to the brink is a subject that continues to be debated. Some analysts have argued that even before the 2017 sanctions,the economic recession, living conditions, and oil production in Venezuela were already on a negative trend and that pre-sanction underlying factors played a greater role in contributing to the country’s collapse than sanctions. As researchers with the Brookings Institute and the Harvard Center for International Development wrote,“Rather than being a result of US-imposed sanctions, much of the suffering and devastation in Venezuela has been, in line with most accounts, inflicted by those in power.”
Others argue that even if true, sanctions have only exacerbated existing problems. In a country heavily dependent on oil—accounting for 90 percent of all exports—the sanctions have been linked to a decline in production “of a dimension seen only when armies blow up oil fields,” one report about the human consequences of economic sanctions by the Center for Economic and Policy Research states. Diminished oil exports have had a negative impact on the country’s revenue and ability to import food and other essential goods with foreign exchange.
A US government watchdog report concluded that sanctions “likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy, primarily by limiting revenue from oil production.” The UN Special Rapporteur found that no “strata of society has been untouched” by the negative impact of unilateral sanctions.
In a 2019 paper titled “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela,” Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot argued that the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration “reduced the public’s calorie intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans.” By making it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, they wrote, sanctions contributed to “an estimated more than 40,000 deaths” from 2017 to 2018.
In the months before Venezuela’spresidential election, the Biden administration offered conditional energy sanctions relief in a stated effort to pressure Maduro into committing to a free and fair electoral process. But the White House later reinstated the sanctionsbecause the Venezuelan government failedto uphold their end of the bargain on a deal that included allowing top opposition candidates to run in the presidential race.
“The [Biden] administration has thought of sanctions relief as a ‘switch’ that could increase Venezuela’s economic prospects and keep people in place,” says Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That strategy has failed, he adds, and lifting sanctions “would be to reward Maduro for what is being called the mother of all electoral frauds in Latin American history.”
For some observers, the path forward is a transition to democracy that allows for the normalization of relations with other countries and economic recovery—without sanctions. There have been some fragile signs of improvement. Inflation, while still high, was down to 190 percent last year and Venezuela’s oil exports increased by 12 percent. Luis Oliveros, an economist at the Universidade Metropolitana in Caracas told El Pais that oil production can continue to increase if sanctions stay flexible.
But uncertainty remains as Maduro tightens his grip on power despite the will of voters, blaming the unrest on “North American imperialism and the criminal fascists” and saying he wouldn’t “hesitate to summon the people to a revolution.” Rodríguez at the University of Denver sees one possible scenario where the pariah Maduro regime collapses in the face of mass protests. But more likely, he says, the “viable way out to avoid the consolidation of a full-fledged autocracy” is through a power-sharing agreement. Meanwhile, the US government has reportedly discussed extending Maduro a pardon offer to convince him to step down.
“The polls showing that large numbers of Venezuelans will migrate if Maduro remains in power prove that it isn’t about the economic situation so much as it is about Maduro,” Berg says. “That is to say, it’s about regime type. Without a change in government, Venezuelans will lose hope and migrate. Absolutely nothing changes in Venezuela until Maduro leaves.”
A Google data center in Douglas County, Georgia. (credit: Google)
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
When lawmakers in Washington set out to expand a lucrative tax break for the state’s data center industry in 2022, they included what some considered an essential provision: a study of the energy-hungry industry’s impact on the state’s electrical grid.
Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed that provision but let the tax break expansion go forward. As The Seattle Times and ProPublica recently reported, the industry has continued to grow and now threatens Washington’s effort to eliminate carbon emissions from electricity generation.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for its newsletter here.
Among the many obstacles to enacting federal limits on climate pollution, none has been more daunting than the Supreme Court. That is where the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions met their demise and where the Biden administration’s attempts will no doubt land.
A forthcoming study seeks to inform how courts consider challenges to these regulations by establishing once and for all that the lawmakers who shaped the Clean Air Act in 1970 knew scientists considered carbon dioxide an air pollutant, and that these elected officials were intent on limiting its emissions.
On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit denied a request to put a hold on recently formulated rules that would limit carbon emissions made by fossil fuel power plants. The request, made as part of a case that sees 25 states squaring off against the EPA, would have put the federal government's plan on hold while the case continued. Instead, the EPA will be allowed to continue the process of putting its rules into effect, and the larger case will be heard under an accelerated schedule.
Here we go again
The EPA's efforts to regulate carbon emissions from power plants go back all the way to the second Bush administration, when a group of states successfully sued the EPA to force it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This led to a formal endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases during the Obama administration, something that remained unchallenged even during Donald Trump's term in office.
Obama tried to regulate emissions through the Clean Power Plan, but his second term came to an end before this plan had cleared court hurdles, allowing the Trump administration to formulate a replacement that did far less than the Clean Power Plan. This took place against a backdrop of accelerated displacement of coal by natural gas and renewables that had already surpassed the changes envisioned under the Clean Power Plan.
Science policy plays a pivotal role in shaping the relationship between scientific research and societal needs. It encompasses the guidelines, regulations, and initiatives that govern scientific research and its application. As an expert in Science and Education, I will elucidate the intricacies of science policy, its significance, and its impact on scientific progress and societal advancement.
Enlarge/ Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), testifies before the House Appropriations Subcommittee at the Rayburn House Office Building on May 15, 2024, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Kevin Dietsch)
Firms that serve as intermediaries to negotiate and control prescription drug access in the US "wield enormous power," largely with "extraordinarily opaque" business practices, and may be "inflating drug costs and squeezing Main Street pharmacies" for profit, according to a searing interim report released Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission.
Amid a national focus on America's uniquely astronomical drug costs, the FTC is taking aim at firms that largely work deep in the bowels of the country's labyrinthine health care system, well hidden from public understanding and scrutiny: pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).
PBMs were initially hired by various payors—employers, health insurance companies, government health plans, and others—to manage prescription drug benefits through various plans. But PBMs have evolved over the years to also negotiate rebates from drugmakers, set reimbursements for dispensing pharmacies, and develop drug formularies (the list of drugs that a health plan covers.) While those functions alone grant PBMs a large amount of power, consolidation and integration over recent years has concentrated that power in troubling ways, according to the FTC report.
Enlarge/ People and their pets rest at the Oregon Convention Center cooling station in Portland as the city is hit with extreme temperatures caused by a heat dome on June 28, 2021 (credit: Kathryn Elsesser / AFP via Getty Images)
Northwest Oregon had never seen anything like it. Over the course of three days in June 2021, Multnomah County—the state’s most populous county, which rests in the swayback along Oregon’s northern border—recorded highs of 108°, 112°, and 116° Fahrenheit.
Temperatures were so hot that the metal on cable cars melted and the asphalt on roadways buckled. Nearly half the homes in the county lacked cooling systems because of Oregon’s typically gentle summers, where average highs top out at 81°. Sixty-nine people perished from heat stroke, most of them in their homes.
When scientific studies showed that the extreme temperatures were caused by heat domes, which experts say are influenced by climate change, county officials didn’t just chalk it up to a random weather occurrence. They started researching the large fossil fuel companies whose emissions are driving the climate crisis—including ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron—and sued them.
Enlarge/ Ozone-producing chemicals come from a variety of sources and don't respect state borders. (credit: John Edward Linden)
On Tuesday, a slim majority of the US Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling that places a stay on rules developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, meant to limit the spread of ozone-generating pollutants across state lines. Because it was handled on an emergency basis, the decision was made without any evidence gathered during lower court proceedings. As a result, the justices don't even agree on the nature of the regulations the EPA has proposed, leading to a blistering dissent from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was joined by the court's three liberal justices.
Bad neighbors
The rule at issue arose from the EPA's regular process of revisiting existing limits in light of changes in public health information and pollution-control technology. In this case, the focus was on ozone-producing chemicals; in 2015, the EPA chose to lower the limit on ozone from 75 to 70 parts per billion.
Once these standards are set, states are required to submit plans that fulfill two purposes. One is to limit pollution within the state itself; the second involves pollution controls that will limit the exposure in states that are downwind of the pollution sources. The EPA is required to evaluate these plans; if they are deemed insufficient, the EPA can require the states to follow a federal plan devised by the EPA.
Login
