Trump’s EPA is taking itself out of the regulation business

Trump EPA says it will no longer consider human health in its decisions, just impacts on business

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In the 55 years since its founding under President Richard Nixon, the Environmental Protection Agency has been a regulatory pendulum, swinging between stringent and lax control of air pollution. 

Under Democratic presidents, the agency tends to clamp down on emissions from cars and smokestacks. Under Republicans, it tends to give automakers and the manufacturing sector more flexibility.

When Donald Trump returned to office last year, climate experts expected him to tilt the balance toward industry as he did in his first term, continuing the ping-pong of the last few decades. 

Instead, his EPA is going much farther, attempting to eliminate its own power to govern pollution. The agency is soon expected to release its final proposal to repeal the landmark “endangerment finding,” an Obama-era rule that gave it the authority to regulate the greenhouse gases that warm the earth; at the same time, it will also repeal its rule limiting automotive carbon emissions. 

The agency also confirmed this week that it will no longer quantify the human health benefits of regulating industrial pollution, a change that could justify far more lenient oversight of toxic emissions from things like smokestacks and power plants. 

Administrator Lee Zeldin hits the road today for a “Freedom Means Affordable Cars” tour in Michigan and Ohio, during which he will tout Trump’s efforts to relax environmental rules on gas cars.

Squint hard, MAGA

Hey MAGA gun fans! Surprise! Donald Trump is coming for your guns!

South County Rising meeting on Friday

Environmental Council of Rhode Island calls on Speaker Shekarchi to push back on the anti-conservation and renewable energy narrative

RI House Speaker Joe Shekarchi encourages ECRI to keep up the fight

Steve Ahlquist

At the Environmental Council of Rhode Island (ECRI)’s legislative coffee hour, held annually in the State House Library, Speaker of the House K. Joseph Shekarchi began his remarks with a story about how Representative David Bennett threatened to resign as Chair of the House Environment and Natural Resources Committee. Representative Bennett was resigning, said the Speaker, because he had never passed a significant bill out of his committee. The Speaker assured Bennett that they would “consider every bill on its merits,” and the first bill passed was the historic 2021 Act on Climate.

It wasn’t easy, said the Speaker. The bill was passed during COVID, and everyone was masked. The House was meeting in the Veterans’ Auditorium, and, instead of voting machines, legislators were using iPads.

“It was a very long and lengthy debate, and our iPads were running out of battery life,” said the Speaker. “They wanted to postpone the hearing, and you could see the opposition getting a little bit of momentum.”

The Speaker decided to call the question, which he rarely does, preferring to allow the debate to run its course. Calling the question stops debate and forces a vote. Act on Climate passed.

“That opened up the floodgates to a lot of good legislation, and we’ll continue,” said the Speaker to the ECRI members, supporters, and legislators packed into the library.

“I know things are not satisfactory right now,” continued Speaker Sheakarchi. “Federally, things that are happening are hurting a lot of our environmental initiatives, but we can’t get lost in that. We must remember the progress we have made and continue to make. You need to be active and involved, and push back against the narrative that these programs are the cause of the energy affordability crisis. That is not true.”

The Speaker continued:

“There’s nothing more powerful than the truth. When you hear from people with credibility like Sue Anderbois and Terry Gray, that makes all the difference in the world. We are being bombarded: receiving several hundred emails a day from the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity.¹ It’s a form email. Some of you may have seen them. If not, I’ll be happy to send you a copy. It’s the same narrative: Get rid of all of the conservation programs and get rid of all of the renewable energy programs. There will be a rally at the State House in two weeks. I expect everybody in this room to be at that rally. We need to be heard.

“I can confirm that my colleagues and I care about the environment, and we’ve made progress. Progress doesn’t happen overnight. It happens in stages, as with the Bottle Bill. We did the first part of that. Not an easy bill. Everybody wants a Bottle Bill. I want a bottle bill. How are we going to implement it? Who is it going to cost? Where are these redemption centers going to be? Who’s going to do redemption? We have committed to delivering those answers within less than a year, and we’ll continue with step two, but step one was important. We needed that real data from the people who are actually going to do the redemptions, where they’re going to go, and how we’re going to make it work.

“Don’t give up hope because it’s not instant. I am not a young person, but some young people want instant success, instant answers, and instant results. Legislation is not instant. Big, effective change takes time, and I have a passion for not doing anything for the sake of doing it. I have a passion for doing it when it’s right and getting it right the first time, as best we can. We’re not perfect. No legislation is perfect, and if we waited for perfect, we’d never get anything done. We don’t want perfect to be the enemy of good, and we’ve passed a lot of good legislation. I stand behind that. I run on that. I’m proud of that.

How oysters are impacted by environmental conditions and farming practices

URI oceanography student spends 18 months researching effects on oysters

Neil Nachbar

Eastern oysters from Rome Point Oyster Farm
(Photo courtesy of Jacqueline Rosa)

The Rhode Island aquaculture industry is more robust than ever. The value of aquaculture products was $8,795,493 in 2024 and 89 active aquaculture farms covered 392.5 acres, according to a report by the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council.

Eastern oysters account for approximately 99% of the state’s aquaculture production, the report noted. Jacqueline Rosa, who is pursuing her master’s degree in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, spent 18 months conducting field work on how water quality and farming practices impact these mollusks.

Eastern oysters grow in Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island’s salt ponds. Rosa’s field work was done in the lower west passage of Narragansett Bay, an area that hosts 48 acres of oyster farms.

Testing the waters

To examine the environmental conditions, Rosa deployed two sensors at Wickford Oyster Company’s 4-acre farm in May 2024, one at the surface of the water and one at the bottom of the water column.

Rosa revisited the farm each week to collect water samples from the surface and the bottom. She brought the samples to the Ocean Carbon Laboratory at the Graduate School of Oceanography for analysis.

American Academy of Pediatrics says Bobby Jr.'s vaccine policy goes against "longstanding medical evidence"

Contrary to CDC changes, AAP advises vaccinating kids against 18 diseases

Mary Van Beusekom, MS

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) announced that it will continue to advise routine childhood immunization against 18 diseases rather than follow the greatly pared vaccination schedule released early this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

Just days before, Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine group founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, said it had filed a lawsuit in US District Court accusing the AAP of engaging in “a decades-long racketeering scheme to defraud American families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule.”

Kennedy, who has long claimed that US children receive “too many” vaccines, modeled the CDC’s new vaccination schedule after that of Denmark, drawing criticism from medical experts who say the two countries have different populations and public health needs.

In 2009, Trump and his kids co-signed President Obama statement calling for action on climate change

Donald Trump’s Descent into Climate Chaos 

By Thomas Schueneman

Back in 2009, in the lead-up to COP15 in Copenhagen, a group of concerned business leaders and “liberal luminaries” called for urgent action on climate change in an open letter to then-President Obama published in the New York Times. The letter said in part: 

“If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.” 

Donald Trump and his three adult children were all signatories.

The letter went on to promote the United States as a model for climate leadership and action:

“Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet.”

An Inconvenient Truth

If we didn’t know it then, we do now. Trump’s commitment to anything is inexorably tied to his own base ambitions, malignant narcissism, and infantile ego. 

I can’t say what motivated Trump to align with climate action proponents, but it’s safe to say he didn’t much care about climate change one way or another. 

There was something in it for him, until there wasn’t. 

His political ambitions and golf courses splattered across the globe change all that. It didn’t take long for his professed climate concern to morph into derision. Starting in 2012, he abandoned his firmly held belief (I jest, he has no firmly held beliefs). That’s when he started accusing China of creating the climate change hoax as a means of keeping America down. 

He has held to his hoax-y rhetoric since then. What better way to curry favor with his recalcitrant MAGA cult and attract Big Oil money than call global warming a hoax? An added bonus is owning the libs, what with their calls for emissions reductions and renewable energy. And it isn’t just the libs who Trump trolls with his rapier wit and intellectual framing. 

He chides other nations, claiming that their efforts to secure a sustainable future, however minimal, will be their downfall. 

Here's a blowup of the NY Times ad, showing the Trump family members names as co-signers:

Great news from ICE

America can breathe a sigh of relief now that this one has been busted

Trump duels with the Boss and loses

 

Dried out prune?

Read and weep new Trump disclosure from newly released Epstein files

Hey MAGA - Now do you understand why Trump didn't want the Epstein files released?

Who did it?

When forests disappear, mosquitoes don’t—they adapt, and increasingly, they bite us.

When the trees are gone, they come for you

Frontiers

https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelinodias/

In the rapidly disappearing Atlantic Forest, mosquitoes are adapting to a human-dominated landscape. Scientists found that many species now prefer feeding on people rather than the forest’s diverse wildlife. This behavior dramatically raises the risk of spreading dangerous viruses such as dengue and Zika. The findings reveal how deforestation can quietly reshape disease dynamics. 

Running along Brazil's coastline, the Atlantic Forest supports an extraordinary range of life, including hundreds of species of birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and fishes. Much of that richness has been lost. Human development has reduced the forest to roughly one third of its original size. As people move deeper into once intact habitats, wildlife is pushed out, and mosquitoes that once fed on many different animals appear to be shifting their attention toward humans, according to a study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

"Here we show that the mosquito species we captured in remnants of the Atlantic Forest have a clear preference for feeding on humans," said senior author Dr. Jeronimo Alencar, a biologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro.

"This is crucial because, in a environment like the Atlantic Forest with a great diversity of potential vertebrate hosts, a preference for humans significantly enhances the risk of pathogen transmission," added co-author Dr. Sergio Machado, a microbiology and immunology researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Is a Vegan Diet Safe for Kids?

Largest Ever Study Weighs Benefits Against Risks

By Taylor & Francis Group

A major new meta-analysis finds that vegetarian and vegan diets can support healthy growth in children when they are carefully planned and include appropriate supplements. The research represents the most comprehensive evaluation so far of plant-based eating patterns in young people.

Scientists from Italy, the USA, and Australia reviewed data from more than 48,000 children and adolescents around the world who followed different types of diets. They assessed growth, overall health, and nutritional adequacy, concluding that vegetarian and vegan diets can provide many essential nutrients and support normal development. However, the analysis also shows that deficiencies can occur if certain nutrients are not supplied through fortified foods or supplements.

The peer-reviewed findings, published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, indicate that plant-based diets may also be linked to added health advantages for children. These include more favorable indicators of cardiovascular health when compared with omnivorous diets that contain meat, fish, and other animal-derived foods.

This meta-analysis draws on evidence from 59 studies conducted across 18 countries, focusing on children and adolescents under the age of 18. It compared lacto-ovo-vegetarian (which include dairy products and eggs, but exclude meat, fish, and poultry) and vegan diets (which exclude all animal-derived foods) with omnivorous diets. In total, the analysis included data from 7,280 lacto-ovo-vegetarians, 1,289 vegans, and 40,059 omnivores, covering a wide range of nutritional and health outcomes.

The results show that vegetarian children generally consumed higher amounts of fiber, iron, folate, vitamin C, and magnesium than those eating omnivorous diets. At the same time, they tended to have lower intakes of total energy, protein, fat, vitamin B1,2 and zinc. Although fewer studies focused specifically on vegan children, the available evidence revealed similar nutritional patterns.

Groundhogs are lousy forecasters but valuable animal engineers – and an important food source

Over and over again, people take weather advice from overgrown rodent

Steven Sullivan, Miami University

Charlestown groundhog. Photo by Will Collette

Whether you call him groundhog, woodchuck, whistle-pig or use the full genus and species name, Marmota monax, the nation’s premiere animal weather forecaster has been making headlines as Punxsutawney Phil for decades.

The largest ground squirrel in its range, groundhogs like Phil are found throughout the midwestern United States, most of Canada and into southern Alaska. M. monax is the most widespread marmot, while the Vancouver Island marmot (M. vancouverensis) is found only on one island in British Columbia.

In total, there are 15 species in the genus Marmota, found around the world from as far south as the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico and the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain, north to regions of Siberia and Alaska so dark and cold that the marmots must hibernate for up to nine months of the year.

Hibernating to escape tough times

Photo by Will Collette

Marmots, including all the actors who have played Phil over the years, are the largest “true” hibernators: animals that enter a torpor that reduces their biological functions to a level closer to dead than alive.

Because this phenomenon is so interesting, scientists pay attention to all aspects of marmot anatomy and physiology. Basic observational science like this is important to advance our understanding of the world, and it sometimes leads to discoveries that improve human lives. Marmot studies are the foundation for experiments to address obesity, cardiovascular disease, mpox, stress, hepatitis and liver cancer, and they may inform work on osteoporosis and organ transplantation.

Aging seems to nearly stop during hibernation, as the marmot heart rate drops from nearly 200 beats per minute when active to about nine during hibernation. Similarly, their active body temperature can be 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) – about the same as a dog or cat – but plummet to 41 F (5 C) when hibernating. Humans, in comparison, become hypothermic at a core temperature of 95 F (35 C).