Connect with us

Science

Senate Confirms Lee Zeldin to Head E.P.A.

Published

on

Senate Confirms Lee Zeldin to Head E.P.A.

The Senate on Wednesday voted to confirm Lee Zeldin to run the Environmental Protection Agency, where he will be charged with executing President Trump’s orders to dismantle major environmental regulations, and possibly parts of the 55-year-old agency itself.

The Senate voted 56 to 42 to confirm Mr. Zeldin, a former House member with little experience in environmental regulation. He is expected to work to erase rules to fight climate change and chemical pollution, while shutting down programs designed to help poor and minority communities that are disproportionately affected by pollution.

In his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 16, Mr. Zeldin told lawmakers that he would “enthusiastically uphold” the agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment, and that he grasped the basic science of climate change.

“I strongly believe we have a moral responsibility to be good stewards of our environment for generations to come,” he said.

But Mr. Zeldin has also been directed to dismantle the largest climate rule ever enacted by the federal government. The rule, finalized last year, would cut tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases, the nation’s largest source of planet-warming pollution, by compelling automakers to increase sales of hybrid and all-electric vehicles.

Advertisement

Mr. Trump incorrectly refers to the rule as the “EV mandate”; the rule does not ban gas-powered vehicles.

“Lee Zeldin will continue President Trump’s mission to roll back punishing, political regulations,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, a member of the Republican leadership, on the Senate floor ahead of the confirmation vote.

But at his confirmation hearing, Mr. Zeldin would not say how he intends to handle the tailpipe regulation, telling senators, “I am not allowed to prejudge the outcomes going into rule-making.”

However, Sean Duffy, the new transportation secretary, released a memo just hours after he was confirmed announcing plans to weaken auto fuel economy standards, which are a companion to the E.P.A. emissions limits. Under the Biden administration, the pair of rules worked in tandem to reduce pollution and were both aimed at the same goal of ensuring that more than half of new passenger vehicles sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents large oil companies, sought the elimination of both rules.

Advertisement

In the weeks since Mr. Trump won the presidential election, auto companies asked him to maintain some form of the Biden rules although with some adjustments, such as lowered penalties for noncompliance. While they have chafed at the requirements to rapidly increase sales of electric vehicles, automakers have also invested billions to transition to E.V.s.

Automakers fear that if the rules are erased, they could be undercut by companies selling cheaper, gas-powered cars. They are also concerned that it could hurt American competitiveness with China, home to the world’s largest E.V. manufacturer, and hurt an industry that is a backbone of American manufacturing and employs 1.1 million people.

But John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents manufacturers of nearly all the new vehicles sold in the United States, said on Wednesday, “It’s reasonable for the new leadership at the Transportation Department to review current fuel economy standards.”

Drew Kodjak, an expert in vehicle technology and policy who served in the Biden White House pointed out that revising the tailpipe emissions limits requires a legal process that takes years.

Additionally, the E.P.A. under Mr. Zeldin is also expected to try to revoke California’s legal authority to set tailpipe limits that are stricter than the national standard. The state now requires that all new cars sold there must be zero-emissions by 2035 and more than a dozen other states have adopted the same rule.

Advertisement

Also on Tuesday, Jim Payne, the E.P.A.’s acting administrator, announced that all members of two of the agency’s major scientific advisory panels, the Scientific Advisory Board and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, will be dismissed, though members will be allowed to reapply.

The move has echoes of steps taken in both the previous Trump administration and the Biden administration, as the role of scientists in shaping environmental policy became a political target. During the first Trump administration, in a then-unprecedented move, several academic scientists were dismissed from another E.P.A. panel, the Board of Science Counselors, and from the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee. The Trump administration said that any scientist on those panels whose research received funding by E.P.A. grants could not weigh in objectively on E.P.A. regulations. The first Trump administration also disbanded another scientific board, the Particulate Matter Review Panel.

In some cases, the administration replaced those scientists with representatives of polluting industries that the E.P.A. regulates. At the beginning of the Biden administration, E.P.A. administrator Michael S. Regan fired members of the Scientific Integrity Board and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and appointed new advisers.

Joseph Arvai, an oceanographer and psychologist who served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory board from 2011 to 2017 and again from 2021 until he was fired on Tuesday, said that he does not intend to reapply for the position.

He recalled being fired along with other scientists by the first Trump administration. “In 2017, it felt like there was no plan, it was just intended to freak people out,” he said. “Now it feels like there’s a plan.”

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Science

‘The Interview’: Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World

Published

on

‘The Interview’: Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World

The science journalist and author Ed Yong likes to joke that during the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020, the impact and reach of his reporting for The Atlantic turned him into “a character in the season of ‘Pandemic.’” Indeed, his Covid journalism — which documented the earliest stages of the pandemic and made him one of the first chroniclers of long Covid — established Yong as a key and trusted public interpreter of the illness and its many ripples. It also won him a Pulitzer Prize. (Additionally, Yong’s 2022 book about animal perception, “An Immense World,” became a best seller. A young reader’s edition will be published on May 13.)

But despite having achieved a level of success and attention that most writers can only dream of, Yong’s immersion in Covid left him feeling as utterly depleted as many of the health care professionals and patients he was covering. So much so that in 2023, he decided to leave his prestigious perch at The Atlantic. Since then, in addition to working on a new book, he has found a measure of salvation, even transcendence, in birding, a pastime that he, like so many others, took up in the wake of those grim days of social distancing and time stuck inside.

So as we approach the fifth anniversary of the U.S. pandemic lockdowns, I wanted to talk with Yong about his Covid lows, his hopeful response to those struggles and his perspective on the lessons we learned — or maybe more accurate, didn’t learn from that strange and troubling time.

I want to start with a subject that a lot of people can relate to: burnout. How did you realize that you had given all that you had to give? I remember talking to public-health experts for a story and hearing people say that they were feeling depressed, anxious, they couldn’t sleep, and thinking, Man, that feels very familiar. That was in June of 2020. By the middle of 2023, I realized that I was doing my best work at severe cost to all of the other parts of myself. I actually dislike the word “burnout.” It creates this image that the person in question did their job, the job was really hard and after a while they couldn’t stand how hard it was and they stopped doing it. Which I don’t think is correct. A lot of the health care workers I spoke to said that it wasn’t that they couldn’t handle doing their job. It was that they couldn’t handle not being able to do their job. They saw all of the institutional and systemic factors that prevented them from providing the care that they wanted to provide. For them, it was more about this idea of moral injury, this massive gulf between what you want the world to be and what you see happening around you. At some point that becomes intolerable. I think that’s much closer to my experience of pandemic journalism too.

Do you have any answers for how to contextualize your feelings in a world where people are struggling for subsistence or with the threat of violence? I often think, when I’ll be low, What right do I have to complain? I’m sure you must have had similar thoughts. This is a great point because you don’t even have to go to that extreme of folks who are struggling to get by, folks who are in the middle of war zones. Let’s just talk about the people whose stories I’m trying to tell. What right do I have to say, “I have listened to your stories, and I’m trying to write about them, and that, for me, is too hard”? Doesn’t that sound a little bit pathetic?

Advertisement

There is something absurd about it. One hundred percent there is.

And yet, the feelings are real. Right. I’ve had this conversation with friends and with my therapist a lot. I think that if we as journalists do our job correctly, what we end up doing is extending as much empathy as we can to the people we are writing about, so that we can correctly characterize and convey their experiences to the world. Empathy really does mean, for me, spending days listening to the worst moments of dozens of people’s lives, having them run through my head again and again so that I can turn them into something that might shift the needle in someone who has never thought about those experiences. I’m sitting here still questioning myself about whether it’s ridiculous to say that that’s hard, but what I can tell you is that I know it’s hard because I felt it. I think that’s enough.

You’ve been clear in saying that Covid has not gone away. You ask people to wear masks at your events. But that attitude is not necessarily where the rest of the world is. How do you think about continuing to take precautions and advising others to do so when it feels as if society has moved on? I do it for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, I have learned that I enjoy not being sick. I know that the cost of long Covid is real and substantial, and I don’t want to run that risk lightly. I also know that I have many friends and people I’m close to who are immunocompromised. So for the sake of the people around me, I also don’t want to get sick. When I do events, I wear a mask for those reasons, and because I know that every time I do a talk, while the vast majority of people in the audience have probably moved on, there are going to be other people who haven’t. I think it makes a huge difference to them to have the person at the front of the stage wear a mask. It tells them, It’s not weird. So I do it for that reason, too. In terms of holding this line at a point when a large swath of society has moved on, I have written a lot about the panic-neglect cycle.

What’s that? The idea is, a crisis happens. Let’s say a new epidemic. Attention and resources flow toward that, people take it seriously, freak out, and then once the problem abates, so, too, does everything else. The resources dwindle, the attention goes away and we lapse into the same level of unpreparedness that led to the panic in the first place. This is real. I’ve seen it through my reporting. I’ve seen it for Ebola, for Covid — you name it.

Bird flu? Sure, why not? All of which is to say, for all of those reasons, I don’t feel self-conscious about still being cautious at a time when most people aren’t. I personally don’t want to lapse into the neglect phase, because I don’t think it’s warranted.

Advertisement

This has been blaring in the back of my mind the whole time we’ve been talking: How worried are you about a bird-flu pandemic? I try not to answer questions on things I haven’t specifically reported on because it is hard to make sense of all this. I didn’t come to these views on Covid lightly. So, specifically how worried am I about bird flu? On a scale of 1 to 10? I don’t know.

I’ll rephrase the question: How worried should I be about bird flu? That’s an even harder question. What I will say is that it is a threat that we should absolutely take seriously. In all likelihood the next pandemic will be a flu one, whether it’s H5N1 or something else. So the specifics of my level of worry about this particular pathogen are subsumed in this ambience of worry about everything. We live in a world where new viruses will have an ever easier time of jumping into us, and where the infrastructure of our societies continues to be poorly suited to handling those threats. If you think about what happened with Covid, why did the U.S. fare so badly? There’s all of these things that people rarely think of in terms of pandemic preparedness: It’s social stuff and, crucially, a lack of trust in government and one another that turns a pandemic into a true disaster. All of those problems are still with us, and, I would argue, are worse than they were in early 2020. The way that it’s often framed is: “Tell me, on a scale of 1 to 10, how worried you are that H5N1 is going to go pandemic.” I think the more important question is, if it does, how screwed are we? And the answer is: really.

So you were dealing with the feelings we talked about earlier, and you got to a point where you decided your life had to change. One of the things that then changed your life was birding. How did you find it? In the spring of 2023, just before I left The Atlantic, I moved to Oakland from D.C., and one thing that happened was I started paying attention to the birds around me. They were omnipresent in a way they weren’t before. On my first day in my new house, there was an Anna’s hummingbird in the garden. I would go for walks and hear birdsong: the melodious sound of a Pacific wren in a nearby redwood forest. I bought a pair of binoculars and would take it with me on neighborhood walks or hikes. I would have Merlin while I was working and look up occasionally and go: “Oh, that’s interesting. It’s an oak titmouse. I’ve never seen one before.” To me, the difference between being casually bird-curious and being an actual birder is making a specific effort to go and look at birds.

Going from passive to active. Exactly. So early September of 2023 was when I made my first trip to a local wetland to specifically look at birds and nothing else. That was, honestly, a life-changing moment.

Can you put me back in that moment? I went to a place called Arrowhead Marsh. It’s this relatively small stretch of wetland that has a boardwalk sticking out into this little chunk of bay, and on that day, I saw all these creatures. I’ve been writing about animals since I’ve been writing about anything, but a lot of my knowledge of the natural world, if you want to be reductive, it’s just trivia. Whereas the knowledge I gained from birding, that started on that boardwalk, feels rooted in the lives of the birds themselves in time and space. I look at the birds, and I see how they behave. Small things that I would never have noticed if I was just reading scientific publications. Those two halves, the academic side and the more lived knowledge, beautifully interact with each other. And the thing that I felt palpably at that place on that day, that I still do every time I go birding, is this incredible sense of being present.

Advertisement

When you’re watching birds — and this could apply to the natural world writ large — there is so much going on that is basically beyond our comprehension. Because of our sensory capabilities as human beings, we are condemned to having only an ankle-deep understanding of what it is to be alive on Earth. To me, that’s humbling and mind-blowing. What do you think? I fully agree. I mean, that is a beautiful précis of basically my entire body of work.

Nailed it! [Laughs.] I can go home now, right? All of it is about the idea that much of the world is hidden from us, that we don’t perceive it and don’t understand it, and that it is worth understanding and it is necessary to understand. I’m now working on Book 3, and I see them as a trilogy that all touch on this theme. “I Contain Multitudes,” the first book, was about the microbes that live inside our bodies and those of other animals, and the enormous influence they play in our lives. “An Immense World” is about how other creatures perceive things that we miss, and about how each of us is perceiving only a thin sliver of the fullness of reality, which is a wonderfully humbling concept. The book that I’m currently working on takes those themes and runs with them. The book is called “The Infinite Extent,” and it is about life at different scales. It is about what it is like to be the size of a blue whale or the size of a bacterium, to live for millennia like a bristlecone pine, or for just a few hours like a mayfly. It’s about these extremes of experience and existence.

I have a curmudgeonly question. Developing an awareness of the magic that’s happening all around us at any given moment, and understanding that there’s this vast cosmic dance playing out — in the abstract, I can see how internalizing those perspectives might change one’s perspective. Sometimes I’m able to get to that place. But the way I’m picturing it in my head is like, I blow up a beautiful balloon. I’m carrying that balloon around and looking up at the balloon: What a beautiful balloon I’m carrying with me. Then I get to the office, and the balloon pops on the halogen light, and I’m back in the [expletive]. Did your understanding of the bigger existential stuff you were writing about actually help you in the moments when you were struggling? I can say that thinking about these ideas constantly really helped me. It felt like a salve to all of that moral injury and despair that I was feeling. It doesn’t cure it, but it fills my life with wonder and joy, and that acts as a buffer against all the other existential dread and fear that we have to grapple with. One thing I’ve said about science as a field is that it is one of the only areas of human endeavor that take us out of ourselves. We exist at a time when we are being crunched ever inward. Whether it’s through a novel virus, or frayed social connections, or algorithms that feed us more of what we already were seeking out. There is a kind of implosive effect of the modern world, and the science and nature writing that I’m prioritizing, and the birding that I do, are all counters to that. They are a way of radiating your attention outward. I’m still wrestling with the curmudgeonly question that you asked. Like, does any of that matter? Sometimes when I go out and look at birds, there’s a voice in my head that says, Is this really the best thing you could be doing with your time?

It’s a dropout solution. Totally, because often people talk about birding as escapism, and there’s something about the word “escapism” that has a slight negative connotation. I had a conversation with a good friend about this, and what she said was, “I think it’s more important than ever to be out in the world.” I agree with that. We need to replenish ourselves, and it matters, because for those of us who care about biodiversity and diversity and the environment and equality, we need to be connected to the thing that we are fighting for. And if we don’t do that, then the work, the fights, become abstract.

So, putting work aside, one could reasonably feel a sense of moral injury just as a result of living in the world right now. We can change our work situation, or at least try, but changing the bigger problems is beyond our scope. Any advice for how to get through that feeling? A nice softball question! There are three ideas that come to mind. One is a quote from the amazing Mariame Kaba, who says, “Hope is a discipline.” She argues that hope is not this nebulous, airy thing. It is a practice that you cultivate through active effort. I think of a line by the great and late global-health advocate Paul Farmer, who said that he “fought the long defeat.” By which he meant that he was often swimming against forces that were extremely powerful, and he knew that he was going to suffer defeats and setbacks, and that he was going to fight nonetheless. Then the third one is an idea called the Stockdale paradox, which was named after Vice Adm. James Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war. When he was finally released, after a long time in captivity, he was asked how he managed to survive what he endured, and he talked about how he made it because he was able to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in his head at the same time. One was the full and brutal realization of his situation, combined with the indomitable hope that things could get better. These three ideas anchor me in these moments when it feels like the gulf between what we hope the world should be and what it actually is seems vast and growing. That gulf is agonizingly difficult to bear, but we bear it nonetheless.

Advertisement

I’d like to wrench the conversation away from heavier topics. Tell me a cool scientific fact that you learned while you were researching your next book. Something that gave you delight. You know, I’m writing a section of the book that is about hummingbirds. The fact that hummingbirds have iridescent colors that are especially vivid at certain angles. The Anna’s hummingbird is a great example of that. In some angles it looks like this vivid capital-“M” magenta jewel. Then it might turn its head and look black and dark. Those colors are not inherent to the feathers themselves. They occur because the feathers have rows of tiny disc-shaped structures that are arranged perfectly at the nanoscale. The light they reflect interferes with and amplifies each other specifically in red wavelengths, and specifically at certain angles. I think about all that I’ve learned through scientific papers and talking with scientists, but I also know the things I’ve learned from watching hummingbirds as a birder. They are small bundles of sass and fury, and I love them for that. This is sort of what I meant when I said that my world now is this mix of the academic and the experiential. It’s all these sides of nature colliding in every single experience — and it’s wonderful.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or The New York Times Audio app.

Director of photography (video): Aaron Katter

Continue Reading

Science

A Boneyard Along the Thames River Reveals London’s Ancient Burials

Published

on

A Boneyard Along the Thames River Reveals London’s Ancient Burials

The banks of the Thames River have hosted human settlements for thousands of years, from Neolithic huts to the soaring skyscrapers of London. Evidence of bygone civilizations has been steadily deposited on the river’s muddy bottom for modern archaeologists to mine.

Now, researchers in London have dated dozens of bones dredged from the river, creating a comprehensive database that has dispelled longstanding theories about why the river came to serve as the final resting place for so many people. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity.

“It’s really fabulous, actually, in lots of different ways,” said Thomas Booth, an expert in ancient genomics at the Francis Crick Institute in London who was not involved in the project. Dr. Booth said it was “by far the most comprehensive effort” to date the human remains found in the Thames.

The river’s mud, which lacks oxygen, is a sealant that helps preserve remains. (If oxygen is present, bones decompose much faster.) And because there is so much activity on the Thames, its mud is constantly yielding historical treasures. In 2018, workers building a new sewage tunnel along the riverbank discovered an intact 500-year-old skeleton with leather boots still on its feet.

For the new study, researchers dated bones by measuring the amount of a carbon isotope in each one. This method, known as radiocarbon dating, had previously been used to determine the age of 19 samples. This time, the researchers tested 28 river samples — all from skulls — that had never been dated before. They also tested two skulls from a decades-old investigation to see if the results still held up (they did).

Advertisement

The researchers also included some samples that had been found by “mudlarks,” amateur archaeologists who are deputized by London officials to scour the Thames. (It’s a popular hobby; some 10,000 people are on the mudlark waiting list.)

In all, the researchers compiled 61 dated samples in their database. About 200 other samples from the river have not yet been dated, they said.

“It’s the largest assemblage of its nature in Britain,” said Nichola Arthur, an author of the study and an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum in London, which contributed the 28 new samples.

The Romans settled London (then known as Londinium) shortly after conquering Britain in 43 A.D. Remarkably, traces of the Roman settlement still remain, such as a basilica just discovered under the city’s financial district.

But humans lived along the river long before that.

Advertisement

“There were people settled here nearly 4,000 years ago,” said Heather Bonney, another archaeologist at the Natural History Museum and author on the new paper.

Half of the new samples came from either the Bronze or Iron Age, which stretched from 2300 B.C. to the arrival of the Romans, with a notable cluster appearing amid the transition between the two periods. This led them to conclude that the bodies had been placed in the river intentionally, contrary to previous theories arguing that they had been moved by powerful tides.

The study also sheds light on archaeology’s “missing dead” conundrum, referring to a dearth of evidence about the funerary practices of many ancient societies. If water burials were as prevalent as the Thames findings suggest, the rivers of Europe could be doing double-duty as prehistoric graveyards.

“Part of the reason why the dead are invisible in this period is that a lot of them are being deposited in rivers or other watery places,” Dr. Booth said.

As far as other watery places, bogs have been an especially rich source for archaeologists, since their acidic waters allow for an astonishing, mummy-like level of preservation. Britain’s most famous bog body is the Lindow Man, who was discovered in 1984 and is thought to have been the victim of a violent death around the time of the Romans’ arrival. None of the Thames bones have achieved his level of fame.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Science

Video Shows a Rare ‘Doomsday’ Fish Off the Coast of Mexico

Published

on

Video Shows a Rare ‘Doomsday’ Fish Off the Coast of Mexico

The elusive oarfish, a creature nicknamed the “doomsday fish” because of its place in folklore as a precursor to disaster, was captured on video this month after it was seen in shallow water in Baja California Sur, along Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

A group of people who were visiting the area spotted the fish swimming near a beach on Feb. 9.

Oarfish have an eel-like slender body and gaping mouth, but the sea-monster-like creatures have been rarely seen by people. As of August, only 20 oarfish had been recorded after they washed up along the coast of California since 1901, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, though one was seen in California as recently as November.

In Japanese mythology, oarfish are viewed as harbingers of doom, signaling impending earthquakes. But researchers in Japan debunked any significant link in a paper published in 2019.

Continue Reading

Trending