McKee FINALLY throws DOT Director Alviti under a RIPTA bus

Too late, Dan

By Will Collette

From RI Current: A section of the Westbound Washington Bridge collapses onto two barges in the Seekonk River after getting torn down by a crane on Jan. 31, 2025. (Screenshot/video obtained by Bill Bartholomew)

Today, RI Department of Transportation Director Peter Alviti finally submitted his resignation.

Alviti was first appointed by former Gov. Gina Raimondo as a patronage gift to the Laborers Union, a big Raimondo backer. The Laborers secured endorsements for Raimondo from most of the building trades that largely offset opposition to Raimondo from state workers' unions.

GoLocal Prov detailed numerous scandals and missteps by Alviti in today's article on Alviti's departure. 

No doubt Gov. Dan McKee hopes Alviti's resignation might lift his falling poll numbers. With the announcement today by RI House Speaker Joe Shekarchi that he will not challenge McKee in the September 8 Democratic Primary, McKee's only serious opponent is former CVS executive Helena Foulkes who has been kicking McKee's butt when it comes to fund-raising.

She was quick to issue this statement about Alviti's exit:

From a news release from her campaign:

In response to RIDOT Director Peter Alviti’s resignation, Helena Buonanno Foulkes released the following statement:

“Director Alviti’s resignation comes two years too late and nearly one month after I released my RIDOT reform plan that highlighted his mismanagement and once again called for his termination. It is obvious that Governor McKee only made this decision because of mounting political pressure,” said Helena. “After holding no one accountable for the Washington Bridge fiasco, bungling the bid process to further delay the bridge’s repair, and hiding safety and inspection reports for over a year, the governor is hoping that playing musical chairs during election season will hide the fact that he has failed the people of Rhode Island. It isn’t going to work.”

Though I am generally skeptical of campaign news releases, I think this statement is an accurate, blunt summary.

Analysis suggests HPV vaccine protects unvaccinated people through herd immunity

Our best hope to eliminate cervical cancer

Laine Bergeson

A new nationwide cohort study from Sweden suggests that widespread human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination could substantially reduce the risk of precancerous lesions even among people who never received the vaccine.

The study, published in The Lancet Public Health, examined rates of high-grade cervical lesions (HSIL+) among more than 850,000 unvaccinated girls and women born from 1985 to 2000 by using national vaccination registries. 

A team led by researchers from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm compared outcomes across cohorts exposed to different HPV vaccination strategies, including largely opportunistic vaccination (when people are offered a vaccine as part of a routine doctor visit or other interaction with the health care system), subsidized vaccination, catch-up vaccination, and school-based vaccination. 

Among unvaccinated women born in 1999 or 2000 and eligible for school-based vaccination programs that attained coverage greater than 80%, HSIL+ incidence was about 50% lower than in unvaccinated women from birth cohorts before vaccination was widespread. 

Trump pulls the US out of the World Health Organization jeopardizing global health initiatives

He says it's about "America First," but HOW does this help America?

Stephanie Soucheray, MA

The United States officially withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO), one year after the Trump administration shared its intention to leave the global agency. 

At that time, the United States was said to provide about 20% of the WHO’s operational budget, but this week WHO officials said the United States has failed to pay membership dues for both 2024 and 2025, leaving the global alliance with a $278 million debt. 

The WHO says withdrawal is not complete until the United States pays its debts. 

“The United States will not be making any payments to the WHO before our withdrawal,” the State Department told NPR in a statement earlier this week. "The cost born by the U.S. taxpayer and U.S. economy after the WHO's failure during the Covid pandemic—and since—has been too high as it is."

The United States is the only country to have withdrawn from the WHO since its founding 1948. During his inauguration last year, Trump said the WHO had gouged the United States, and he blamed the agency for covering up China’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Trump had also tried to leave the WHO during his first presidential term, after the pandemic began, but President Joe Biden reversed that plan on his first day of office in 2020. 

WHO bylaws require nations to give a one-year advance notice of withdrawal and to settle all debts before the exit is complete. 

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?