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Wildlife groups express alarm at plan to ‘streamline’ UK environmental rules

Government wants to spur economic growth and drive housebuilding but charities say nature should be priorityWildlife groups have expressed alarm after ministers promised a radically “streamlined” approach to UK environmental regulation intended to drive economic growth and speed up new housing, as well as major projects such as airports.While officials said the plans should boost nature conservation overall, the removal of what one called “bat by bat” decisions, a reference to the £100m bat shelter constructed for part of HS2, could water down individual protections. Continue reading...

Wildlife groups have expressed alarm after ministers promised a radically “streamlined” approach to UK environmental regulation intended to drive economic growth and speed up new housing, as well as major projects such as airports.While officials said the plans should boost nature conservation overall, the removal of what one called “bat by bat” decisions, a reference to the £100m bat shelter constructed for part of HS2, could water down individual protections.The new regime is based on a report commissioned in the autumn by Steve Reed, the environment secretary. Led by Dan Corry, a No 10 adviser under Gordon Brown, it sets out 29 recommendations, nine of which are being immediately adopted.The most radical is that major projects should only have to deal with a single “lead regulator”, which would be responsible for ensuring environmental decisions happen at speed. This would not be a new body but one of the existing quangos developers already deal with such as the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Forestry Commission.Other recommendations being adopted include a streamlining of environmental permits and guidance, intended to assist “sensible and risk-based” decisions; a single digital portal for such permissions; and a new “infrastructure board” in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), intended to help projects clear barriers.Reed said the intention was to “boost economic growth and unleash an era of building, while also supporting nature to recover”. However, some nature groups expressed concern that the former would overshadow the latter, with ministers visibly pushing against protection that could hold up new housing or big projects.Joan Edwards, the head of policy at the Wildlife Trusts, said: “Slashing red tape won’t work for this government any more than it worked for the last because protecting wildlife and wild places is essential to achieving truly sustainable growth.“We don’t need more short-term sugar-rush economics – we need housebuilding which supports healthy communities and which is built on a foundation of nature’s recovery.”Beccy Speight, the chief executive of the RSBP, said the bird charity would support changes that could help natural recovery and would “thoroughly review” Corry’s proposals.She added: “However, any changes must prioritise nature, ensuring that protected areas are shielded from harmful development that could cause irreversible damage. Reassurances alone are not enough.”Kit Stoner, the chief executive of the Bat Conservation Trust, said: “The secretary of state talks about a commonsense approach to better regulation; we would urge him to work with us to take an evidence-based approach. Without this, the cutting of corners is likely to accelerate nature and economic decline.”The 64-page review by Corry aims to end what one official called the current “merry-go-round” of regulators, replacing it with a streamlined approach based on outcomes, rather than one that was “too risk-averse and focused on process”.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionProtecting nature, such as the Bechstein’s bats shielded by the HS2 tunnel in Buckinghamshire or the fish whose fate could delay the construction of the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant in Somerset, was important, it said.“But in mitigating our impacts, we shouldn’t be rigidly protecting everything exactly as it is, at any cost. Our approach must also make ample space for innovation, development and growth.”Corry wrote that he would expect environmental groups to be “nervous” about whether the new focus and parallel plans to give regulators more discretion, could mean nature suffered.He added: “But everything I have heard and learned during this review suggests that the current system does not work as well as it could for nature and the environment, let alone for growth.”Officials acknowledge that this is very likely to mean a less stringent policy for specific protection, particularly around distinct major projects, with this “focus on proportionality” meaning something such as the bat tunnel would be unlikely to happen again.There are, however, no plans to amend or scrap wider habitats regulations, introduced under EU laws and blamed by previous governments for creating unnecessary red tape.Reed said: “Nature and the economy have both been in decline for too long. That changes today. I am rewiring Defra and its arms-length bodies to boost economic growth and unleash an era of building while also supporting nature to recover.”

Australians want nature protected. These 3 environmental problems should be top of the next government’s to-do list

Three experts consider what’s required to protect and conserve Australia’s natural wonders, from fighting invaders to stopping habitat loss and saving species.

Christina ZdenekAustralia is a place of great natural beauty, home to many species found nowhere else on Earth. But it’s also particularly vulnerable to introduced animals, diseases and weeds. Habitat destruction, pollution and climate change make matters worse. To conserve what’s special, we need far greater care. Unfortunately, successive federal governments have failed to protect nature. Australia now has more than 2,000 threatened species and “ecological communities” – groups of native species that live together and interact. This threatened list is growing at an alarming rate. The Albanese government came to power in 2022 promising to reform the nation’s nature laws, following a scathing review of the laws. But it has failed to do so. If re-elected, Labor has vowed to complete its reforms and introduce a federal Environment Protection Agency, in some other form. The Coalition has not made such a commitment. Instead, it refers to “genuine conservation”, balancing the environment and the economy. They’ve also promised to cut “green tape” for industry. But scientific evidence suggests much more is required to protect Australia’s natural wonders. Fighting invaders Labor has made a welcome commitment of more than A$100 million to counter “highly pathogenic avian influenza”. This virulent strain of bird flu is likely to kill millions of native birds and other wildlife. The government also provided much-needed funding for a network of safe havens for threatened mammals. These safe-havens exclude cats, foxes and other invasive species. But much more needs to be done. Funding is urgently needed to eradicate red imported fire ants, before eradication becomes impossible. Other election commitments to look for include: increased biosecurity funding, to prevent new incursions long-term investment in eradicating major pests and weeds from key sites support for research into new tools to control invasive species such as feral cats, for which no broad-scale solution is currently possible no reversal or weakening of policies aimed at curbing invasive pests such as feral horses in national parks new laws to ensure threat abatement plans must be implemented adequate funds to manage invasive species across the expanded protected areas system to meet the key global commitment to nature conservation national coordination and leadership to stop the indiscriminate use of poisons that can spread through ecosystems and food-chains, killing non-target animals such as owls, quolls, Tasmanian devils, reptiles and frogs. Stopping land clearing and habitat destruction The states are largely responsible for controlling land clearing. But when land clearing affects “matters of national environmental significance” such as a nationally listed threatened species or ecological community, it becomes a federal matter. Such proposals are supposed to be referred to the federal environment minister for assessment under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. But most habitat destruction is never referred. And if it is, it’s mostly deemed “not a controlled action”. That means no further consideration is required and the development can proceed. Only about 1.5% of the hundreds of thousands of hectares of land cleared in Australia every year is fully assessed under the EPBC Act. This means our threatened species and ecological communities are suffering a “death by a thousand cuts”. How do we fix this? A starting point is to introduce “national environmental standards” of the kind envisaged in the 2020 review of the EPBC Act by Professor Graeme Samuel. A strong Environment Protection Agency could ensure impacts on biodiversity are appropriately assessed and accounted for. Habitat destruction at Lee Point, Darwin. Martine Maron Protecting threatened species For Australia to turn around its extinction crisis, prospective elected representatives and governments must firmly commit to the following actions. Stronger environmental law and enforcement is essential for tackling biodiveristy decline and extinction. This should include what’s known as a “climate trigger”, which means any proposal likely to produce a significant amount of greenhouse gases would have to be assessed under the EPBC Act. This is necessary because climate change is among the greatest threats to biodiversity. But the federal environment minister is currently not legally bound to consider – or authorised to refuse – project proposals based on their greenhouse gas emissions. In an attempt to pass the EPBC reforms in the Senate last year, the Greens agreed to postpone their demand for a climate trigger. Key threats to species, including habitat destruction, invasive species, climate change, and pollution, must be prevented or reduced. Aligning government policies and priorities to ensure environmental goals aren’t undermined by economic and development interests is essential. A large increase in environmental spending – to at least 1% of the federal budget – is vital. It would ensure sufficient support for conservation progress and meeting legal requirements of the EPBC Act, including listing threatened species and designing and implementing recovery plans when required. Show nature the money! Neither major party has committed to substantial increases in environmental spending in line with what experts suggest is urgently needed. Without such increased investment Australia’s conservation record will almost certainly continue to deteriorate. The loss of nature hurts us all. For example, most invasive species not only affect biodiversity; they have major economic costs to productivity. Whoever forms Australia’s next government, we urge elected leaders to act on the wishes of 96% of surveyed Australians calling for more action to conserve nature. Read more: Protecting salmon farming at the expense of the environment – another step backwards for Australia’s nature laws Euan Ritchie receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Department of Energy, Environment, and Climate Action. Euan is a Councillor within the Biodiversity Council, a member of the Ecological Society of Australia and the Australian Mammal Society, and President of the Australian Mammal Society.John Woinarski is a Professor at Charles Darwin University, a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, co-chair of the IUCN Australasian Marsupials and Monotremes Specialist group, a councillor with the Biodiversity Council, and a member of the science advisory committee of Zoos Victoria and Invertebrates Australia. He has received funding from the Australian government to contribute to the management of feral cats and foxes.Martine Maron has received funding from various sources including the Australian Research Council, the Queensland Department of Environment and Science, and the federal government's National Environmental Science Program, and has advised both state and federal government on conservation policy. She is a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, a director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, a councillor with the Biodiversity Council, and leads the IUCN's thematic group on Impact Mitigation and Ecological Compensation under the Commission on Ecosystem Management.

As Happened in Texas, Ignoring EPA Science Will Allow Pollution and Cancer to Fester

Trump administration plans to destroy EPA science will leave the air we breathe and the water we drink more polluted

As Happened in Texas, Ignoring EPA Science Will Allow Pollution and Cancer to FesterTrump administration plans to destroy EPA science will leave the air we breathe and the water we drink more pollutedBy Jennifer Sass Cows graze near the Oak Grove Power Plant in Robertson County, Texas, subject to EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) rules to reduce carbon emissions and mercury pollution under the Biden administration. Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesI’ve spent my scientific career asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set stronger, lawful public-health protections from toxic chemicals. I do not always agree with EPA’s final decisions, but I respect the scientific process and am always grateful for the agency’s scientists—our public brain trust.In one of the most dangerous acts against facts and science, the Trump administration announced in March that it will shutter the EPA’s independent research office. This will cut more than 1,000 scientists and technical experts who help the agency determine if, for example, a chemical poses a cancer risk, or a factory is polluting a nearby river. At the same time, Trump’s EPA has installed former oil and chemical industry lobbyists to write the rules to regulate those industries.There’s a lot of empty talk about making us healthy coming from this administration. Future generations will be even worse off.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.What is left unsaid by the Trump EPA is this: eliminating scientists from the EPA is kneecapping environmental safeguards. Every major environmental statute—the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Superfund law governing cleanup requirements—relies on EPA scientists to calculate how hazardous chemicals are, how people and wildlife may be exposed and what health and ecological harms may occur. Questions critical to environmental and community protections are researched, such as: Will exposure to this chemical in my workplace increase my risk of breast cancer? Is the air quality from power plant emissions safe for the neighboring community? What is an acceptable standard for PFAS forever chemicals in our drinking water?A drone view of the Sulphur Bank mercury mine Superfund site in Clearlake Oaks, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024.Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty ImagesInstead, the Trump team is yet again swinging its chainsaw, this time against independent science to favor polluting industries. Consequent to gutting scientific inquiries by the government and decimating academic scientific research, only one type of scientific research will be available for setting environmental standards: polluter research. And that’s trouble. The public is right to distrust polluter-sponsored science; see “tobacco science” and the myth of safe nuclear waste for starters.Just ask Texas. The state of Texas’s vigorous defense of ethylene oxide, a well-known carcinogen, provides an ongoing example of the perils to public health from science done by a polluting industry with a financial interest in the outcome and the support of a state government hell-bent on rewriting scientific facts about a cancer-causing chemical.In 2016, after nearly 10 years of research and analysis, the EPA determined ethylene oxide, a chemical widely used in facilities in Texas and Louisiana to sterilize medical equipment, was linked to cancer—with a 30 times greater risk than the EPA had previously found. EPA’s new risk evaluation included a study of over 300 breast cancer cases in women working with the chemical and adjusted for added risks where children may be exposed.EPA’s report was finalized after multiple internal reviews, and reviews from other government agencies, with public input including from Texas and the industry on many occasions. There were also two rounds of public review by the agency’s science advisory board.Rather than accept that finding, the chemical industry and Texas’ regulatory agency issued its own alternative report in 2020 on ethylene oxide. In stark contrast with EPA’s evaluation, the Texas assessment is a contractor product sponsored by the ethylene oxide industry with limited public review. It fails to account for the risk of breast cancer and could allow over 3,000 times more air pollution to be emitted, which would drastically increase illnesses and deaths—including from cancer—for workers and nearby communities.In an effort to compel EPA to adopt Texas’ cancer-friendly risk estimates nationally, Texas requested a review of its findings by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the nation’s top source of high-quality trusted science and health advice.In March, the National Academies issued its final report, rebuking the foundations of the Texas analysis, finding it repeatedly deviated from best scientific practices and failed to offer a “credible basis” for its findings, specifically its determination that ethylene oxide was not associated with breast cancer.Texas’ efforts to rewrite the history of cancer-causing ethylene oxide as a benign, no-big-deal chemical, is just the beginning of the toxic mayhem and misinformation we can expect from the Trump team to support the financial interests of toxic polluters.Erasing cancer evidence, fudging data, and pretending wild claims are the truth will become the norm, undermining every environmental law and regulation in the nation, and compromising our right to health.All of us will suffer for it.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Microplastics Linked To High Blood Pressure, Diabetes, Stroke

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterTUESDAY, April 1, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- Microplastics appear to be contributing to chronic diseases in...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterTUESDAY, April 1, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- Microplastics appear to be contributing to chronic diseases in shoreline areas of the United States, a new study suggests.High blood pressure, diabetes and stroke rates are higher in coastal or lakefront areas with greater concentrations of microplastics in the environment, researchers reported at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology (ACC).The results also suggested a dose relationship, where higher concentrations of microplastics pollution are associated with more chronic disease, researchers said.“This study provides initial evidence that microplastics exposure has an impact on cardiovascular health, especially chronic, noncommunicable conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes and stroke," lead investigator Sai Rahul Ponnana, a research data scientist at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland, said in a news release.Microplastics are tiny plastic particles as small as 1 nanometer; by comparison, a strand of human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide.These particles are released as larger pieces of plastic break down, and can come from food and beverage packaging, consumer products and building materials, researchers said in background notes.People can be exposed to microplastics in the water they drink, the food they eat and the air they breathe.For this study, researchers linked U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data on chronic illness rates with federal data on microplastics concentrations in the sediment along coastal and lakeshore areas in 555 census tracts. The data ran from 2015 to 2019.Microplastics ranked among the top risk factors associated with chronic illness, researchers found. They considered 154 factors, including income, employment rate and air pollution."When we included 154 different socioeconomic and environmental features in our analysis, we didn't expect microplastics to rank in the top 10 for predicting chronic noncommunicable disease prevalence,” Ponnana said.However, researchers noted that the study does not prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between microplastics and chronic illness. More studies are needed to prove a concrete link and rule out other possible explanations.More research is also needed to determine the amount of exposure to microplastics that would have an impact on a person’s health, researchers added.In the meantime, people can help minimize microplastics exposure by reducing how much plastic they throw away."The environment plays a very important role in our health, especially cardiovascular health," Ponnana said. "As a result, taking care of our environment means taking care of ourselves."The findings were presented Monday at the ACC’s meeting in Chicago. Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has more on microplastics.SOURCE: American College of Cardiology, news release, March 25, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Are Blue Zones a Mirage?

The age detectives are fighting.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsDo you want to live forever? How about to at least 105? You’ve probably heard of blue zones—amazing places where people live disproportionately longer and healthier lives. From Okinawa, Japan, to Ikaria, Greece these regions of the world have captured the imagination of an aging world.Most of the advice that researchers have extracted from these places are what most people consider just common sense. Don’t stress too much or eat too much or drink too much alcohol. Make sure to eat plants and legumes, build community, and protect familial relationships.But while this might be fine advice, at least one researcher is skeptical that the underlying research holds up.On this week’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Dr. Saul Newman, a researcher at the University of Oxford and University College London, who seeks to debunk the blue-zones research with studies of his own. His critics accuse him of writing a “deeply flawed” paper, keeping the debate active. (You can read their arguments here.)Newman’s argument is pretty straightforward. The documentation certifying people’s births is really hard to verify, and there are many documented cases of age fraud. Some of that fraud is intentional—people claiming to be older than they are for cultural or financial benefit—and some is unintentional, thanks to shoddy recordkeeping or researchers getting fooled or making mistakes.While this debate rests on methodological questions that we can’t fully explore in this episode, Newman’s provocation raises important questions about how much we should trust some of the most popular ideas in longevity research.The following is a transcript of the episode:Jerusalem Demsas: According to Our World in Data, in 1800, not a single region of the world had a life expectancy longer than 40 years. By 2021, the global average life expectancy was more than 70 years. It’s still not enough. We want to live longer, healthier lives. What can we do about it?You’ve probably heard of “blue zones,” regions of the world where researchers claim to have found disproportionate numbers of people living into their hundreds. The first such Eden was Sardinia, Italy. Then Okinawa, Japan, and Loma Linda, California, among others.But in recent years, despite the prevalence of cookbooks and diets and Netflix docuseries about these places explaining how to learn from the lifestyles of people living in these regions, something hasn’t quite added up.My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.Saul Newman is a longevity researcher at the University of Oxford and the University College London who has become convinced that this research doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First, when he looks at the regions of the world designated blue zones, they just don’t look like particularly healthy places. The blue-zones theory claims that people live longer in these regions because of their naturally healthy lifestyles, but what Saul finds when he looks at these regions is low literacy, low incomes, high crime, and even short life expectancies relative to the national average. But even more tellingly, according to his research, introducing official birth certificates suspiciously coincides with a steep 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people claiming to be over 109. A number of other statistical oddities indicate that the people claiming to be over 100 years old are either misleading us or are misled themselves.Here at Good on Paper, several of the studies we discuss are preprints, which means they haven’t finished going through the formal review process that can take years. We do this because waiting to discuss studies until after they’ve been through that process would mean missing out on tracking important live debates. But I say all that now because, while Saul is convinced of his findings, this is not yet a settled debate. The proponents of blue zones are fighting back and claim he “omits or misunderstands” how rigorous their methods are.But to hear his perspective on the science of longevity and why he doesn’t trust the blue-zones research, I’m excited to have Saul joining us today.Saul, welcome to the show!Saul Newman: Pleasure to be here.Demsas: So why do people die?Newman: Why do people die? Well, this is a fascinating question, and many of the people in aging research sort of still admit that we really don’t understand the fundamentals. So it’s actually a surprising thing that something so obvious is something we’re still figuring out. The best approximation we have at the moment is that we look at the inverse question: Why continue to live? What is the sort of evolutionary advantage of continuing to live?There are two main thoughts. One I favor, and another that’s quite out of date. The out-of-date one is this sort of Darwinian idea that we exist just to make children. And this is the idea that has the problems, because if we exist just to make children, you get stuck with all sorts of awkward questions, like why does menopause evolve? Why evolve not to have children? Why evolve to help other people at the cost of your own reproduction? And we know all these things happen, and they happen across the animal kingdom, which brings us to the second idea.And the second idea is that we evolve to pass on genes. And because we are related to so many different people, there are a lot of ways to pass on genes, including indirect ways where we help others. This is a sort of still-developing field in answering that question of why we exist, essentially. And it’s a very exciting one because it can explain things like the evolution of menopause, where we’re taking care of grandchildren.But it can also potentially explain a lot of traits that are very difficult to analyze. Traits like homosexuality don’t make sense in this sort of cruel, hard Darwinian sense of, Oh, you’re just a baby factory. But there is a potential to explain them using inclusive fitness. I mean, that said, there was also the flip-side argument to that: Why do I need to justify myself in terms of evolutionary theory in order to exist? Well, of course you don’t. So it’s a very difficult debate to get through, but it’s also an open question at this point.Demsas: What exactly is happening, though, when you die? Let’s say you don’t get an illness, right? Like, we know what happens when someone dies of a stroke or has a heart attack or has cancer or some other kind of long-running illness. But if you are just a generally healthy person—you’re in your 80s, or you’re in your 90s—what’s happening to your body?Newman: It is slowly degenerating, in functional terms. So this is, you know, often very hard to measure, because you have to define what the function of your body is to say, you know, how it’s degenerating, but there are sort of obvious signs. So your metabolic function declines with age. Obvious things, like your physical capacity to run a hundred meters, for example, declines with age. Mental capacity does decline, but it can be much slower. And you know, I think that’s really fascinating, because if you look at, for example, the rankings of top chess players, they decline, but they decline extremely slowly. But essentially, there’s this sort of general systemic decline as you get older in terms of how well you can function.Demsas: There’s a paper that I know that you wrote about this idea of, you know, as you get older, of course, your likelihood of death increases as you age. But there was a hypothesis that perhaps at a certain point, the rate at which you were likely to die kind of leveled off. So if you made it to 80, if you made it to 90—yes, your likelihood of dying every year was still, you know, elevated relative to a younger person, but it no longer was increasing significantly. What happened with that hypothesis?Newman: Well, this touches on the best way we have to measure age and aging, and the sort of functional decline is increases in the mortality rate, because once you hit about age 40 or 35, your odds of dying double at a sort of fixed clockwork rate.Demsas: Wait—what year was that?Newman: Around 35 to 40. It depends a little bit because—Demsas: Okay, great. Just logging that. (Laughs.)Newman: Yeah. It starts to decline earlier, but it’s obscured by something called the “accident hump.” And this is basically, like, what you do when you’re a teenager, right? There’s a big bump in mortality caused by, you know, cars running into trees or jumping off of buildings into swimming pools or whatever it happens to be. But this clockwork doubling means that your mortality, your odds of dying, double usually around every eight years, and there’s really nothing we can do about that.We can change the baseline, but every eight years, your odds of dying will double and double and double until you reach old age. And so in old age, there’s a hypothesis that mortality rates stop getting worse with age, and therefore that aging rates kind of stop or at least slow down considerably. Now, it doesn’t mean that things are getting better. You end up in this sort of Russian-roulette scenario where it’s a “see if your odds of dying flatten out.” And essentially, you’re playing Russian roulette every three months in terms of your mortality risk.And what does that mean in terms of human lifespan? So it means something very interesting. It means that there’s no actual limit to how long you can play roulette without losing. You know, there’s a probabilistic sort of cap where eventually you are going to lose.Demsas: Yeah, unless you’re the luckiest person alive.Newman: Exactly. So there’s nothing per se ruling out a run of good numbers. But the problem here is that this idea is something that has been fought over for 50-odd years and has not been resolved, because it may be that your odds of dying do keep doubling and doubling and doubling until they hit the odds of dying that equal to one, right? So this is what I call the “maximum survivable age.” And it’s not clear to scientists which of those two was correct—whether we strike a maximum survivable age, where we can’t possibly live older than this age, or whether we reach a sort of grim Russian-roulette scenario.Demsas: But life expectancy has improved remarkably over the 20th century. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, people with average lifespans of late ’70s in many developed nations, and rates of child mortality have declined significantly. So it seems like there’s a lot that policy, development, changes in public-health strategies can do to improve lifespan.Is it your sense that—I mean, you just kind of brought up this idea of a maximum survivable age. Is it your perception that there is a number—there is a threshold at which, despite all of these things that you can do to make yourself healthier, to make yourself better, the genetic selection that might exist over generations, there’s just not a chance that humans are gonna live to be 300, 400, etcetera?Newman: Well, in 2016, I waded into this debate because, like I said, there are two sides. And one of the sides had published an idea that there was this hard limit to maximum lifespan. And they published it in one of the most elite scientific journals there is. And I realized they had made colossal mistakes in their analysis—really just fundamental mistakes. They had rounded off most of their data to zero. They had accidentally deleted everyone who died in May and June, and just really made a complete mess of it. But they had argued for one case, and this case was that there’s a limit to how long you can live, a single limit.I had another group come along and argue the opposite. Now, the opposite was this Russian-roulette scenario. The problem was that they had done something even worse, because they had taken everybody in Italy over the age of 105 and used them to build this sort of flattening-out curve. And when they had made this curve, they needed to say what it was flattening out from. So they needed to say, Well, what’s the normal midlife probability of death, and how fast does it get worse? What it boiled down to is that they had picked out the only estimate from earlier life-mortality models that gave them a flattening-out result.So they had 861 options, and they chose the only option that gave them a significant result. So here I was, in the middle of a very vitriolic and long-running debate, saying that both camps were wrong. And I think both camps are wrong, because if you take that maximum survivable age and you estimate it, it doesn’t converge to a single value mathematically. And so in plain language, what that means is that if you grow up in a different environment, your maximum survivable age is different. And it moves over time, really clearly moves over time. So there is not one limit to human life. There is, at best, a smorgasbord of limits that depend on where you grew up, what population you’re in.Demsas: So essentially, there is a maximum survivable age, but it will differ based on the environmental and policy choices that are being made at that time. And so I guess that then the question just becomes, like, how much can you really do on environmental factors?So I want to get to this question about this theory of blue zones, which I think has become very popular. I mean, there’s been, you know, a popular book, a Netflix docuseries. It has inspired tons of attention.There are regions of the world where people have claimed to live remarkably long lives—past 80, even past 100—at rates higher than you would expect just based on if it was just distributed normally: places like Okinawa, in Japan; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece. What was originally the evidence for the idea that these places were unusually good for long life?Newman: Well, the original evidence was rather amusing, actually, because like everything else in extreme-age research, there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents. You know, you have government documents or informal documents that say, I’m this old. But the amusing factor was that the first blue-zone study found a bunch of people within Sardinia that seemed to be living a long time. They didn’t measure anyone outside of Sardinia. They decided that this was a global outlier for extraordinary ages, and they thought that incest, that people sleeping with each other was making this island—Demsas: I’ve never heard this. (Laughs.)Newman: It’s extraordinary. It doesn’t make it to the documentary—Demsas: —to the Netflix docuseries. (Laughs.)Newman: —for a very good reason. Yeah. I mean, there’s nobody making this lifestyle recommendation, I hope. (Laughs.)Demsas: Dear God.Newman: It’s kind of amazing. And that was the start of the blue zones.So, you know, I sort of vaguely knew about this idea while I was getting involved in this fight between the plateau people and the people who think there’s a limit to human life. And, you know, I sort of thought of it as an amusing aside, but as time went on, it became less and less amusing, more and more concerning—like, starkly concerning. And the reason is that everything in these studies is based on looking at documents and saying, Oh, they’re consistent.Demsas: You mean, like, birth certificates?Newman: I mean birth certificates. So there are a lot of problems with that, that really came out of the woodwork over time because, you know, it’s on paper.But when I started looking into these extreme-age cases, it really snowballed. Everything snowballed in a way that completely destroyed the idea and the underlying data of the blue zones. And effectively, you know, people are just believing their own fairy tales here. This really, you know, goes beyond cases, though, because early on in the investigation, I discovered that Japan, where it was claimed Japan had among the world’s best evidence for birth records. And in 2010, it turned out that 82 percent of the people over the age of 100 in the country were dead.Demsas: And was it pension fraud, or what?Newman: It was not pension fraud. It was the remarkable fact that in Japan, the household has to register your death, and if you are the last person in the household and you are dead, how do you do that?Demsas: Oh, wow.Newman: So they had, like, literally hundreds of thousands of people who had died in World War II or had died subsequently, and who were just getting older on paper, including the oldest man in Tokyo and the oldest woman in Tokyo.Demsas: Were they paying them, like, Social Security?Newman: Oh, yes.Demsas: Like, what was happening? Where was the money going?Newman: Well, in the case of the oldest man in Tokyo, the money was going to the family. And he was an extraordinary case that kicked off this investigation because—so there’s a sort of week in Japan where there’s a respect for the aged [day], and in preparation, city officials in Tokyo had gone looking for the oldest man. And eventually, they found out that the oldest man was in Tokyo, but he’d been dead in his apartment for 30 years, and his family were living in the apartment. And the oldest man in Tokyo had been steadily collecting his pension checks.Now, what’s extraordinary about that is that his paperwork was perfectly in order. Like, if you handed their paperwork to a demographer, they would not be able to see anything wrong with it. I mean, it’s not like you die and automatically a form pops out in the central bureaucracy, right? There’s no actual way to know.So it turned out that most extreme-old-age data was undetected errors, and this happened in every blue zone.Demsas: So you went through all the blue zones and saw the same pattern?Newman: I went through all the blue zones. The same thing happened. In Greece, at least 72 percent of the people in Greece who were over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from underground. And what’s remarkable about that is they had just passed a government audit, despite being dead. They passed a government audit in 2011, and in 2012, the government turned around and said, Actually, all those people were dead.Demsas: So walk me through this a little bit, because I think there’s a few different arguments that you’re making here. One is that there are places where it’s quite difficult to know what’s happening with the population, because there’s [a situation] like what you mentioned in Japan, where the reporting of death is happening in a method where you actually can’t validate, when the oldest person in a household has died.And then there’s a second strand of things, which is that people are actively committing fraud because of pensions and Social Security or other sorts of welfare benefits. And then there’s a third, which is just that these documents are not consistent or good, and so when demographers are trying to do this kind of research, they’re ending up having to rely on pretty shoddy documentation or to make broad claims.So how much of this is happening in each place? Like, what do you think is most prevalent?Newman: We don’t know what’s most prevalent. I mean, this is actually part of the problem: that we can see when an error has happened, but if we have documents in front of us that look good, we don’t know if they’re in error or not. And this pattern repeats itself. So there are many, many ways. There’s a whole layer cake of different methods by which you can screw up someone’s age.Like you said, you can just write it down wrong at the start. There was a case where the world’s oldest man was actually just his younger brother, and they just swapped documents. It’s completely undetectable, and it’s happened three times. And there are other cases where there’s active pension fraud. I mean, there’s also cases where you just have someone who is illiterate and has picked up the wrong documents. The list goes on and on and on.But the point is that demographers keep validating these people, and then decades—or even in one case, a century later—find out that they aren’t who they say they are. And that process is pretty much random. So you have to ask yourself, you know, what happens to a field over the course of more than a century when the data can only be checked for being consistent? You can’t actually tell if it’s true?And I think it really set up this extraordinary disaster where not only are the blue zones based on data that doesn’t make sense; we actually have this sort of fundamental problem in looking at the oldest people within our society. Blue zones are an exemplary case of this, but it’s more general.So to give you an example, health in the blue zones was poor before, during, and after they were established. Even in America, at least 17 percent of people over the age of 100 were clerical errors, missing, or dead—at least 17 percent. Many of them just did not have birth certificates. And we have no way of knowing. Like, it’s not as if I can take a person into a hospital, and they can put them into a machine, and it tells me how old they are.Demsas: Cut their arm off and count the rings (Laughs.)Newman: Exactly. The old pirate joke. You cut the leg off and count the rings. You can’t do that.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And that means we are just taking all of this evidence at face value. Normally, that would be fine. Right? And this is where I’m going to apologize for talking numbers. But this is a theoretical result I came up with in 2018.Let’s imagine you have 100,000 people who are 50, really 50. Like, they’ve got their documents, everything. And then you have an extraordinarily low rate of error in which you take 100 40-year-olds, and you give them documents to say they’re 50. If you do that, normally you’d expect, Oh, I can just ignore this. My statistical model will take care of it as noise. But something happens instead that is extraordinary, because those 40-year-olds are, like I said, less than half as likely to die than the real data. So your errors have a lower rate of dying and being removed from the population than your real data—Demsas: Wait—sorry. Can you explain that? I don’t understand.Newman: So you remember: I told you about the clock where your mortality rate doubles every eight years? That means if, let’s say—and I call them “young liars.” If my young liars are eight years younger, their odds of dying day to day are half. So the errors have half the mortality rate of the real data. Every eight years, the percentage of errors doubles, and by the time you get to 100, every single person or almost every single person is an error.So you can’t ignore these tiny error rates. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. It doesn’t matter where you are. You can’t just pretend they don’t exist, because they build up in this weird, nonlinear way over time, and it means that you would actually mathematically expect all of the oldest people in the world to be fake. So, you know, I’ve published this in a scientific journal. No one’s ever been able to argue the math, but they do not want to face up to sort of the repercussions of this.Demsas: Yeah. Part of this is very familiar to me. I don’t have a birth certificate. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the only document I have about my birth and parentage is a baptismal certificate, where I’m pretty sure it was filled out by a member of the church that I was baptized into. I’m not joking: It’s written in teal ink.We were asylum seekers here. I’m, like, taking this to the State Department. I’m like, I swear to God, my father is my father. You literally have to give me a passport. I’m a citizen here. And it was such—it was awful. It was such a hassle. And then—now I’m getting off topic here, but—my brother had to get a DNA test to prove that our parents were his parents in order to get his driver’s license eventually, and his passport. So I’m very familiar with this.And there’s another phenomenon—which, I mean, I don’t know if this is something that you’ve seen in your research—wherein some cultures and communities, of course, being older is, like, quite an advantage. And so there will be people who you’re like, I know how old you are, but you are telling everyone you are 10 to 15 years older than you are. Have you seen this in your research?Newman: All the time. Yeah, I mean, constantly. There was a study in the BBC a couple of months ago where they looked at heart age. And this is a National Institute on Aging–funded study on people in the rainforest, right? And they say, We don’t have any idea how old we are. And the headline is, Oh, these people have really young hearts for their age. You know, they don’t know their age. They’re literally telling you, We are making it up.And, you know, if you have any doubts about the blue zones, there used to be something called the “longevity zones” that predates the blue zones. It was put out by National Geographic in exactly the same way. It had exactly the same hallmarks of, Oh, you live in a mountainous region that’s very remote, and you eat yogurt and vegetarian diets.And it was exactly what you’re saying. These people gave status to village elders, so people were inflating their ages to an extraordinary degree. They were saying, I’m 122. And that’s all it was. You know, this was three regions across the world: Soviet Georgia, where apparently yogurt was the secret; the Vilcabamba Valley, in Ecuador; and the Hunza Valley, in Pakistan. These were the blue zones, and every single case was based on rubbish recordkeeping. And, you know, it just seems to be that’s exactly what’s happened again.[Music]Demsas: After the break: Even if blue zones aren’t real, does that really change how we think about living longer?[Break]Demsas: The thing I’m wrestling with when I engage with this, because, you know, you have published this work; you’ve written about it in the Times and other places. But the fundamental idea that there are locations that are better for people’s lifespans seems not overturned by this, right?Like, we know that location matters a lot for health outcomes, air pollution in particular. It feels like there’s a new paper every other week showing that there’s massive impacts of air pollution on life expectancy, on cognitive functioning, on general health. Is the fundamental concept that there are certain places where people are going to live longer still one that we should be putting more research into?Newman: I think that’s not controversial. But I also think it’s very well understood, for exactly the reasons you say. There’s a study every week on average life expectancy. And what’s striking about this is that those places are very different from the places that get extreme life expectancy.So I basically took a sample of 80 percent of the world’s 110-year-olds and most of the world’s 105-year-olds, and looked at their distribution within countries. So I’m sitting in London right now. And in all of England, the place with the best rate of reaching 105 was the single poorest inner-city suburb with the single fewest number of 90-year-olds.So those two things—where it’s good to live, on average, and where it’s good to reach extreme old age—were exactly the opposite. This is like saying Flint, Michigan, is the healthiest place in the U.S.A. No shade on Flint, Michigan. The government is really the cause of this, but it does not make any sense. It fundamentally doesn’t make any sense. And it gets even worse when you start looking at the details.So the single U.S. blue zone is Loma Linda. I mean, the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan. They measure it, and it is completely and utterly unremarkable.Demsas: I’m not, you know, deeply reporting in the longevity space here, but the way that you have talked about your interactions with some of these authors makes me think it’s an especially contentious field. Why has it kind of remained so difficult to sort of overturn this popular narrative around blue zones?Newman: Well, it makes a lot of money.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: It’s really that simple. I mean, there are multiple best-selling cookbooks, you know. And I’d like to point out, of course: Don’t take your health advice from cookbooks. Its really sort of needs reinforcing every now and again. (Laughs.) But, you know, if you really had a cure for aging, you’d be winning the Nobel Prize.Demsas: You wouldn’t be writing a cookbook? (Laughs.)Newman: You would not be writing a cookbook. You wouldn’t be on late-night television, you know, making a sales pitch. You’d just be like, I want my Nobel Prize. I have a cure for all diseases. Where’s my money? It’s really fundamental.But there is another aspect to this in that a lot of research careers are built on examining the oldest old, and even more research careers are built on just assuming that birth-certificate ages are correct. And to show that they’re not correct in an undetectable fashion on such a massive scale threatens a lot of people’s research careers.Demsas: But part of the thing that I find interesting about the blue zone’s recommendations is that a lot of them are things that are just straightforwardly good advice, right? Move naturally. Have a sense of purpose. Stress less. Don’t eat too much. Eat beans and legumes. Have community. Put your family first. The only one that I think is potentially not actually good is: Drink alcohol in moderation. But the rest of them are generally associated with good health to different extents and, you know, with longevity to different extents.I guess, like, what drove you to become so interested in pushing back on this narrative, given that the advice that people are getting is generally still, like, you know, good health advice? Like, you probably should do most of these things if you’re not already.Newman: Well, I think the problem is the way in which the people in these regions are really kind of culturally being exploited. Because they don’t bear any connection to what actually happens in the blue zones. And I think that was what really drove it home for me, is that you have this sort of flavor of some guy who turns up for a few weeks, looks around, decides it’s the ikigai, and goes home. And if you actually go to the government of Japan, they’ve been measuring Okinawa, for example, since 1975. And every single time they’ve measured Okinawa, it has had terrible health. It has been right at the bottom of the pile.Demsas: Wow.Newman: I’ll take you through some statistics that were robustly ignored by people in selling these blue-zones ideas. Body mass index is measured in Okinawa and compared to the rest of Japan, and it’s measured in over-75-year-olds. So if you go back to 1975, that’s people born 1900 or before, and they measure how heavy they are. They have been last every year, by a massive margin.And then you look at the next claim. So that sort of knocks a hole in the “move naturally” claim. The “move naturally” claim also has this sort of idea that people grow gardens in the blue zones, right? The government of Japan measures that, and they are third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. They don’t grow gardens. And we’ve known that since the beginning of records.And then you look at the idea that they eat plants. It seems really noncontroversial. But people in Okinawa do not eat their veggies. And we know this because we ask them. They’re last in the consumption of root vegetables, last in the consumption of leafy vegetables, last in the consumption of pickled vegetables. They’re third from the top in other raw meat. You know, they eat 40 kilograms of meat a year, at least, which is way above the global and national average. And even sweet potato—sweet potato is on the front of the Netflix documentary, these purple sweet potatoes—they are last for sweet potato consumption out of all the 47 prefectures of Japan.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: And they always have been. There’s another idea that, you know, they have a sense of belonging, that they belong to a faith-based community. They’re 93.4 percent atheist. They’re third to last in the country, and it is a very atheist country. So the problem is that none of these claims have any connection to reality whatsoever.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And it’s been sitting in the open for decades.Demsas: Have you become a lot more cynical about scientific research as a result of this?Newman: Oh, I mean, absolutely. It’s extraordinary, the sort of cognitive dissonance that goes on. And really, I mean, all of these claims just have no connection to reality. And you see this sort of sad thing playing out with the locals, where a beach resort will get built. People will fly in for three days, and they’re still sitting there going, like, Why don’t we have a hospital? Why are we all still poor?You know, just basic social problems get overlooked because of this. So yeah, it has made me much more cynical, because these, I guess you would call them “lumps and bumps,” should have been obvious right from the point when someone said incest was good for living a long time.Demsas: So, like, I mean, preregistration helps reduce a lot of issues in social science. There’s also been increasing attempts to subject, you know, big findings, important findings to replication by various groups and individuals.I mean, is there something fundamental that you think needs to happen differently in terms of how reputable journals accept new findings? Do you think that all the data needs to be open? What needs to happen here to prevent these sorts of problems in the future?Newman: In short, the answer is: really a lot.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: The slightly less short answer is that the core of science is reproducibility. It is the core idea. And these results are not reproducible. And it’s not just that they’re not reproducible. After 20 years, nobody has published the underlying data. And there needs to be a much heavier emphasis on replication in science and on testing claims—especially profitable claims—before they’re just thrown out into the open.Because, you know, I find it amazing. This is something that was discussed at an elite level at the World Economic Forum. Now, we cannot have a cookbook-based piece of lifestyle advice governing global health. So we need to really rejig the—I mean, first, the level of skepticism in science needs to go up considerably. And second, we need to really start hitting back on papers that need to be retracted, papers that need to be removed from the scientific record because they do not replicate or because, you know, like the first two—the studies I pointed out here—because they’re based on extremely questionable choices.Demsas: So most people listening to this will have heard of this topic before, but have you found anything that indicates it’s been especially influential in public health in that policy makers are taking it quite seriously as a way of trying to push different nonvalidated recommendations?Newman: Yes. I mean, the presentation at the World Economic Forum is really a low point, an extraordinary low point. But I think what is, like I said, more troubling is that you have an entire machinery of public health here that didn’t spot how completely wrong this is. In retrospect, it’s so wrong that everybody’s sort of giggling. But it’s been 20 years of this being perhaps the most popular idea in demography.And so I get worried about this because I’ve just completed a new study. And in this new study, I have taken every single 100-year-old in the world and analyzed where they’re from and what countries attain the age of 100 at the highest rates. And to do this, I took United Nations data contributed by every government on Earth, in good faith, with the best efforts at data cleaning—both by the governments and by the UN. And the places that reach 100 at the most remarkable rates don’t make any sense.Malawi, which is one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth, is in the top 10, and it’s in the top 10 routinely. You know, Western Sahara, which is a region that does not have a government, is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, according to the UN. I mean, that’s fundamentally absurd. And it’s fundamentally absurd that it has been 70 years that this data has been produced for, and nobody has noticed the absurdity. And I find that deeply shocking.Puerto Rico was one of the top 10, and that initially passed muster. You’ve got a place in a rich country that has a long history of birth certificates, until you realize that this is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, and the reason seems to be that the birth certificates are so badly documented that they restarted the entire system in 2010. They said, Birth certificates are no longer legal documents. They threw it all out and started again because of systemic levels of error.Demsas: Wow.Newman: And that’s how you reach 100.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: You just write your age down wrong. And you know, there is this sort of public-health element that is deeply troubling because you are one of the people in the world that doesn’t have a birth certificate, and you’re not alone.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: A quarter of children now don’t have a birth certificate—a quarter of all children. And we are just ignoring that.Demsas: I want to take a step back because I think that even though I think that this is deeply troubling, there is still a desire—I mean, part of the reason why there’s such a focus on this issue is people really want to figure out how to extend their life. Every year they get older, they’re, you know, deeply concerned with yoga, with protein intake, with lifting weights. A lot of different things begin to occupy your mind as the number turns to 3, 4, 5 at the beginning of your age.I want to ask about how much we know about the role of environmental versus genetic factors in determining longevity. Is all of this effort to try and tweak our life expectancy—is it really that worth it, or is it largely just a question of your genetics kind of determining what your life expectancy is going to be?Newman: I mean, there’s good news and bad news. And I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is—well, it depends on your perspective, I suppose. The bad news is that the people who live the longest, on average, are born into rich countries with free health care. It’s that simple. The good news is: When it comes to the environment, it plays a big role, a very big role in how long you live. And there is a lot you can do about it, not a single one of which costs any money, right?So I’ll break it down. The simple things that we really know about lifespan: Don’t drink. There you’ll get, it depends, but if you [weren’t] going to get addicted, you’ll get about an extra 30 years of lifespan over what you would if you got addicted to alcohol. And for context, the CDC estimates that that’s about the same as heroin addiction. But if you drink without getting addicted and give up drinking, you’re still going to gain roughly three to four years.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: Right. So that’s simple.Don’t smoke: You’ll gain about seven years. Do some exercise: You’ll get probably—it depends how much you exercise, but let’s say four years. And go to your GP, and that’s it. You don’t need to buy the cookbook.I think the reason the cookbook sells so well is that those three things are somewhat difficult, right? They’re kind of hard, and I think this is why longevity cures perennially do so well, is that they’re always easier than those three things. Almost always, you know, the ones that do well. And that is what underpins this market. But if you really want to live a longer time, just don’t drink; don’t smoke; do some exercise.Demsas: Well, tell me a little bit more about the genetic factors here. I mean, there was a study I saw that looked at 20,000 Nordic twins born in the late 1800s, and found that genetic differences had negligible impacts on survival before about age 60, but after age 60 and particularly those reaching their 80s and beyond, genetic factors become more important. I don’t know if you’ve seen that paper or if you’ve seen other research about this, but what do we know about the role of genetics in longevity?Newman: I haven’t seen that paper, but I’ve seen some extraordinarily bad papers on the roles of genetics and longevity. There’s just something called a genome-wide-association study, where you effectively say, you know, what genes are associated with extreme longevity. And I’ve seen that conducted on sample sizes of less than 200 people, which is, I mean—it’s a bit like saying you’ve got a space program when you let go of a carnival balloon. It’s a joke.So I would be extremely skeptical of longevity claims. You know, there is just this fundamental problem with our documents that if you go into that study and dive into that study, you’ll realize that they, like everybody else, have to trust what is written down on the piece of paper that says how old these people are.And there’s no way to check that. You know, I think we’re on the edge of a situation where you can. There have been some extraordinary scientific advances in estimating people’s age, but nobody seems to want to face up to that fundamental problem yet.Demsas: Well, Saul, this has been fantastic. Always our last and final question: What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being just good on paper?Newman: I’ll tell you something that turned out to be bad on paper in the moment. When I was an undergrad, it’s kind of like someone said to me, Go to the best U.K. university. It’s the one in Oxford, Oxford Brooks, which is not the University of Oxford. They told me completely the wrong university to go to, and I’d gone to it. And so to sort of crawl my way out of this hole, I found out that my university offered an exchange program to the Ivy League. And it was the first year they’d run it. So they just didn’t understand how much it was gonna cost.Demsas: Okay.Newman: And I was like, Great. I could be the poorest kid in the Ivy League, right? So I went on exchange, but without me knowing it, they realized how much it cost and pulled my visa status after the first six months. So I wound up in the FBI building in L.A., you know, in a locked elevator, going to one of the rooms for an interview, just completely not knowing that I’d overstayed.Demsas: Is that even a good on paper? That just sounds like you got screwed.Newman: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s as close as I got. I mean, it was good on paper right up until that point.Demsas: Yeah. What school were you going to?Newman: I was going to Ithaca—Cornell, in Ithaca—and paying, I think, $1,000 a semester in student loans.Demsas: Oh my gosh. That is, like, one of those things where you really gotta check to see if that deal’s going to pan out.Newman: Yeah, I think it worked out long term, but short term, yeah, not so great.Demsas: Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.Newman: Thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.Demsas: If you like what you heard on today’s episode, I have a suggestion for you! My colleagues here at The Atlantic are exploring how we talk about aging, in our newest How To series. You can hear a trailer at the end of this episode, and then go subscribe to How to Age Up, coming April 7, wherever you listen to podcasts.[Music]Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Trump's Department of Energy targets California and other blue states for budget cuts, according to internal documents

A major national effort to develop clean hydrogen energy is facing funding cuts — but only in Democratic states.

The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle environmental protections and roll back nationwide progress toward clean energy disproportionately target California and other blue states, internal documents show.As early as this week, the Department of Energy may pull funding from hundreds of projects — many of which were bolstered by President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law and are geared toward climate-friendly initiatives such as solar power, heat pumps, battery storage and renewable fuels, according to a leaked list reviewed by The Times. The cuts could include as many as 262 projects in the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, of which roughly 80% are based in states that did not go for Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Also on the chopping block are nearly two dozen projects in the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, including a major national effort known as the Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) Program, which aims to accelerate the development of hydrogen projects that can replace planet-warming fossil fuels. Those cuts, too, are not applied equally: Of the seven states and regions selected to participate in the $7-billion federal hydrogen project, the four set to be gutted are in primarily Democratic areas. The hydrogen incubators on the cut list include a hub in California; a Mid-Atlantic hub in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey; a Pacific Northwest hub in Oregon, Washington and Montana; and a Midwest hub in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. Meanwhile, the hydrogen hubs in red states and regions are safe, the list shows, including a large hub in Texas; a “heartland” hub in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota; and an Appalachia hub in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Officials with the Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. California was among 33 applicants for the competitive initiative, which launched in 2021 and ultimately selected seven “hubs” to develop and test various sources of hydrogen. The California hub — known as ARCHES, or the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems — was awarded $1.2 billion in federal funds, with plans to bring in an additional $11.2 billion from private investors. But it now faces cuts from Trump’s DOE despite the fact that the hub was the highest-scoring applicant among those considered for the federal award, according to sources familiar with the matter. Democratic staff members with the House Science Committee who agreed to speak on background said the findings indicate that the cuts are partisan and ideological in nature — a trend in keeping with other actions from the Trump administration, which has repeatedly targeted environmental programs in California and other Democratic areas in recent weeks. Indeed, cost alone does not appear to be a factor, given that Texas’s hydrogen hub received the same amount of federal funding — $1.2 billion — as California’s, yet the former was not on the cut list. The two states’ projects were the costliest of the hubs, which range from roughly $750 million to $1.2 billion.The total cuts from the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy amount to more than $905 million, with about $735 million coming from blue states and $169 million from red states, according to a Times analysis. Insiders said the proportions do not reflect overall clean energy investments by red and blue states, with Republican states such as Texas — a clean energy juggernaut — facing far fewer cuts from that office. According to documents reviewed by The Times, only eight Texas projects are on the chopping block compared with 53 in California. House Science Committee staffers cautioned that the leaked lists represent a snapshot in time and that the administration could change its plans before making any official announcements. Already, they said, some Republican representatives and private industry leaders have been successful in stopping certain projects from being canceled. So far, none of their Democratic counterparts have been able to do the same, they said.The cuts could have considerable implications for the nation’s energy future. The seven hydrogen hubs were collectively expected to produce 3 million metric tons of hydrogen each year — reducing 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or roughly the amount of 5.5 million gas-powered cars. Each of the seven hubs was experimenting with different sources of hydrogen, with California focused on producing hydrogen exclusively from renewable energy and biomass while other hubs worked with natural gas, nuclear power and renewable sources such as wind and solar.Officials with ARCHES said it could be weeks before they have more clarity on the situation. “ARCHES remains committed to working with our partners to establish a secure, reliable and competitive hydrogen ecosystem, creating hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs and delivering substantial health and economic benefits for Californians,” Chief Executive Angelina Galiteva said in a statement. “We have nothing more to share at this time.”Hydrogen is also not without controversy. Critics have expressed concern that producing hydrogen is water- and energy-intensive, potentially dangerous to transport and expensive. Supporters say it fills in a key gap that electrification alone cannot cover, particularly for heavy industries such as manufacturing and transportation.ARCHES planned to fund at least 37 smaller projects in and around California, including efforts to decarbonize the Port of Los Angeles, as well as plans to install more than 60 hydrogen fueling stations around the state.The status of those projects remains unclear.The president — who received record donations from fossil fuel companies during his campaign — has taken aim at what he describes as “environmental extremists, lunatics, radicals and thugs” in recent weeks, vowing instead to ramp up the production of coal, increase oil drilling and block California’s efforts to transition to electric vehicles, among other actions.

UK housebuilders ‘very bad’ at building houses, says wildlife charity CEO

Land speculation to blame for lack of progress amid Labour drive to build 1.5m new homes, says Wildlife Trusts headUK politics live – latest updatesBusiness live – latest updatesHousebuilders in the UK are failing to supply much-needed new homes not because of restrictive planning laws, but because they are “very bad” at building houses, the head of one of the UK’s biggest nature charities has warned.“There’s planning permission today for a million new houses,” said Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts. “So why aren’t they being built? Why is it that volume housebuilders in this country are actually very bad at building houses, even when they’ve got planning permission?” Continue reading...

Housebuilders in the UK are failing to supply much-needed new homes not because of restrictive planning laws, but because they are “very bad” at building houses, the head of one of the UK’s biggest nature charities has warned.“There’s planning permission today for a million new houses,” said Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts. “So why aren’t they being built? Why is it that volume housebuilders in this country are actually very bad at building houses, even when they’ve got planning permission?”Ministers have boasted of their swingeing reforms to the planning system – in a bill that passed its second reading last week – claiming they will clear the way for the 1.5m new homes promised in the Labour manifesto.But Bennett believes this hope will be in vain because the government is missing the point. “[The reason so few homes are built] is because they [the large housebuilders] love to hold land and wait for the prices to up. A lot of the way that a lot of housebuilders in this country make money is through speculation around land prices, as much as it is about building houses.”Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, and Keir Starmer, the prime minister, have overhauled the planning system to make housebuilding easier. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PAHousebuilders rejected Bennett’s analysis. Steve Turner, an executive director of the Home Builders Federation, said: “Housebuilders deliver a range of high-quality environmentally friendly house types to meet all budgets, and customer satisfaction levels are at an all time high. The myth of land banking has been demolished time and again by independent experts. Housebuilders’ only return on investment is selling homes, and having purchased land and navigated the costly and bureaucratic planning process there is absolutely no reason not to build and sell.”Bennett will mark five years in April as head of the Wildlife Trusts, a confederation of 46 independent organisations which together boast 2,600 nature reserves (“about 1,000 more than McDonald’s has restaurants”) and 944,000 members. Before that, he headed Friends of the Earth.The Wildlife Trusts, as a charity, are careful to avoid being party political, but within Charity Commission guidelines there is still scope for civil society groups to take issue with the politicians of the day.And planning regulation – and the supposed conflict between development and environmental protection – has become a political flashpoint. Green groups have accused the Labour government of “scapegoating” nature and fomenting culture wars, after Rachel Reeves, chancellor of the exchequer, called for businesses to “focus on getting things built, and stop worrying about the bats and the newts”. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, has also weighed in, ridiculing the presence of “the distinguished jumping spider” for allegedly halting new homes in Kent.Government criticism of environmental protection may be partly based on a wish to establish an enemy, says Bennett. Photograph: Alamy/PAThe government’s combative rhetoric has been informed, Bennett believes, not by careful consideration of the UK’s infrastructural deficits, but by a mixture of a “misinformation bubble”, in which top ministers have absorbed some prejudices of the previous Conservative government, and a belief that they need to set up an enemy to fix on.Reeves was sounding “more Liz Truss than Liz Truss” on the growth issue, he added, referring to the former Tory prime minister who espoused anti-green rhetoric more often heard from US rightwing politicians. He blames Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief adviser, for a fixation on the Reform party, which threatens Labour in seats across the “red wall”.Reform’s leaders, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, have been vitriolic in their condemnation of environmentalists, green concerns over nature and “stupid net zero”, as described by Tice. But Bennett pointed to a survey of 4,000 people’s attitudes towards green issues, which found that Labour voters who were thinking of switching to Reform were overwhelmingly positive towards the Wildlife Trusts. “There’s a lot of the kind of Reform voters who care passionately about this. People who live in the Westminster bubble assume that what the party leadership are doing is what the voters are doing. It’s quite different.”Building work in Ebbsfleet Garden City, Kent, which the prime minister said was being held back by wildlife concerns. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPAHe has extended invitations to Farage, Tice and the Reform party to meet and discuss these issues. So far, they have not been taken up.Bennett argues that new housing could sit alongside nature, if housebuilders were given greater direction by the government and built affordable homes instead of the larger and more expensive “executive” homes that deliver higher profits. But he said the poor construction of many new houses, and the failure of developers to build in harmony with nature and incorporate green space, were among the reasons people rejected them.Bennett added that charities such as the Wildlife Trusts create economic growth while improving society. “We’re now employing 3,700 people across the UK in those communities,” he said. “I get a bit fed up at times when politicians talk about charities as if we’re just like small little things. We are actually really significant employers.” Bennett added that in many areas, wildlife charities “underpin the local economy”, providing tourism opportunities, flood management and employment.Labour disparages nature at its peril, Bennett said, arguing that all voters care about nature on their doorstep. He said: “I see people from every demographic, political [party] or age. The one thing that unites us is how much we care about our local environment, and care about local nature, and want to see it in a better state.”

Average person will be 40% poorer if world warms by 4C, new research shows

Experts say previous economic models underestimated impact of global heating – as well as likely ‘cascading supply chain disruptions’Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.The study, by Australian scientists, says average global GDP per person will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C higher, , much higher than previous estimates of a drop of about 1.4%. Continue reading...

Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.The study, by Australian scientists, says average global GDP per person will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C higher, , much higher than previous estimates of a drop of about 1.4%.Even if governments around the globe hit their near-term and long-term climate targets, scientists now estimate global temperatures will rise by 2.1C.Criticisms have mounted in recent years that a set of economic tools known as integrated assessment models (IAM) – used to guide how much governments should invest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions – have failed to capture major risks from climate change, particularly extreme weather events.The new study, in the journal Environmental Research Letters, took one of the most popular economic models and enhanced it with climate change forecasts to capture the impacts of extreme weather events across global supply chains.Dr Timothy Neal, of the University of New South Wales’s Institute for climate risk and response and the lead author of the study, said the new research had looked at the likely impact of global heating of 4C – seen by many climate experts as catastrophic for the planet – finding it would make the average person 40% poorer. This compared with about 11% poorer when using the models without enhancements.Previous economic models that “inadvertently concluded” even high levels of global heating would have only modest impacts on the global economy had “profound implications for climate policy”, Neal said.He said economic models had tended to only account for changing weather on a local level, rather than how weather extremes like droughts or floods could affect global supply chains.“In a hotter future, we can expect cascading supply chain disruptions triggered by extreme weather events worldwide,” Neal said.Prof Andy Pitman, a climate scientist at UNSW and co-author of the research, said: “It’s in the extremes when the rubber hits the road. It isn’t about average temperatures”“Retooling economic models to account for extremes in your part of the world and its impact on supply chains feels like a very urgent thing to do so countries can fully cost their economic vulnerabilities to climate change and then do the obvious thing – cut emissions.”Some economists have argued global losses from global heating might be partially balanced by warming that could benefit some cold regions, such as Canada, Russia and northern Europe. But Neal said global heating would hit countries everywhere, because global economies are linked by trade.Prof Frank Jotzo, a climate policy expert at Australian National University who was not involved in the research, said economic climate modelling using IAMs assumed that if climate change made an activity such as agriculture unviable in one part of the world, increased output would simply come from somewhere else.“The result is that the models say that climate change makes little difference to the future world economy, which is contrary to what physical impact science and a nuanced understanding of interdependencies in the economy would suggest.”A report in January from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, representing the profession that underpins the risk management decisions of the world’s insurers and pension funds, said previous economic risk assessments had failed to account for real-world climate impacts like “tipping points, extreme events, migration, sea level rise, human health impacts or geopolitical risk.”“The benign but flawed results may reinforce the narrative that these are slow-moving risks with limited impacts, rather than severe risks requiring immediate action,” the report said.Mark Lawrence researches climate risk as a professor of practice at the University of Adelaide and previouslyworked in financial risk management with senior roles at major financial institutions including Merrill Lynch and ANZ Banking Group. He said the results of the new research were credible.“If anything, I believe the economic impacts [of climate change] could be even worse,” he said.A consequence of the disconnect between modelling and real-world climate impacts, Lawrence said, was that “the potential economic benefits of urgent climate policy action have also been significantly understated”.

The bid to make Illinois a leader on electric trucking

A coalition of environmental justice advocates is pushing Illinois to become the first Midwest state to adopt California’s Advanced Clean Trucks standards designed to spur a transition to zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles over the next decade. “Air pollution is an equity issue,” Griselda Chavez, an environmental…

A coalition of environmental justice advocates is pushing Illinois to become the first Midwest state to adopt California’s Advanced Clean Trucks standards designed to spur a transition to zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles over the next decade. “Air pollution is an equity issue,” Griselda Chavez, an environmental justice organizer with Warehouse Workers for Justice, said at a recent press conference. The group represents workers and residents in communities heavily impacted by warehouses, including the Chicago-area town of Joliet, a major logistics hub. “Black, brown, and low-income communities in and around Joliet are disproportionately affected by diesel pollution, large amounts of truck traffic, and increasing growth of the warehouse industry,” Chavez said. ​“Those workers also go home to their families and go to schools that are surrounded by large amounts of truck traffic and poor air quality.” The Illinois Pollution Control Board is considering adopting not only California’s clean truck standards but also the Golden State’s Advanced Clean Cars II program, which would phase out the sale of most non-electric passenger vehicles by 2035, and its stricter nitrogen oxide limits on heavy-duty vehicles. The deliberations are happening as the Trump administration seeks to block California’s unique authority to set vehicle emission standards that exceed federal rules. Illinois advocates have focused mostly on the clean trucks program because of the health and environmental justice implications of diesel-powered trucks throughout the state. They are especially concerned about places like Joliet and Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, a largely immigrant community where warehouses have also proliferated. In 2023, the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization worked with the Center for Neighborhood Technology on a truck-counting study that showed on one June day, an average of 1.5 heavy-duty trucks per minute drove along a residential street in the heart of the community. Sally Burgess, downstate lead organizing representative for Sierra Club’s Illinois chapter, told the Pollution Control Board during a March 10 hearing that she counted more than 300 diesel-burning semi-trucks during the 65-mile drive between her home in central Illinois and the state’s capitol. “All along our route, on both sides of the highway, farm fields, rustic barns, cows and other farm animals, some homes,” said Burgess. ​“Some would refer to it as a bucolic rural setting — clogged with diesel trucks.” Stimulating Illinois’ EV markets The Advanced Clean Trucks program would require manufacturers selling in Illinois to ensure that between 40% and 75% of their heavy-duty vehicle sales are zero-emissions by 2035, with the percentage depending on type of vehicle. They would have to sell higher percentages of electric medium-sized non-tractor trucks than pickup trucks and vans as well as larger tractor-trailers. Manufacturers could also comply by purchasing credits from other companies that go beyond those targets, or by shifting credits from types of vehicles where they exceed the mandates. “If, for example, a truck-maker sells a lot of zero-emission delivery vans but doesn’t offer a zero-emission version of their box trucks, they can convert their extra [pickup and van] credits into [midsize truck] credits and still maintain compliance,” said Trisha DelloIacono, head of policy for Calstart, a national nonprofit focused on clean transportation policy and market development, by email. DelloIacono said demand for zero-emissions heavy-duty vehicles is so high that manufacturers should not have trouble meeting the sales targets if they make the inventory available. After a certain number of years, those that don’t comply either through electric vehicle sales or credit purchases could be fined. Advocates say that the state mandates benefit people nationwide since they motivate manufacturers to increase their EV offerings.

‘Playing gods with the cradle of life’: French Polynesia’s president issues warning over deep-sea mining

Exclusive: Moetai Brotherson fears environmental risks of controversial practice and says independence from France must not be ‘rushed’Read more Pacific leaders: in their wordsFrench Polynesia’s president has issued a stark warning over the risks of deep-sea mining, saying it will be allowed in his territory “over my dead body” as he argues the potential for environmental damage outweighs any benefits.Moetai Brotherson’s comments to the Guardian come as countries in the Pacific and elsewhere grapple with whether to extract minerals from the sea floor. Deep-sea mining has not yet begun, but some companies and countries are exploring the practice, which could start in the coming years. Continue reading...

French Polynesia’s president has issued a stark warning over the risks of deep-sea mining, saying it will be allowed in his territory “over my dead body” as he argues the potential for environmental damage outweighs any benefits.Moetai Brotherson’s comments to the Guardian come as countries in the Pacific and elsewhere grapple with whether to extract minerals from the sea floor. Deep-sea mining has not yet begun, but some companies and countries are exploring the practice, which could start in the coming years.“We’re playing gods with the cradle of life – and that’s way too dangerous,” Brotherson said from his office in Papeete.Asked if he would consider deep-sea mining in the future, Brotherson said: “Over my dead body.”French Polynesia is located in the South Pacific Ocean about halfway between Australia and South America. It consists of more than 100 islands, including Tahiti and Bora Bora. Although technically still under French sovereignty, the islands are largely autonomous, with their own government, currency and local laws.French Polynesian president Moetai Brotherson says deep-sea mining is a ‘lure’ for Pacific Island countries. Photograph: Atea Lee Chip Sao/The GuardianUnder French Polynesia’s statute of autonomy, France has ultimate jurisdiction over what it deems “strategic materials”, which includes the minerals found in the seabed. Brotherson’s administration is attempting to get the statute modified.Brotherson was elected in 2023 as a member of the pro-independence Tāvini Huiraʻatira party. He said deep-sea mining was a “lure” for Pacific Island countries, which might see the practice as a “shortcut to a better social and economic situation”.Deep-sea mining involves extracting minerals and metals such as nickel, cobalt and copper from the deep seabed, at depths greater than 200m. These minerals are used in a range of products including batteries, electronics and renewable energies.Proponents say mining the deep sea will support the green energy transition and aid the development of Pacific Island economies. Others argue the practice could have a devastating impact on the seabed, and the long-term consequences for the environment and ocean ecosystems are uncertain.Deep-sea mining has divided Pacific island governments. While some, including French Polynesia and Micronesia, are against the idea, others such as the Cook Islands and Nauru have been actively pursuing partnerships with mining companies as a way to diversify their economies.In February, the Cook Islands signed a strategic partnership deal with China which included cooperation to explore deep-sea mining in the Cook Islands’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ). In March, Kiribati announced it would also be exploring a deep-sea mining partnership with China. Other large states including Russia and South Korea hold exploration contracts, and companies are pushing to begin mining the deep sea.French Polynesia’s presidential palace in the capital, Papeete. Photograph: Atea Lee Chip Sao/The GuardianWhile Brotherson supports the right of the Cook Islands to exploit its deep-sea resources, he doesn’t agree with it.“From our perspective, it’s very disturbing because it sets a precedent and also ignores the fact that undersea pollution doesn’t have boundaries,” said Brotherson, who noted that pollution from mining in the Cook Islands could end up in French Polynesian waters.Dr Lorenz Gonschor, an expert on Pacific regionalism and governance at the University of the South Pacific, said exploration of deep ocean resources was likely to happen in the future.He said as “large ocean nations” the emerging practice gave Pacific islands “tremendous importance in the sense that they will now potentially have huge economic resources”.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, currently supports a ban on deep-sea mining but Brotherson worries that could change with the election of a new president in France.France has complicated relationships with its Pacific Island colonies, which also includes New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna. New Caledonia saw violent unrest and protests last year sparked by voting reforms proposed by the French parliament.Brotherson has stated publicly that he would consider holding a referendum on independence from France in the next 10 to 15 years.France, however, has shown no indication of moving towards decolonisation for French Polynesia, rejecting calls for independence at the 2023 UN special committee on decolonisation and continuing to maintain an active military presence in the islands. Macron, during his last visit to French Polynesia in 2021, emphasised strengthening the existing relationship.Gonschor acknowledged that independence for French Polynesia would be a “big challenge”, particularly because of its history of economic subsidies and “superficial development” from France. Still, he believed there was a chance of seeing independence in our lifetimes.“From a geopolitical standpoint, it’s unavoidable. In the long run, France won’t be able to afford to keep these overseas colonies.”Brotherson is willing to take a slow path to secure independence “the right way” and start by building French Polynesia’s “economic self-resilience”, which includes a sustainable tourism and energy transition, as well as a move to boost the local agricultural sector and prioritise the digital economy.“I’d rather not see independence in my time if it’s being rushed and done wrong … It would be great if I could see it, but it’s not about me,” Brotherson said. “It’s about the people in the country.”

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