Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Accept Deny

GoGreenNation News

Learn more about the issues presented in our films
Show Filters

In “Cancer Alley,” Black Communities Get All the pollution, But Few of the Jobs

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Residents of the mostly Black communities sandwiched between chemical plants along the lower Mississippi River have long said they get most of the pollution but few of the jobs produced by the region’s vast petrochemical industry.  A new study led by Tulane University […]

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Residents of the mostly Black communities sandwiched between chemical plants along the lower Mississippi River have long said they get most of the pollution but few of the jobs produced by the region’s vast petrochemical industry. A new study led by Tulane University backs up that view, revealing stark racial disparities across the US’s petrochemical workforce. Inequity was especially pronounced in Louisiana, where people of color were underrepresented in both high- and low-paying jobs at chemical plants and refineries.  “It was really surprising how consistently people of color didn’t get their fair share of jobs in the petrochemical industry,” said Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist with the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. “No matter how you slice or dice the data by states, metro areas or parishes, the data’s consistent.” Toxic air pollution in Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor, an area often referred to as “Cancer Alley,” has risen in recent years. The burdens of pollution have been borne mostly by the state’s Black and poor communities, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.  The Tulane study’s findings match what Cancer Alley residents have suspected for decades, said Joy Banner, co-founder of the Descendants Project, a nonprofit that advocates for Black communities in the parishes between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. “You hear it a lot—that Black people are not getting the jobs,” she said. “But to have the numbers so well documented, and to see just how glaring they are—that was surprising.” People of color were underrepresented in all of the highest-paying jobs among the 30 states with a large petrochemical industry presence, but Louisiana and Texas had “the most extreme disparities,” according to the study, which was published in the journal Ecological Economics.  While several states had poor representation on the upper pay scale, people of color were typically overrepresented in the lower earnings tiers.  In Texas, nearly 60 percent of the working-age population is nonwhite, but people of color hold 39 percent of higher-paying positions and 57 percent of lower-paying jobs in the chemical industry.  Louisiana was the only state in which people of color are underrepresented in both pay categories. People who aren’t white make up 41 percent of the working-age population but occupy just 21 percent of higher-paying jobs and about 33 percent of lower-paid jobs.  The study relied on data from the US Census Bureau, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Louisiana Economic Development. The chemical industry disputed the study’s findings. “We recognize the importance of examining equity in employment, however, this study offers an incomplete and misleading portrayal of our industry and its contributions,” David Cresson, president and CEO of the Louisiana Chemical Association, said in a statement.  Cresson pointed to several industry-supported workforce development programs, scholarships and science camps aimed at “closing the training gap in Louisiana.” But the study indicates education and training levels aren’t at the root of underrepresentation among states or metro areas. Louisiana’s education gap was modest, with college attainment at 30 percent for white residents and 20 percent for people of color. In places like Lake Charles and St. John the Baptist Parish, where petrochemical jobs are common, the gap was minimal—five percentage points or less. The industry’s investments in education are “just public relations spin,” Banner said.  “The amount of money they’re investing in schools and various programs pales in comparison to how much they’re profiting in our communities,” she said. “We sacrifice so much and get so little in return.” Louisiana is also getting little from generous tax breaks aimed at boosting employment, the study found.  The state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program has granted 80 percent to 100 percent property tax exemptions to companies that promise to create new jobs. For each job created in Cameron Parish, where large natural gas ports have been built in recent years, companies were exempted from almost $590,000 in local taxes. In St. John, each job equated to about $1 million in uncollected tax revenue. “This tradeoff of pollution in exchange for jobs was never an equal trade,” said Gianna St. Julien, one of the study’s authors. “But this deal is even worse when the overwhelming majority of these companies’ property taxes are not being poured back into these struggling communities.”   This coverage was made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization producing in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.

Pollution
Chemicals
Climate

RFK Jr. Knows Amazingly Little About Autism

While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a […]

While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a terrifying “disease” that “destroys,” as he put it, children and their families. Kennedy made it clear he planned to use his powerful role as the person in charge of a massive federal agency devoted to protecting public health to promote the idea that autism is caused by “environmental factors,” a still-speculative thesis that’s clearly a short walk towards advancing his real aim: blaming vaccines.  Kennedy has spent the last 20 years promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric, falsely and repeatedly claiming that vaccines are linked to autism. Yet as the press conference made clear, Kennedy knows startlingly little about autism. In the course of his remarks, he detoured into a rabbit hole filled with pseudoscience about the condition, providing a vast display of all the things he does not seem to know about current research and basic facts about the condition. Here’s a list of just a few of the major pieces of misinformation Kennedy shared.  Falsely framing autism as a debilitating “disease” and an “epidemic”   Kennedy’s ableist and factually incorrect framing of autism relies on explicitly calling it a “disease,” when most scientists refer to it as a “disorder.” Many autistic self-advocates object to that framing too, saying that autism is part of the wide range of human neurodiversity. According to data released in 2021, roughly 61.8 million people worldwide are believed to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Most significantly, autism is widely agreed to exist on a spectrum—hence its clinical name, “autism spectrum disorder”—and autistic people have a wide range of abilities and ways that their autism expresses itself. In remarks that drew the most scrutiny, Kennedy depicted profound autism as something that inevitably robs children of their abilities, proclaiming: “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” (Our colleague Julia Métraux interviewed autistic poet and attorney Elizabeth McClellan earlier this week, who said his remarks are “useless eaters rhetoric,” the eugenicist idea used by Nazi Germany in the 1930s to dehumanize and eventually murder disabled people.) A press release issued by HHS this week even referred to autistic children as “afflicted.” Kennedy previously claimed that under his guidance, HHS intends to uncover the causes of autism by September, a timeline as improbable as it is highly specific.  One autism researcher, who asked to speak anonymously in order to freely address their concerns, told Mother Jones that framing autism as a “disease” with environmental causes seemed designed to set up Kennedy “as the ‘savior’ to the autism community” when he claims to have discovered its cause. The notion that there is a single cause of autism is, to put it mildly, not at all backed up by the decades of research on this highly complex diagnosis. Framing autism as a “disease” with environmental causes seemed designed to set up Kennedy “as the ‘savior’ to the autism community” when he claims to have discovered its cause. Declaring that autism is “clearly” caused by “environmental toxins”  But Kennedy took on step towards meeting this self-imposed deadline by stating, “This is coming from an environmental toxin,” adding the provocative assertion, “And somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food.” He promised that within two to three weeks “we’re going to announce a series of new studies to identify precisely what environmental toxins are causing it.” He also floated the idea of using AI to help in those studies.  The causes of autism are still being studied, but it’s widely thought that both genetics and environmental factors likely play a role in who develops it. Nor are those environmental factors necessarily “toxins.” Dr. Paul Offit is a virologist, a pediatrician, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine used in infants. He told Mother Jones that a variety of factors can contribute to the risk of developing autism, including advanced maternal or paternal age, intrauterine infections when the mother is pregnant, genetics, and maternal health. “What those four things all have in common is that you’re born with autism,” he says. All the evidence, he says, “is that these are events that are occurring while the child is in the womb,” rather than what anti-vaccine advocates have suggested many times, that autism is caused by vaccines received after the child is born. Craig Newschaffer, a professor of biobehavioral health and an autism researcher at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Health and Human Development, said that while he believes environmental exposures could play a role in autism, the interaction between those and other factors is incredibly complex. “There’s probably a constellation of environmental factors that could be involved here that they probably account on their own for small increases in risk,” he said, “and they probably work in concert with genetic mechanisms.” Rejecting the idea that increased autism rates are due in part to better diagnosis and surveillance The press conference was called to respond to a new CDC report which showed a small increase in the number of 8-year-olds diagnosed with autism. Kennedy repeatedly rejected the idea that the increase was due to better autism diagnosis tools and surveillance, declaring that making that argument amounted to “epidemic denial,” and saying that genes “don’t cause epidemics.” Kennedy also said that the root causes of autism could be found much faster “because of A.I. and because of the digitalization of health records that are now available to us.” Craig Newschaffer, who has spent the better part of his career studying potential causes of autism, called Kennedy’s idea of using artificial intelligence to quickly solve the mystery of autism “extremely infeasible.” He noted large-scale efforts are already underway to use machine learning to analyze existing autism datasets—but the results of those studies, he said, are at least five years away.  Yet Penn State’s Newschaffer said his research had suggested that expanded diagnostic capabilities were indeed an important contributor to increasing autism rates. “There’s been lots of accumulation [of evidence] that the diagnostic tendency is a strong, strong factor in this,” he said.   Claiming there are “no” older autistic adults To bolster his claim that environmental exposures are causing autism rates to climb, Kennedy argued that older adults are not autistic. “Have you ever seen anybody our age—I’m 71 years old—with full-blown autism?” he asked. “Headbanging, nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, stimming, toe-walking, these other stereotypical features—where are these people walking around the mall?” Putting aside the scornful and stigmatizing way Kennedy spoke about profoundly autistic people, it’s simply not true that there are no older autistic adults, which we know for many reasons, including the fact that their health outcomes have been studied for years. Autistic elderly people are at greater risk than the general population for a range of health conditions, including cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and they’re also more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression. Older autistic adults report loneliness at higher rates than the general population, and research suggests that many of them could benefit from the social services and support they do not currently receive. All of these factors could limit the likelihood that Kennedy might see them “walking around the mall.”  Relying on an expert who has connections to pseudoscience groups Kennedy also brought Dr. Walter Zahorodny to join him on the stage. An associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers University’s medical school, he has been a lead researcher on the New Jersey Autism Study, which has monitored the state’s autism rate for two decades.    Zahorodny said during the press conference that he believed that the uptick in autism rates could not be explained by expanded diagnostic criteria. “I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether we call it an epidemic tsunami or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors,” he said, echoing Kennedy who has also claimed it is triggered by “toxic exposure.” Zahorodny has collaborated with researchers and groups who deal in pseudoscience or are controversial in the autism community. He appeared in a 2018 video produced by SafeMinds, a group that has suggested that mercury in vaccines causes autism and regularly works with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. In 2020, Zahorodny co-authored a study of autism rates in Black and Hispanic children with Cynthia Nevison, a University of Colorado climate scientist who is also a contributor to Children’s Health Defense. There, she writes not about climate but rather about her frustration with the lack of research into the “root causes” of autism. In addition, Zahorodny appeared on a 2020 episode of a podcast produced by the National Council on Severe Autism, which has come under fire for its support of the use of restraints for autistic people.  Melissa Alfieri Collins, an anti-vaccine activist in New Jersey, said in an email to Mother Jones that she had worked with Zahorodny in 2019 on her effort to defeat a bill that would have eliminated religious exemptions for childhood vaccination requirements. Zahorodny, Collins recalled, briefed legislators and “stated that vaccines could not currently be ruled out as one of multiple possible causes of sharply increasing autism prevalence.” The bill ultimately failed. Zahorodny did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Overall, Kennedy’s message worried autism researchers and mainstream scientists. But it was received ecstatically by the anti-vaccine community he’s long been a part of. Anti-vaccine activist Larry Cook, a California naturopath and one-man anti-vaccine clearinghouse, approvingly shared a tweet from Kennedy, underlining the places where the secretary referred to the “autism epidemic” and characterized autism as being “preventable.”  “We had the answers over 40 years ago,” Cook tweeted. “They were buried, dismissed, ridiculed, assassinated.”  Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine activist and the former spokesperson for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, who’s now the CEO of a group he co-founded with Kennedy called MAHA Action, also expressed his enthusiasm. “For decades we have been gaslit by every HHS Secretary that stood at this podium and denied that autism was an epidemic as it climbed from 1 in 10k to 1 in 31 (1 in 12.5 boys in CA),” he tweeted. “If you are watching a news organization that is not celebrating RFKJ in this historic moment it’s time to cancel your subscription forever. It’s now clear who they work for. #MAHA”

Activism
Climate
Food

Microplastics Make It into Your Food through Plant Leaves

New evidence shows plant leaves absorb airborne microplastics, a previously overlooked route for the particles to enter crops that has implications for ecology and human health

Plant Leaves Absorb Microplastics—And They End Up in Our FoodNew evidence shows plant leaves absorb airborne microplastics, a previously overlooked route for the particles to enter crops that has implications for ecology and human healthBy Willie Peijnenburg & Nature magazine Plants can absorb plastic particles directly from the air. Ruben Bonilla Gonzalo/Getty ImagesPlastic production is increasing sharply. This has raised concerns about the effects of microplastics (typically defined as plastic particles smaller than 5 millimetres in diameter) and nanoplastics (smaller plastic particles that are less than 1,000 nanometres in diameter) on human health. These concerns are partly influenced by alarming findings of the presence of microplastics in various human tissues, including the brain and placenta. Continuing research is examining pathways of human exposure to microplastics, including through food sources. Most attention is focused on soil and water as common sources of plastics that enter the food chain. However, writing in Nature, Li et al. provide strong evidence supporting the air as being a major route for plastics to enter plants.Plants can absorb plastic particles directly from the air. Particles in the air can enter leaves through various pathways, such as through structures on the leaf surface called the stomata and through the cuticle. Stomata are small openings made of cells, and the cuticle is a membrane, covered in insoluble wax, that is well suited for absorbing microplastics.Once inside the leaf (Fig. 1), microplastics move through spaces between plant cells and can also accumulate inside tiny hair-like structures, called trichomes, on the surface of leaves. Microplastics can also travel to and enter the plant’s water- and nutrient-transporting system (called the vascular bundle) and from there reach other tissues. Trichomes are ‘sinks’ for external particles and they therefore reduce the efficiency of microplastic transport from leaves to roots. Given that leaves are a key part of the food chain, microplastic particles that accumulate here can easily pass to herbivores and crop leaves, both of which can be directly consumed by humans.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.Microplastics can also travel to and enter the plant’s water- and nutrient-transporting system (called the vascular bundle). From there, microplastics can reach other tissues.Li and colleagues’ study demonstrates that the absorption and accumulation of atmospheric microplastics by plant leaves occurs widely in the environment, with the concentrations of these particles in plants being consistent with their concentrations in air at the sampling sites. The authors report that the concentrations of the microplastics polyethylene terephthalate and polystyrene were 10–100 times higher in open-air planted vegetables than in greenhouse-grown vegetables. Leaves with a longer growth duration and the outer leaves of vegetables contained higher microplastic concentrations than did younger leaves and inner leaves. Microplastic concentration in plants increased with the duration of exposure to these particles.Although the efficiency of leaf uptake of microplastics is extremely low (around 0.05%), Li and colleagues’ findings provide evidence from fieldwork of accumulation of atmospheric microplastics in leaves. The relative importance of this airborne exposure to microplastics in plants compared with that of other uptake routes is difficult to assess, because information available on microplastic uptake through soil and water is sparse. Li et al. report concentrations of polystyrene nanoplastics of about 7–10 nanograms per gram of the dry plant weight for lettuce leaves after outdoor exposure in Tianjin, China.In the case of exposure to microplastics in the water, plastic concentrations similar to those found in plants by Li and colleagues after airborne deposition could only be obtained previously by exposing lettuce roots to polystyrene nanoplastics in water, at exposure levels as high as 5 milligrams of plastic per litre of water. Another study examining plant exposure to microplastics in water reported that there was no plant uptake of these plastics from water entering a wastewater treatment site. In soil cultivation experiments reported by Li and colleagues, the root absorption of polystyrene nanoparticles that ended up in the shoot was less efficient than the absorption of airborne nanoplastics. Li and colleagues found that the level of the plastics that reached leaves from roots were well below the 7–10 nanograms per gram of dry plant weight that is associated with airborne deposition of nanoplastics. Li et al. report that levels of microplastics in air-exposed plants at highly microplastic-contaminated sites increased mostly tenfold compared with levels at non-contaminated sites.Researchers have found that microplastics in the air can enter plants, including crops, through the outer layer of cuticle and epidermal cells. They can then move through spaces between plant cells to enter tiny hair-like structures on the leaf surface called trichomes. Alternatively, after entering the leaf, microplastics can move to cells in a system called the vascular bundle that transports water and nutrients to tissues elsewhere in the plant.These findings illustrate the potential implications of airborne microplastics and nanoplastics accumulating in leaves and being transferred to herbivores and humans. This highlights a possible yet understudied pathway of plastic exposure that might have ecological and health implications. However, key gaps remain in scientists’ understanding of the various factors that influence the uptake, accumulation and biological effects of microplastics in humans. These knowledge gaps include: the composition of the average human diet and its role in determining exposure levels; the efficiency with which plastics accumulate in the gut; and the extent to which these particles reach key organs. Furthermore, there is a major lack of data on the threshold levels at which microplastics and nanoplastics might begin to exert harmful effects on human health.The combination of these uncertainties severely hinders efforts to accurately quantify the potential risks posed by airborne microplastics. Without a comprehensive and systematic approach to studying plastic fate and toxicity, our understanding remains incomplete. The current body of knowledge about the environmental and physiological effects of plastics is full of gaps, with no consistent data available on plastics of well-defined compositions, sizes, shapes or densities.A conclusion to draw from Li and co-authors’ work is that, although there is no widely supported consensus on the risks to humans from exposure to plastics, the deposition of these substances from the air into human food is an exposure pathway not to ignore. Combining these concerns with considerations of direct exposure of humans to airborne plastics might suffice to prompt the adoption of precautionary measures. Although research on the long-term health effects of plastics is still continuing, preliminary research suggests possible links to problems with breathing, inflammation and other adverse health outcomes. Given these uncertainties, integrating precautionary approaches — such as reducing plastic use and increasing public awareness — might help to lessen potential risks. Proactive measures might also encourage further scientific investigation into the extent of microplastic exposure and its health implications, ensuring better protection for individuals and for the environment.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 9, 2025.

Food
Health
Science

G' and his 'lovely girl': Gene Hackman penned poignant notes to wife amid Alzheimer's battle

The correspondence of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa was humorous, sad, moving and mundane, offering a glimpse into the couple's private life.

Authorities recently released a new cache of records in the death investigation of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa — including a series of heartfelt notes the couple left for each other, revealing the close-knit nature of their relationship even as Hackman’s health declined amid a battle with Alzheimer’s. The letters are at times humorous, sad, moving and mundane, offering a glimpse into the private and loving life the couple led before they were both found dead in their Santa Fe compound in February.The Oscar-winning actor affectionately signed most of the letters “Love G” and referred to Arakawa, his wife of 33 years, as “Lovely girl.” Included in the Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa death investigation are photos of letters the couple exchanged. (Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office) In some of the letters, he appeared to poke fun at his deteriorating memory.“I’m going down to that building out past the hot water place where you sit and do whatever it is that people are supposed to do in such a building — maybe I’ll remember once I get down there,” he wrote, signing the letter “love whats his name.” In another letter, he wrote a joking poem that may have referred to a medical visit, saying, “I’m off to see the wizard, the wizard of achie pokie. She stabs me here, she stabs me there, she stabs me almost everywhere.”“But I’ll survive, because after I am still alive,” the note continues. “(But sometimes just barely) Love G.”Hackman, 95, relied on Arakawa, 65, as his sole caregiver during his later years in life. Other evidence photographed around the home showed her detailed notes on the doses and timing of Hackman’s medications as well as the records she kept of his medical appointments in her calendar.In one letter, Hackman wished Arakawa “happy several days after your birthday” and wrote “sorry still about the dinner and having to ask for your help although it was appreciated.” Letters revealed in the investigation are humorous sad and often mundane. (Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office) Arakawa, too, left written notes for Hackman around the home, reminding him of where she was going and what she was doing.In one letter, she wrote that she was taking their dog Zin to obedience class and that she had left him a jigsaw puzzle on the table. Another letter taped to the wall simply read, “yoga 12:30 p.m.”Arakawa died around Feb. 11 of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare and often fatal respiratory illness spread by rodents, according to the New Mexico medical investigator’s office. In an environmental assessment, investigators found rodent feces, dead rodents and nests in structures on their property; however, there was no evidence of rodents found in their main home.Hackman died several days later of complications of advanced Alzheimer’s disease, kidney disease and heart disease, according to the medical investigator. Authorities believe he may have wandered the house for several days unaware of Arakawa’s death and unable to get help due to the advanced state of his disease. One of the couple’s three dogs, an Australian kelpie mix named Zinna, was found dead in a crate in their home when the couple were discovered on Feb. 26. A necropsy revealed that Zinna died of dehydration and starvation due to being confined. The other two dogs, who were able to roam the property, were found alive and taken into care. Recently released photos from the investigation showed that the couple displayed in their home dozens of agility ribbons won by their dogs.In addition to the new photos of the home and the letters, the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office released body camera video, an environmental assessment and a full investigation report this week.A New Mexico state judge had temporarily blocked the release of any records from the death investigation at the request of the Hackman estate. On March 31, however, a judge ruled that records from the investigation could be unsealed as long as they did not clearly show the couple’s bodies.

Health
Nature
Water

Air, Light Pollution Increase Risk Of Thyroid Cancer In Children

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, April 18, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- Babies exposed to air and light pollution have a higher risk of...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, April 18, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- Babies exposed to air and light pollution have a higher risk of developing childhood thyroid cancer, a new study says.Airborne particle pollution and outdoor artificial light both increased babies’ risk of developing thyroid cancer before they turned 20, researchers recently reported in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.“These results are concerning, especially given how widespread both of these exposures are,” lead researcher Nicole Deziel, an environmental epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, said in a news release.“Fine particulate matter is found in urban air pollution due to automobile traffic and industrial activity, and artificial light at night is common, particularly in densely populated urban areas,” she added.Both fine particle pollution and light pollution are considered environmental carcinogens that disrupt the body’s endocrine system, including thyroid function, researchers said in background notes.Particle pollution pose a threat because they’re small enough to enter the bloodstream. The airborne particles can be smaller than 2.5 micrometers, while a human hair is 50 to 70 micrometers wide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).And outdoor artificial light can suppress melatonin and alter a person’s sleep/wake rhythm, which also influences hormone-regulated cancers, researchers said.For the study, researchers compared data from 736 young people diagnosed with thyroid cancer before age 20 with that from 36,800 healthy kids, all of whom hail from California.The team assessed the cancer patients’ exposure to air and light pollution based on their families’ home address when they were born.Results showed that for every 10 micrograms per cubic meter increase in particle pollution, a child’s odds of developing thyroid cancer rose by 7% overall.The strongest associations between air pollution and thyroid cancer were found among 15- to 19-year-olds (8% increased risk) and Hispanic children (13% increased risk), researchers said.Likewise, children born in areas with high levels of outdoor artificial light were as much as 25% more likely to develop thyroid cancer."Thyroid cancer is among the fastest growing cancers among children and adolescents, yet we know very little about what causes it in this population," Deziel said."Our study is the first large-scale investigation to suggest that these exposures early in life — specifically to PM2.5 and outdoor light at night — may play a role in this concerning trend,” she added.Compared to adults, children are often diagnosed with thyroid cancer at more advanced stages, with larger and harder-to-treat tumors, researchers said.Even if kids survive thyroid cancer, they can suffer aftereffects like headaches, physical disabilities and mental fatigue that will haunt them throughout their lives, researchers said.Researchers emphasized that more work is needed to replicate and validate their findings.“In the meantime,” Deziel noted, “our results point to the critical importance of addressing environmental factors in childhood cancer research. Reducing exposures to air pollution and managing light pollution could be important steps in protecting children's health.”SOURCE: Yale School of Public Health, news release, April 15, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Pollution
Health

Get Ready for Expensive Tomatoes and Lots of Food Contamination

You could soon be hearing a lot of news about tomatoes. That’s because the Commerce Department announced this week that Mexican tomatoes will be subject to 21 percent tariffs starting July 14. If this goes through, expect tomato prices to rise precipitously: The United States relies heavily on greenhouse-grown tomatoes, of which the Agriculture Department estimates 88 percent are imported, with most coming from Mexico.Of course, the Trump administration’s tariff policy so far has not exactly been consistent or predictable. The president could drop this tomato tariff tomorrow and announce that he and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum have reached an understanding, brokered by Laura Loomer, that henceforth tomatoes imported from Mexico will be exempt from import duties and be known as “prosperity apples.” (Any publication daring to call them “tomatoes” will be kicked out of the White House press corps.)But again, if this tariff goes through, then taxing the bejeezus out of the second-most-consumed vegetable in the country will obviously have a noticeable impact on a lot of people’s grocery bills. Yet amazingly, this may be the least of American consumers’ worries right now when it comes to food disruption.The Guardian reported Tuesday that recent torrential rains have caused “millions of dollars of crop losses” in Texas and the Midwest. When added to the Trump administration’s cuts to farming infrastructure, climate-smart farming initiatives, and various food assistance programs that provided a market for some farmers, plus the trade war jeopardizing export markets in Mexico and China, this means that many U.S. farms are in trouble. “Without a bailout, we can only imagine how bad this will be for farmers,” Food and Water Watch’s Ben Murray told reporter Nina Lakhani. But other experts noted that even with a bailout, delivering the money fast enough might be an issue, and trade relations in particular could take time to rebuild. All this is in addition to, as this newsletter previously noted, substantial cuts both to the climate adaptation and mitigation efforts vital to long-term food production and to USDA’s operating budget. This week, Government Executive reported that planning documents reveal further cuts. They include firing “thousands” more USDA employees, “consolidat[ing] … local, county-based offices around the country into state committees,” and a 22 percent cut to salaries and expense accounts at the Farm Service Agency (which directly supports farms with loans and disaster assistance programs). Food safety will also take a hit. The Food and Drug Administration’s Human Foods Program, which works on food safety, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Environmental Health and Science Practice, which headed the response to the applesauce lead-poisoning fiasco in 2023, have both been gutted, Time recently reported. This comes after last month’s news that the Trump administration had axed two USDA committees advising on food safety: the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection, the former of which was busy reviewing last year’s fatal listeriosis outbreak and figuring out how to prevent repeats of the 2022 infant formula contamination that killed babies.The USDA also announced that it would be increasing line speeds at meatpacking plants and nixing “redundant” worker safety reports. This is deeply troubling on a humanitarian level, given that worker safety at meatpacking plants is already a nightmare, with gruesome injuries affecting a highly vulnerable workforce. (For more on this, read Melody Schreiber’s recent report in The Guardian or Ted Genoways’s award-winning 2023 piece for TNR about the shooting of a worker in an Oklahoma pork-processing plant.) As the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union vice president Mark Lauritsen said recently to the Times: “If the work force is under more pressure for speed, with less safety oversight, that can lead to a miscut on a carcass, bile that could leak out of the intestine, that contaminates the equipment, and then the next carcass and the next and the next.”Numerous outlets in recent years have reported the growing concerns about insufficient safeguards in the U.S. food system. Just two days after Trump’s inauguration, the Government Accountability Office delivered a report that rebuked USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service for its delays in finalizing rules to reduce pathogens in meat, and issued several recommendations for closing gaps in the agency’s approach to limiting salmonella and campylobacter outbreaks. It’s hard to imagine, given the chaos that has now befallen the entirety of the American food system and regulatory apparatus, that those recommendations are going to be speedily enacted.Stat of the Week470That’s how many wildfires the state of Wisconsin has seen this year, as of Monday this week—”double the average for this time of year,” Wisconsin Public Radio’s Danielle Kaeding reports.What I’m ReadingRevealed: Meat Industry Behind Attacks on Flagship Climate-Friendly Diet ReportIn 2019, a major, long-researched study known as the EAT-Lancet report, which compiles top recommendations for sustainable diets, sparked major backlash over one single recommendation: to cut global red meat consumption in half. Now “new evidence” indicates the backlash “was stoked by a PR firm that represents the meat and dairy sector,” investigative outlet DeSmog reports:A document seen by DeSmog appears to show the results of a campaign by the consultancy Red Flag, which catalogues the scale of the backlash to the report. The document indicates that Red Flag briefed journalists, think tanks, and social media influencers to frame the peer-reviewed research as “radical”, “out of touch” and “hypocritical”...Based on DeSmog’s review of the document, Red Flag’s attack campaign appears to have been conducted on behalf of the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), a meat and dairy industry coalition that was set up to protect the sector against “emerging threats”. The AAA counts representatives from Cargill and Smithfield Foods—two of the world’s five largest meat companies—on its board. Red Flag is known to have previously worked for members of the AAA.Red Flag’s campaign overview evaluates the success of social media posts from the AAA attacking the EAT-Lancet report, including a paid advertising campaign launched on behalf of the alliance that reached 780,000 people.The surge of criticism had adverse consequences for the report’s authors.… In some cases, the backlash led them to withdraw from promoting the research in the media, and undermined their academic careers. Read Clare Carlile’s full report at DeSmog.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

You could soon be hearing a lot of news about tomatoes. That’s because the Commerce Department announced this week that Mexican tomatoes will be subject to 21 percent tariffs starting July 14. If this goes through, expect tomato prices to rise precipitously: The United States relies heavily on greenhouse-grown tomatoes, of which the Agriculture Department estimates 88 percent are imported, with most coming from Mexico.Of course, the Trump administration’s tariff policy so far has not exactly been consistent or predictable. The president could drop this tomato tariff tomorrow and announce that he and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum have reached an understanding, brokered by Laura Loomer, that henceforth tomatoes imported from Mexico will be exempt from import duties and be known as “prosperity apples.” (Any publication daring to call them “tomatoes” will be kicked out of the White House press corps.)But again, if this tariff goes through, then taxing the bejeezus out of the second-most-consumed vegetable in the country will obviously have a noticeable impact on a lot of people’s grocery bills. Yet amazingly, this may be the least of American consumers’ worries right now when it comes to food disruption.The Guardian reported Tuesday that recent torrential rains have caused “millions of dollars of crop losses” in Texas and the Midwest. When added to the Trump administration’s cuts to farming infrastructure, climate-smart farming initiatives, and various food assistance programs that provided a market for some farmers, plus the trade war jeopardizing export markets in Mexico and China, this means that many U.S. farms are in trouble. “Without a bailout, we can only imagine how bad this will be for farmers,” Food and Water Watch’s Ben Murray told reporter Nina Lakhani. But other experts noted that even with a bailout, delivering the money fast enough might be an issue, and trade relations in particular could take time to rebuild. All this is in addition to, as this newsletter previously noted, substantial cuts both to the climate adaptation and mitigation efforts vital to long-term food production and to USDA’s operating budget. This week, Government Executive reported that planning documents reveal further cuts. They include firing “thousands” more USDA employees, “consolidat[ing] … local, county-based offices around the country into state committees,” and a 22 percent cut to salaries and expense accounts at the Farm Service Agency (which directly supports farms with loans and disaster assistance programs). Food safety will also take a hit. The Food and Drug Administration’s Human Foods Program, which works on food safety, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Environmental Health and Science Practice, which headed the response to the applesauce lead-poisoning fiasco in 2023, have both been gutted, Time recently reported. This comes after last month’s news that the Trump administration had axed two USDA committees advising on food safety: the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection, the former of which was busy reviewing last year’s fatal listeriosis outbreak and figuring out how to prevent repeats of the 2022 infant formula contamination that killed babies.The USDA also announced that it would be increasing line speeds at meatpacking plants and nixing “redundant” worker safety reports. This is deeply troubling on a humanitarian level, given that worker safety at meatpacking plants is already a nightmare, with gruesome injuries affecting a highly vulnerable workforce. (For more on this, read Melody Schreiber’s recent report in The Guardian or Ted Genoways’s award-winning 2023 piece for TNR about the shooting of a worker in an Oklahoma pork-processing plant.) As the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union vice president Mark Lauritsen said recently to the Times: “If the work force is under more pressure for speed, with less safety oversight, that can lead to a miscut on a carcass, bile that could leak out of the intestine, that contaminates the equipment, and then the next carcass and the next and the next.”Numerous outlets in recent years have reported the growing concerns about insufficient safeguards in the U.S. food system. Just two days after Trump’s inauguration, the Government Accountability Office delivered a report that rebuked USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service for its delays in finalizing rules to reduce pathogens in meat, and issued several recommendations for closing gaps in the agency’s approach to limiting salmonella and campylobacter outbreaks. It’s hard to imagine, given the chaos that has now befallen the entirety of the American food system and regulatory apparatus, that those recommendations are going to be speedily enacted.Stat of the Week470That’s how many wildfires the state of Wisconsin has seen this year, as of Monday this week—”double the average for this time of year,” Wisconsin Public Radio’s Danielle Kaeding reports.What I’m ReadingRevealed: Meat Industry Behind Attacks on Flagship Climate-Friendly Diet ReportIn 2019, a major, long-researched study known as the EAT-Lancet report, which compiles top recommendations for sustainable diets, sparked major backlash over one single recommendation: to cut global red meat consumption in half. Now “new evidence” indicates the backlash “was stoked by a PR firm that represents the meat and dairy sector,” investigative outlet DeSmog reports:A document seen by DeSmog appears to show the results of a campaign by the consultancy Red Flag, which catalogues the scale of the backlash to the report. The document indicates that Red Flag briefed journalists, think tanks, and social media influencers to frame the peer-reviewed research as “radical”, “out of touch” and “hypocritical”...Based on DeSmog’s review of the document, Red Flag’s attack campaign appears to have been conducted on behalf of the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), a meat and dairy industry coalition that was set up to protect the sector against “emerging threats”. The AAA counts representatives from Cargill and Smithfield Foods—two of the world’s five largest meat companies—on its board. Red Flag is known to have previously worked for members of the AAA.Red Flag’s campaign overview evaluates the success of social media posts from the AAA attacking the EAT-Lancet report, including a paid advertising campaign launched on behalf of the alliance that reached 780,000 people.The surge of criticism had adverse consequences for the report’s authors.… In some cases, the backlash led them to withdraw from promoting the research in the media, and undermined their academic careers. Read Clare Carlile’s full report at DeSmog.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Food
Agriculture
Climate

As EPA Rolls Back Regulations for Large Industrial Polluters, It Finds a New Target: A Two-Person Geoengineering Startup

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is demanding information from a small geoengineering startup company it says is launching pollution into the air.  The EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation submitted a demand for information to Make Sunsets, which launches balloons filled with sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere in an attempt to lower the planet’s […]

The company, Make Sunsets, launches balloons that release sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. The gas—less than what is released during a single cross-country flight—cools the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight.By Phil McKennaThe U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is demanding information from a small geoengineering startup company it says is launching pollution into the air. 

Pollution

Portland City Council moves to reject controversial PGE Forest Park transmission project

The Portland City Council moved Thursday to reject a PGE transmission upgrade project in Forest Park that would require the utility to clearcut more than 370 trees on about 5 acres in the park.

The Portland City Council moved Thursday to reject a Portland General Electric transmission upgrade project in Forest Park that would require the utility to clearcut more than 370 trees on about 5 acres in the park. The decision Thursday night – described as “tentative” until a final vote on May 7 – came after councilors considered appeals by the Forest Park Conservancy and Forest Park Neighborhood Association to overturn a city of Portland hearings officer approval in March of PGE’s proposal. The vote followed five hours of presentations and public testimony and directs city attorneys to write an ordinance to grant the appeals and overturn the hearings officer’s decision. PGE can appeal to the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals. PGE wants to rewire a 1970s transmission line and add a second line in the utility’s existing right-of-way and said the upgrade will address an increase in the region’s energy demand and prevent rolling blackouts in North and Northwest Portland. A report from Portland’s Permitting and Development Office in January recommended that the hearings officer turn down PGE’s project due to non-compliance with environmental standards and the city’s Forest Park management plan. But hearings officer Marisha Childs last month went against those recommendations, agreeing with PGE about the need for the project and finding that routing through Forest Park “is the least environmentally detrimental option” of all the alternatives PGE analyzed. The two groups that filed the appeals said PGE failed to meet city approval criteria and that project would set a precedent for further development in the park. PGE’s proposal had touched off a months-long clash between the utility and opponents who seek to protect the trees in the 5,200-acre park because they provide valuable habitat for countless wildlife species and climate benefits to all city residents. More than 3,000 people filed testimony about the project, including over 1,000 who sent in comments ahead of the appeals hearing, with the vast majority against the upgrade. Several hundred protesters gathered at City Hall before the hearing. They held cardboard cutouts of trees, animals and insects and signs that read “Save Forest Park,” “No more ecocide” and “You have to be nuts to destroy Forest Park.” A protester at Portland City Hall holds a sign opposing PGE's transmission upgrade project in Forest Park ahead of a City Council appeals hearing. Beth Nakamura“It’s important to have more energy transmission infrastructure, power lines and responsive grids, yet this is one of the situations where it is very clear there is no ambiguity. PGE can build this project elsewhere in order to keep the lights on,” Damon Motz-Storey, the Sierra Club Oregon chapter’s director, told the crowd. “These trees have been standing since before we even had electricity in homes.”Motz-Storey then led the rally in a chant: “Listen to the people and the trees, not PGE.” Protesters and park advocates filled the council chambers and two overflow rooms, testifying one after another that the PGE project runs counter to the city’s plan to sustain an old-growth forest in Forest Park and asking for the council to save the trees and protect the park. Protesters at Portland City Hall listen as the City Council considers the appeals on PGE's controversial Forest Park transmission project. Beth Nakamura“This project is unacceptable to us and the community and the critters and plants that depend on us to say no to cutting trees, building roads, bulldozing, filling in wetlands and streams and saying this is good for climate resilience,” said Scott Fogarty, executive director with Forest Park Conservancy, the group that filed one of the appeals. The conservancy formed to maintain trails and restore native habitat in the park. Fogarty said PGE’s proposed plan to offset losses from the upgrade does not address cutting down 100-year-old trees and the benefits they bring. The mitigation proposal includes planting Oregon white oak seedlings near the project area, seeding the transmission corridor and access road edges with a pollinator-friendly native seed mix and paying a fee to the city to remove invasive species in the park. He also said the upgrade would pave the way for city approval of future phases of the project in Forest Park and lead to more tree removal. PGE has said those future phases could affect another 15 acres of the park. “Is 5 acres acceptable? Is 20 acres acceptable? Where do we draw the line?” Fogarty asked the council members. “One could argue losing just one 100-year-old tree is unacceptable, let alone 5 acres. In the age of climate resilience, this project flies in the face of retaining carbon suckers in a region that is seeing increased impacts from climate change, including potential fire danger.” PGE argued before the council that the project area is neither old nor ancient forest and that the maintenance of existing transmission lines is key to preserving blackout-free electricity. A proposal by Portland General Electric to cut more than 370 trees in Forest Park to upgrade transmission lines has spurred opposition. The utility and renewable energy proponents say the upgrades are needed to address transmission bottlenecks and fulfill state clean energy mandates.courtesy of Portland General Electric“Alleviating this choke point is important because our experts predict that as early as 2028 there is the risk of outages during times of peak demand,” said Randy Franks, a senior project manager for PGE. “Think about the hottest part of the day, during an ongoing heat wave, with no fans and no air conditioning.”Franks said the more than 20 alternatives PGE examined were not practical, would require the utility to take property through eminent domain, would take too much time or cost too much – and could lead to similar or even greater negative impacts to trees and wildlife outside the park. He said the city’s Forest Park management plan acknowledges the existence of utility corridors and the need to maintain and upgrade them over time and that doing so will help reduce global warming.“If we are serious about combating climate change, we simply have to improve the grid, keep it reliable and increase transmission capacity,” Franks said. Only a handful of people testified in favor of PGE’s plans. “Utilities around the country, including ours, are facing the most rapid load increases in a generation and concomitant reliability challenges. At the same time, our state is laboring to remove from the grid the coal and gas plants that are fueling climate change locally,” said Angus Duncan, the former chair of the Northwest Conservation and Power Planning Council, a group tasked with developing and maintaining a regional power plan. “We need to rebuild the power system to exclude fossil generation.” Council members Angelita Morillo and Steve Novick questioned the assertion that PGE’s proposal would help combat climate change. Novick also asked why PGE did not provide more evidence as to why the transmission upgrades are needed by 2028, not at a later date. Other councilors said they did not feel PGE had proved an alternative outside the park was unfeasible and did not present a compelling mitigation plan. And most of the 12 council members said they disagreed with PGE and the hearings officer that the proposal meets the parameters of the park’s management plan. “Ultimately, I think what has been proposed is probably the best option in the park,” said Councilor Eric Zimmerman. But, he said, nothing in PGE’s proposal showed that the council should overrule the Forest Park management plan. “I don’t think the standard has been met to not follow that plan,” Zimmerman said.Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney agreed. “If an alternative (to the project) exists, we should not be granting an exception,” she said. Councilor Dan Ryan said the decision will likely be one of many to pit the needs for clean electricity against those of protecting the environment. “Portland will be having more and more tough decisions that include extremely difficult trade-offs. This is just where we are in managing the climate crisis,” Ryan said. “I think PGE worked really hard to find the best option and yet we all want a different option.” That’s because, he added, he – like other Portlanders – loves the park and its trees. “Forest Park is a cathedral,” Ryan said. “And maybe it’s Holy Week and I’m just treating this in a very spiritual way, but it’s just really difficult for me to think I could take a vote that would on the appearance be about deforesting Forest Park during this sacred week.” — Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at gwozniacka@oregonian.com or 971-421-3154.Our journalism needs your support. Subscribe today to OregonLive.com.

Forests
Animals
Conservation

Workshop explores new advanced materials for a growing world

Speakers described challenges and potential solutions for producing materials to meet demands associated with data centers, infrastructure, and other technology.

It is clear that humankind needs increasingly more resources, from computing power to steel and concrete, to meet the growing demands associated with data centers, infrastructure, and other mainstays of society. New, cost-effective approaches for producing the advanced materials key to that growth were the focus of a two-day workshop at MIT on March 11 and 12.A theme throughout the event was the importance of collaboration between and within universities and industries. The goal is to “develop concepts that everybody can use together, instead of everybody doing something different and then trying to sort it out later at great cost,” said Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.The workshop was produced by MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), which has an industry collegium, and MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program. The program included an address by Javier Sanfelix, lead of the Advanced Materials Team for the European Union. Sanfelix gave an overview of the EU’s strategy to developing advanced materials, which he said are “key enablers of the green and digital transition for European industry.”That strategy has already led to several initiatives. These include a material commons, or shared digital infrastructure for the design and development of advanced materials, and an advanced materials academy for educating new innovators and designers. Sanfelix also described an Advanced Materials Act for 2026 that aims to put in place a legislative framework that supports the entire innovation cycle.Sanfelix was visiting MIT to learn more about how the Institute is approaching the future of advanced materials. “We see MIT as a leader worldwide in technology, especially on materials, and there is a lot to learn about [your] industry collaborations and technology transfer with industry,” he said.Innovations in steel and concreteThe workshop began with talks about innovations involving two of the most common human-made materials in the world: steel and cement. We’ll need more of both but must reckon with the huge amounts of energy required to produce them and their impact on the environment due to greenhouse-gas emissions during that production.One way to address our need for more steel is to reuse what we have, said C. Cem Tasan, the POSCO Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) and director of the Materials Research Laboratory.But most of the existing approaches to recycling scrap steel involve melting the metal. “And whenever you are dealing with molten metal, everything goes up, from energy use to carbon-dioxide emissions. Life is more difficult,” Tasan said.The question he and his team asked is whether they could reuse scrap steel without melting it. Could they consolidate solid scraps, then roll them together using existing equipment to create new sheet metal? From the materials-science perspective, Tasan said, that shouldn’t work, for several reasons.But it does. “We’ve demonstrated the potential in two papers and two patent applications already,” he said. Tasan noted that the approach focuses on high-quality manufacturing scrap. “This is not junkyard scrap,” he said.Tasan went on to explain how and why the new process works from a materials-science perspective, then gave examples of how the recycled steel could be used. “My favorite example is the stainless-steel countertops in restaurants. Do you really need the mechanical performance of stainless steel there?” You could use the recycled steel instead.Hessam Azarijafari addressed another common, indispensable material: concrete. This year marks the 16th anniversary of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub), which began when a set of industry leaders and politicians reached out to MIT to learn more about the benefits and environmental impacts of concrete.The hub’s work now centers around three main themes: working toward a carbon-neutral concrete industry; the development of a sustainable infrastructure, with a focus on pavement; and how to make our cities more resilient to natural hazards through investment in stronger, cooler construction.Azarijafari, the deputy director of the CSHub, went on to give several examples of research results that have come out of the CSHub. These include many models to identify different pathways to decarbonize the cement and concrete sector. Other work involves pavements, which the general public thinks of as inert, Azarijafari said. “But we have [created] a state-of-the-art model that can assess interactions between pavement and vehicles.” It turns out that pavement surface characteristics and structural performance “can influence excess fuel consumption by inducing an additional rolling resistance.”Azarijafari emphasized  the importance of working closely with policymakers and industry. That engagement is key “to sharing the lessons that we have learned so far.”Toward a resource-efficient microchip industryConsider the following: In 2020 the number of cell phones, GPS units, and other devices connected to the “cloud,” or large data centers, exceeded 50 billion. And data-center traffic in turn is scaling by 1,000 times every 10 years.But all of that computation takes energy. And “all of it has to happen at a constant cost of energy, because the gross domestic product isn’t changing at that rate,” said Kimerling. The solution is to either produce much more energy, or make information technology much more energy-efficient. Several speakers at the workshop focused on the materials and components behind the latter.Key to everything they discussed: adding photonics, or using light to carry information, to the well-established electronics behind today’s microchips. “The bottom line is that integrating photonics with electronics in the same package is the transistor for the 21st century. If we can’t figure out how to do that, then we’re not going to be able to scale forward,” said Kimerling, who is director of the MIT Microphotonics Center.MIT has long been a leader in the integration of photonics with electronics. For example, Kimerling described the Integrated Photonics System Roadmap – International (IPSR-I), a global network of more than 400 industrial and R&D partners working together to define and create photonic integrated circuit technology. IPSR-I is led by the MIT Microphotonics Center and PhotonDelta. Kimerling began the organization in 1997.Last year IPSR-I released its latest roadmap for photonics-electronics integration, “which  outlines a clear way forward and specifies an innovative learning curve for scaling performance and applications for the next 15 years,” Kimerling said.Another major MIT program focused on the future of the microchip industry is FUTUR-IC, a new global alliance for sustainable microchip manufacturing. Begun last year, FUTUR-IC is funded by the National Science Foundation.“Our goal is to build a resource-efficient microchip industry value chain,” said Anuradha Murthy Agarwal, a principal research scientist at the MRL and leader of FUTUR-IC. That includes all of the elements that go into manufacturing future microchips, including workforce education and techniques to mitigate potential environmental effects.FUTUR-IC is also focused on electronic-photonic integration. “My mantra is to use electronics for computation, [and] shift to photonics for communication to bring this energy crisis in control,” Agarwal said.But integrating electronic chips with photonic chips is not easy. To that end, Agarwal described some of the challenges involved. For example, currently it is difficult to connect the optical fibers carrying communications to a microchip. That’s because the alignment between the two must be almost perfect or the light will disperse. And the dimensions involved are minuscule. An optical fiber has a diameter of only millionths of a meter. As a result, today each connection must be actively tested with a laser to ensure that the light will come through.That said, Agarwal went on to describe a new coupler between the fiber and chip that could solve the problem and allow robots to passively assemble the chips (no laser needed). The work, which was conducted by researchers including MIT graduate student Drew Wenninger, Agarwal, and Kimerling, has been patented, and is reported in two papers. A second recent breakthrough in this area involving a printed micro-reflector was described by Juejun “JJ” Hu, John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.FUTUR-IC is also leading educational efforts for training a future workforce, as well as techniques for detecting — and potentially destroying — the perfluroalkyls (PFAS, or “forever chemicals”) released during microchip manufacturing. FUTUR-IC educational efforts, including virtual reality and game-based learning, were described by Sajan Saini, education director for FUTUR-IC. PFAS detection and remediation were discussed by Aristide Gumyusenge, an assistant professor in DMSE, and Jesus Castro Esteban, a postdoc in the Department of Chemistry.Other presenters at the workshop included Antoine Allanore, the Heather N. Lechtman Professor of Materials Science and Engineering; Katrin Daehn, a postdoc in the Allanore lab; Xuanhe Zhao, the Uncas (1923) and Helen Whitaker Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Richard Otte, CEO of Promex; and Carl Thompson, the Stavros V. Salapatas Professor in Materials Science and Engineering.

Technology
Chemicals
Crisis

In East Palestine Derailment Trial, Railroad and Chemical Maker Agree on Who Pays Residents

Norfolk Southern reached an agreement with one of the two companies it has been trying to force to help pay for the $600 million class-action settlement it agreed to over its disastrous 2023 train derailment near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and the toxic chemicals that were released and burned

Norfolk Southern reached an agreement with one of two companies about how much each side will help pay for a $600 million class-action settlement, which the railroad agreed to after the disastrous 2023 Ohio train derailment and toxic chemicals that were released and burned.This lawsuit doesn’t change anything about how much money people will receive from the settlement or any payments to the village of East Palestine or anyone else — those are all established in various settlement agreements. This case only affects which companies have to write the checks to pay for the class-action settlement, which is separate from the cost of the massive environmental cleanup.The railroad and OxyVinyls, the chemical company that made the vinyl chloride that was released and burned after the derailment, announced the settlement Thursday in the midst of the ongoing trial over who should pay people affected by the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.The two companies didn't disclose any details of the agreement in their brief statement.The third company involved in the lawsuit, GATX, which owned the railcar that caused the derailment, declined to comment on the settlement. The case is expected to go to the jury next week in a trial that began late last month.Residents are still waiting to receive most of the money from the settlement because of pending appeals, although some payments have started to go out.After the train derailed in East Palestine, an assortment of chemicals spilled and caught fire. Then three days later, officials blew open five tank cars filled with vinyl chloride because they feared those cars might explode, generating a massive black plume of smoke that spread over the area and forced evacuations. The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed in its investigation that the vent-and-burn operation was unnecessary because the tank cars were starting to cool off and the railroad failed to listen to the advice from OxyVinyls’ experts or share their opinions with the officials who made the decision.But during the trial, Norfolk Southern raised questions about conflicting information that OxyVinyls' representatives on scene and at headquarters provided as officials were deciding whether to release and burn the vinyl chloride.Norfolk Southern has said all along that it believes OxyVinyls should help pay because the railroad says the chemical manufacturer provided inconsistent and inaccurate information about its vinyl chloride before officials decided to burn it.Last year, Norfolk Southern lost a similar lawsuit when it tried to force GATX and OxyVinyls to help pay for the environmental cleanup after the derailment, which has cost the Atlanta-based railroad more than $1 billion. It made similar arguments in this trial to get help paying for the class-action settlement.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Chemicals
Transportation

No Results today.

Our news is updated constantly with the latest environmental stories from around the world. Reset or change your filters to find the most active current topics.

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.