While the scientific evidence about climate change has not
changed, the legal obligation to act on it has
By Bonnie Phillips / ecoRI News staff
The Environmental Protection Agency on Feb. 12 revoked its
own 2009 “endangerment finding,” a scientific conclusion that for 16 years had
been the central basis for regulating planet-warming emissions from power
plants, vehicles, and other sources.
The finding itself is straightforward: carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases — caused by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and
gas — endanger public health and welfare. The finding relied on evidence from
multiple scientific authorities, including the National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering and Medicine, and was adopted after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
in 2007 that greenhouse gases are air pollutants that can be regulated
under the Clean Air Act.
The Trump administration has claimed the endangerment
finding hurts industry and the economy and that the Obama and Biden
administrations twisted science to determine that greenhouse gases are a public
health risk. While other air pollutants will still be regulated, the decision
specifically removes the main legal foundation for federal greenhouse gas
limits tied to fossil fuel use.
In practical terms, this means federal regulators are no
longer required to set nationwide limits on these emissions. The scientific
evidence about climate change hasn’t changed, but the legal obligation to act
on it has.
“Despite overwhelming opposition from state and local
leaders nationwide, the Trump administration’s actions depart from
well-established scientific consensus and substantially weaken the federal
government’s authority to regulate harmful emissions, rolling back longstanding
public health safeguards and vehicle emissions standards,” said Terry Gray,
director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. “Allowing
greenhouse gas emissions to go unchecked exacerbates the climate and public health
challenges communities are already experiencing. Rhode Island remains committed
to protecting the health, safety, and well-being of its residents.”
Getting drug advice from a guy who sniffed cocaine off toilet seats and who was a heroin addict
Phillip Reese
After a grueling year of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation to treat breast cancer, Sadia Zapp was anxious — not the manageable hum that had long been part of her life, but something deeper, more distracting.
“Every little ache, like my knee hurts,” she said, made her worry that “this is the end of the road for me.”
So Zapp, a 40-year-old communications director in New York, became one of millions of Americans to start taking an anxiety medication in recent years. For her, it was the serotonin-boosting drug Lexapro.
“I love it. It’s been great,” she said. “It’s really helped me manage.”
The proportion of American adults who took anxiety medications jumped from 11.7% in 2019 to 14.3% in 2024, with most of the increase occurring during the covid pandemic, according to survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 8 million more people, bringing the total to roughly 38 million, with sharp increases among young adults, people with a college degree, and adults who identify as LGBTQ+.
Even as psychiatric medications gain public acceptance and become easier to access through telehealth appointments, the rise of a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, known as SSRIs, has triggered a backlash from supporters of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement who argue they are harmful.
Doctors and researchers say medications such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Lexapro are front-line treatments for many anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder, and are being misrepresented as addictive and broadly harmful even though they’ve been proved safe for extended use.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decried broadening SSRI use. During his Jan. 29 confirmation hearing, he said he knows people, including family members, who had a tougher time quitting SSRIs than people have quitting heroin. More recently, he said his agency is studying a possible link between the use of SSRIs and other psychiatric medications and violent behavior like school shootings.
How Will the War in Iran Affect Your Utility Bills?
By Kiley Bense
Trump's planned ballroom seems to be holding Trump's attention more than the war he started with Iran
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set off a global energy crisis in 2022, sending prices for oil and gas skyrocketing in Europe and the U.S. for months on end. Many Americans struggled to keep up with their bills, and disconnections—when utility companies shut off power or heat because of nonpayment—spiked.
Now, energy experts fear the Trump administration’s decision to attack Iran could trigger a similar sequence of events. Qatar has shut down production at the world’s largest liquefied natural gas facility. Liquefying natural gas allows it to be stored and moved over longer distances than pipelines can accommodate. Shipments through a critical trade route, the Strait of Hormuz, have been cut off. Fifteen percent of the global oil supply and 20 percent of global LNG normally pass through this waterway.
In response, oil, gasoline and diesel prices are up, and natural gas prices in Europe are surging. The conflict is “wreaking havoc with global gas and LNG markets, even more so than oil,” according to analysts at Wood Mackenzie, the global energy and natural resources consulting firm. Asian markets “are the most exposed,” but “Europe is also in panic mode,” the analysts said.
The world hasn’t yet seen disruption on the scale of what happened at the start of Russia’s years-long attack on Ukraine, but that’s where we could be headed.
“If this continues for a full week, that’s the kind of trajectory that we might be on,” said Clark Williams-Derry, energy finance analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “The longer this conflict lasts, the more likely we are to see higher prices that people are paying for natural gas.”
The Ukraine war, he warned, led to “a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary households, people who are paying utility bills, to the people who are providing them with fossil fuels.”
The immediate fallout from the war with Iran illustrates the problems with ramping up U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas without any policy guardrails,he said. The more LNG that America exports, the more domestic natural gas prices are tied to swings in the global market. “It’s U.S. consumers who are bidding against global consumers for the same gas,” he said.
For all the parallels to history, though, Trump’s Iran war is historically unique in one critically important way: In its early stages, the war is not popular with the American public.
A recent CNN poll found that 59% of Americans oppose the war – a trend found in poll after poll since the war began.
As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that what’s likely generating public opposition to the Iran war today is the absence of a big story with a grand purpose that has bolstered public support for just about every major U.S.-promoted regime change war since 1900. These broad, purpose-filled narratives generate public buy-in to support the costs of war, which are often high in terms of money spent and lives lost when regime change is at stake.
Likewise, in the 2000s a dominant narrative about preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and stopping terrorism brought strong initial public support for the war in Afghanistan, with 88% support in 2001, and the war in Iraq, with 70% support in 2003.
With no comparable narrative around Iran today, Trump and Republicans could face big problems, especially as costs continue to rise.
No anti-Iran narrative
Trump criticized for disrespectful baseball cap at homecoming of caskets of soldiers killed in Iran War
Iran has been a thorn in the side of many American presidents for a long time. So, what’s missing? Why no grand-purpose narrative at the start of this war?
Gains like these by rivals prove traumatic to the nation. They also dislodge the status quo and provide the opportunity for new grand-purpose narratives with new policy directions to emerge.
Today, most Americans see no existential danger around Iran. A Marist poll from March 3, 2026, found that 55% of Americans view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. And the number who see Iran as a major threat, 44%, is down from 48% in July 2025.
By contrast, 64% of Americans saw Iraq as a “considerable threat” prior to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.
In the summer of 2025, Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities were significantly damaged – “completely and totally obliterated,” according to Trump, though there is no confirmation of that claim – during the 12-Day war between Iran and Israel.
Makes patients stay in the hospital when they might not need to
By Carl Dimitri, Senior Writer, School of Public Health, Brown University
A
long-standing Medicare policy meant to manage rehabilitation services in
nursing homes may keep older Americans in hospitals longer than necessary
without improving patient health or saving Medicare money, new research finds.
Established in 1965, the rule was intended to manage the use
of skilled nursing facilities, which provide short-term medical and
rehabilitative care to Medicare beneficiaries. Known as the “three-day rule,”
it requires patients to spend at least three consecutive days in the hospital
before Medicare will cover care in a nursing facility. Skilled nursing
facilities are used as a post-hospital benefit by one in five Medicare
beneficiaries after hospitalization, and Medicare pays an average of about
$15,000 for each stay.
The old saying "you are what you eat" suggests
that our food choices determine our health and longevity. Now, a study published in
the journal Science Advances has put some specifics on it by
estimating how many extra years can be gained through a healthy diet.
To crunch the numbers, Yanling Lv at Huazhong University of
Science and Technology in China, along with her colleagues, analyzed data from
more than 100,000 UK Biobank participants. This is a large-scale database
containing in-depth genetic and health information from half a million
volunteers. They tracked the study's subjects for just over 10 years by giving
them regular surveys asking what they had consumed during the previous 24
hours.
Five best diets
The team gave each participant a score based on how closely
their meals matched five validated
healthy diets: a Mediterranean diet (rich in healthy fats, fish, and
vegetables), the Diabetes Risk Reduction Diet (high-fiber and low-sugar foods),
the DASH (dietary approaches to stop hypertension) Diet, a plant-based diet,
and the AHEI (Alternative Healthy Eating Index). Additionally, the researchers
scored participants' DNA for 19 genetic
variants associated with longevity.
Tamar Abrams had a lousy couple of years in 2022 and ’23. Both her parents died; a relationship ended; she retired from communications consulting. She moved from Arlington, Virginia, to Warren, Rhode Island, where she knew all of two people.
“I was kind of a mess,” recalled Abrams, 69. Trying to cope, “I was eating myself into oblivion.” As her weight hit 270 pounds and her blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood glucose levels climbed, “I knew I was in trouble health-wise.”
What came to mind? “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!” — the tuneful ditty from television commercials that promoted the GLP-1 medication for diabetes. The ads also pointed out that patients who took it lost weight.
Abrams remembered the commercials as “joyful” and sometimes found herself humming the jingle. They depicted Ozempic-takers cooking omelets, repairing bikes, playing pickleball — “doing everyday activities, but with verve,” she said. “These people were enjoying the hell out of life.”
So, just as such ads often urge, even though she had never been diagnosed with diabetes, she asked her doctor if Ozempic was right for her.
Small wonder Abrams recalled those ads. Novo Nordisk, which manufactures Ozempic, spent an estimated $180 million in direct-to-consumer advertising in 2022 and $189 million in 2023, according to MediaRadar, which monitors advertising.
By last year, the sum — including radio and TV commercials, billboards, and print and digital ads — had reached an estimated $201 million, and total spending on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs topped $9 billion, by MediaRadar’s calculations.
Novo Nordisk declined to address those numbers.
Should it be legal to market drugs directly to potential patients? This controversy, which has simmered for decades, has begun receiving renewed attention from both the Trump administration and legislators.
“We are just getting started,” Trump’s secretary of “war,”
Pete Hegseth, said yesterday, adding that the attacks on Iran will escalate,
with “death and destruction all day long.”
So far more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in
Iran, according
to human rights monitors, including 180 children, most of them schoolgirls
aged 7 to 12 years old who were killed when a missile directly hit their
school.
Wars can be morally justifiable if they are necessary to
protect a nation’s people, but Trump has failed to make the case that this war
is necessary. His allegation that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon
has been rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency and much of the
intelligence community.
As I have noted before, the moral purpose of civilized
society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker.
Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the
fittest and most powerful could survive.
Trump is lifting speed limits for boats traveling through sensitive whale habitat
By Frank Carini / ecoRI News columnist
Once they were tagged with the “right” label, their future
instantly dimmed. These marine mammals got their white name because they
floated when killed, making it easier to retrieve their carcasses.
There are less than 400 left, and they are traveling greater
distances to find food, habitat, and mates. We are stressing them out, and
special interests continue to delay efforts to help these leviathans survive.
The North Atlantic right whale is one of the world’s most
endangered large whale species, and it’s all because of us. By the early 1890s,
commercial whalers had hunted this magnificent creature to the brink of
extinction. We can’t live in harmony with the natural world, or with each
other.
Late last year researchers discovered that a North Atlantic right whale sighted
in Massachusetts waters was the same animal reported off Ireland in 2024. It
was called an “extraordinary connection” that showed the whale traveled some
3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
While conducting an aerial survey in November, observers
from the Provincetown, Mass.-based Center for Coastal Studies sighted a North Atlantic
right whale off the coast of Boston. Scientists in the New England
Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life confirmed that
the marine mammal had previously only been seen in Donegal Bay, Ireland, in
July 2024.
There are rare instances of known North Atlantic right
whales from the western Atlantic traveling to the eastern Atlantic and back,
but this appears to be the first documented case of a right whale initially
sighted in the eastern North Atlantic and later sighted in the western North
Atlantic, according to the Center for Coastal Studies and the New England
Aquarium. The 2025 sighting suggests that historical North Atlantic right whale
habitat may still hold value and that right whales continue to search widely
for suitable habitat.
While whaling is no longer a threat, this baleen whale
species has never recovered to its pre-whaling numbers, and human interaction
still presents the greatest danger to their existence.
This Vaccine Stops Bird Flu Before It Reaches the Lungs
By WashU Medicine
Since first appearing in the United States in 2014, H5N1
avian influenza, widely known as bird flu, has steadily expanded its reach.
The virus has spread from wild birds into farm animals and, more
recently, to humans. Since 2022,
more than 70 people in the U.S. have been
infected, including two deaths. Because the virus continues to circulate widely
among animals, scientists warn that it has ongoing opportunities to adapt in
ways that could allow it to spread more easily between people, raising fears of
a future pandemic.
A Nasal Vaccine Designed to Stop Infection Early
To reduce that risk, researchers at Washington University
School of Medicine in St. Louis developed a nasal spray vaccine aimed at
stopping the virus at its point of entry. When tested in hamsters and mice, the
vaccine triggered strong immune responses and successfully prevented infection
after exposure to H5N1.
One major concern with bird flu vaccines is that immunity
from previous seasonal flu infections or vaccinations could weaken their
effectiveness. The research team addressed this issue directly and found that
their nasal vaccine remained highly protective even in animals with prior flu
immunity.
The findings were published today (January 30) in Cell
Reports Medicine.
A new report by the National
Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) finds that there are
just 54 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely
low-income households in Rhode Island.
The report, The
Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes, also reveals a national shortage
of 7.2 million affordable and available rental homes for extremely low-income
renter households – those with incomes at or below the poverty level or 30% of
their area median income, whichever is greater – resulting in just 35
affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter
households nationwide.
That’s a gap of 23,222 affordable and available rental homes
for extremely low-income renters in Rhode Island.
These findings come amidst ongoing attacks on federal
housing resources.
“The annual Gap report reflects what too many Rhode
Islanders are living every day: rents that stretch paychecks beyond their
limits and impossible choices between housing, food, medicine, and other basic
needs,” said Melina Lodge, Executive Director of the Housing Network of Rhode Island.1 “We are still not producing enough homes
affordable to residents with the lowest incomes, leaving families without the
stability they need to thrive. At a time when federal housing resources are
increasingly uncertain, we must recommit to reversing decades of
underinvestment and restrictive land use policies and expand deeply affordable
housing so people can count on a safe, stable place to call home.”
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