Members of the US Army National Guard patrolling Penn Station in New York City. | Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images Crime rates are falling. Why are lawmakers passing tough-on-crime bills? When it comes to public safety, lawmakers have two primary jobs: enacting policies that curb crime and making their constituents feel safe. It might seem like those two things go hand-in-hand; after all, if lawmakers successfully reduce crime rates, then people have less to worry about. But as has been especially evident recently, there can be a big disconnect between actual crime trends and how people feel about them. According to a Gallup poll, for example, the share of Americans who believe that crime is an “extremely” or “very serious” problem afflicting the country recently hit an all-time high — 63 percent in 2023, up from 48 percent just five years earlier. But the crime data paints a very different picture: According to the FBI, after an uptick in crime in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, crime rates have actually been falling across the country, with murders declining by 13 percent between 2022 and 2023. In New York City, one of the cities Republicans often point to as a supposed example of lawlessness, shootings are down 25 percent, and homicides are down 11 percent. “We keep getting a lot of really great information suggesting that violent crime is declining — in some cases extremely sharply,” said Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. “At the same time, there’s a real lag between what the data show and how people perceive the data.” That gap between reality and public perception is proving to have serious consequences. “Elected officials don’t govern based on necessarily what the data say,” Grawert said. “They govern on what the data say and how the public perceives it.” So as long as people continue to feel that crime is a problem — a reality prompted by an early pandemic crime spike and subsequently fueled by media reports that often overstated the rise in crime — lawmakers feel pressured to respond to a problem that, by and large, appears to be subsiding. That’s why a slew of cities and states have started adopting laws that hark back to the tough-on-crime approach of the 1980s and ’90s, a trend that has crossed party lines. Some jurisdictions, for example, have dramatically increased police presence, cracked down on homeless encampments, and imposed harsher penalties for petty crimes. These policies, in both Republican and Democratic jurisdictions, threaten the meaningful progress that criminal justice reform advocates achieved in the past decade, including a reduction in the prison population. This kind of legislation is both shortsighted and irresponsible: Many of these bills are getting enacted after crime began falling, which not only means they’re likely unnecessary, but they could also potentially pave the way for a reinvigorated era of mass incarceration. New crime bills are not responding to actual crime trends Louisiana was once known as the prison capital of the world, with more prisoners per capita than any other US state, or country for that matter. In 2012, according to the Times-Picayune, one in 86 adults in the state was serving time in prison, which at the time was almost twice the national average. The racial disparities were staggering, too: In New Orleans, one in seven Black men was either in prison, on parole, or on probation. But following a wave of criminal justice reforms across the country, some of which had bipartisan support, Louisiana lawmakers sought to change the state’s reputation. They succeeded, overhauling crime laws and ultimately reducing the prison population. The number of people held in prison for nonviolent offenses, for example, declined by 50 percent between 2016 and 2023. Legislators in the state recently passed changes to its criminal justice system that will likely reverse that pattern. The new laws will impose harsher penalties and longer sentences for a range of offenses, including carjackings and drug dealing, make it significantly harder to qualify for parole or overturn a wrongful conviction, and treat 17-year-olds who are charged with a crime as adults. But deep-red Louisiana isn’t the only place this sort of change of heart is happening. In San Francisco, voters approved ballot measures in March that would expand police surveillance and impose drug tests on welfare recipients — showing a public appetite, even among liberal voters, to do away with a more forgiving law enforcement approach. And in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, recently deployed hundreds of National Guard troops to patrol the city subway system, despite the fact that crime on the subway was relatively rare and already on the decline. One area getting a lot of lawmakers’ attention is drug enforcement, especially against the backdrop of rising overdose deaths across the country. Oregon’s Democratic governor, for example, recently signed a bill that recriminalized possession of drugs in the state, reversing a decriminalization ballot measure that voters passed in 2020. But criminalization of drugs in particular is an easy way for lawmakers to say they’re responding to a problem without actually committing the necessary resources to address it, like making treatment centers more accessible. “The laws that are being proposed to counteract this by punishing people are not being proposed with public safety in mind,” Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, told me. If they were, she said, they would be accompanied by an expansion of programs, including treatment centers and safe injection sites. Part of the tough-on-crime trend can be explained by the fact that an election is coming up, and politicians are concerned that the public’s sentiment about crime might sway voters. Fear-mongering about crime — and law-and-order campaigns in particular — is especially popular among Republicans every election cycle. This time around, Democrats seem to be responding not by pointing to declining crime trends, but by trying to appear even tougher on crime than their Republican counterparts. Given people’s attitudes toward crime — and the wrong public perception that crime is on the rise — Democrats might be justifiably worried about appearing out of touch if they deny their constituents’ distorted reality. But that just leads to bad policymaking as a result. “It’s a punitive turn in American policymaking that reflects a political establishment that doesn’t have any good ideas,” Bertram said. “Republicans love to make penalties harsher and sentences longer. To see Democrats bandwagoning on it is sinister and new and reflects a fear that they don’t have enough in their platform.” A renewed era of mass incarceration After the number of prisoners in the United States peaked at around 2.3 million people in 2008, a range of criminal justice reform bills succeeded in bringing that number down by reducing sentences, decriminalizing drugs, and by prosecutors being more selective about which laws to enforce and against whom. And in 2020, after the Covid pandemic prompted lawmakers to release low-risk prisoners, the prison population dipped to around 1.7 million. In recent years, the number of people in prison has been starting to creep back up, increasing by 2 percent nationally between 2021 and 2022. In some states, the rise has been much more pronounced, like in Mississippi, where the prison population grew by 14.3 percent in the same period. That’s in part because crime did indeed rise during the pandemic, but it’s also likely the result of a stricter law enforcement approach to low-level crimes. The overblown shoplifting panic, for example, prompted many states and local prosecutors to impose harsher penalties on offenders, despite the fact that shoplifting, like other crimes, was trending downward. It’s too early to know just how much the new tough-on-crime laws will affect the overall prison population, but they could potentially erase years of progress and further entrench America’s era of mass incarceration as a permanent reality. It’s easy for lawmakers to forget that when the public seems desperately afraid of a crime wave that seems to no longer exist. “There’s a sort of sense of ‘We have to do something, this is something, let’s do it,’ rather than a sober-minded, careful response to the data and the history, and what we know works and what doesn’t,” Grawert said. Indeed, it’s important for lawmakers to take a long-term approach to crime instead of trying to find a quick fix to a short-term problem. One way lawmakers can remind themselves of that is this tidbit in public polling: The same poll that showed that 63 percent of Americans think crime is a very serious problem nationally also showed that only 17 percent believed crime was an extremely or very serious problem in the area they lived in. That could be because while they might read about a supposed crime wave across the country, they’re not actually seeing any evidence of it in their own neighborhoods. Even if new tough-on-crime laws are intended to assuage the public’s fears about crime, they’re seemingly unnecessary and end up hurting everyone in the long term. After all, policy responses like New York sending the National Guard to the subway, which only visibly reinforce the idea that there’s an active threat, won’t only make people feel less safe; they’ll likely lead to more arrests for low-level offenses, too. Lawmakers should ask themselves: What would that actually achieve?

Former President Donald Trump greets his own appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, ahead of the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 04, 2020. | Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images The justices already effectively gave Trump what he wants in his Supreme Court immunity case. Today, the Supreme Court will hear what might be one of its least consequential arguments in modern history. I’m referring, of course, to Trump v. United States, the case asking whether former President Donald Trump is immune from a federal criminal prosecution arising out of his failed attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. This is one of the most widely followed cases the Supreme Court has heard in recent memory. For the first time in American history, a former president faces criminal charges. And these charges are a doozy, alleging that Trump targeted our democracy itself. So why is this argument so inconsequential? The answer is that Trump has already won everything he could reasonably expect to win from the Supreme Court, and then some. Even this Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican-appointed supermajority, is unlikely to buy Trump’s argument that former presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump’s lawyers have not even attempted to hide the implications of this argument. When the case was heard by a lower federal court, a judge asked Trump’s lawyer if the former president was immune from prosecution even if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.” Trump’s lawyer responded that Trump was immune, unless he were first impeached and convicted by the Senate. If you’re curious about the legal arguments in this case, I dove into them here. But again, they are a sideshow. Trump’s goal is to delay his trial for as long as possible — ideally, from his perspective, until after this November’s election. And in this respect, the Supreme Court has already given him what he wants. So long as this case is sitting before the justices, that trial cannot happen. And the justices have repeatedly refused special prosecutor Jack Smith’s requests to decide this immunity question on an expedited schedule that would ensure that Trump’s criminal trial can still happen before November. This decision to put Trump’s appeal on the slow track is part of a much larger pattern in this Supreme Court: The justices do not always need to rule in favor of a conservative party on the merits in order to achieve a conservative result. They can do so simply by manipulating their own calendar. How the Court games its calendar to benefit litigants on the right By handling requests from Republican litigants with alacrity, while dragging their feet when a Democrat (or someone prosecuting a Republican) seeks Supreme Court review, the justices can and have handed big victories to right-wing causes while simultaneously sabotaging liberals. Before the Trump case reached the Supreme Court, this penchant for manipulative scheduling was most apparent in immigration cases. During the Trump administration, lower courts often handed down decisions blocking the former president’s immigration policies, and the Court (often over the dissent of several justices appointed by Democrats) moved quite swiftly to put Trump’s policies back in place. In Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary(2019), for example, after a lower court blocked a Trump administration policy locking many migrants out of the asylum process, the Court reinstated this policy about two weeks after the administration asked it to do so. Similarly, in Wolf v. Cook County(2020), the Court reinstated a Trump administration policy targeting low-income immigrants just eight days after Trump’s lawyers sought relief from the justices. Once Biden came into office, however, the Court hit the brakes. In August 2021, for example, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a Trump appointee who is known for handing down poorly reasoned decisions implementing right-wing policy preferences — ordered the federal government to reinstate a Trump-era immigration policy known as “Remain in Mexico.” Though the Supreme Court eventually reversed Kacsmaryk’s decision, it sat on the case for more than 10 months, effectively letting Kacsmaryk dictate the nation’s border policy for that whole time. Similarly, after another Trump-appointed judge struck down a Biden administration memo laying out enforcement priorities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Court waited about 11 months before finally intervening and restoring the administration’s longstanding power to set priorities for law enforcement agencies. The point is that, even in cases where the justices ultimately conclude that a conservative litigant should not prevail, they frequently hand that litigant a significant victory by sitting on the case and allowing a Republican policy to remain in effect for sometimes more than a year.(Given the slow pace of most litigation, this might not be particularly remarkable — except for the stark difference in how the Court has treated suits against Trump and Biden’s policies.) The Court’s ability to set its own calendar allows it to manipulate US policy without actually endorsing lower court decisions that cannot be defended on the merits. The Court’s behavior in the Trump immunity case is a close cousin to this tactic. Again, it is difficult to imagine even this Supreme Court ruling that presidents may commit crimes with impunity. But the Court does not need to explicitly declare that Trump is above the law to place him above the law. All it has to do is string out his immunity claim for as long as possible. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images The potential TikTok ban is now law. What happens next? The bill to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban made it to President Joe Biden’s desk on Wednesday as part of a huge foreign aid package that passed through Congress this week. And Biden, as he previously promised, signed the bill into law. ByteDance now has nine months to sell TikTok, a deadline that Biden can opt to extend once by 90 days. And while TikTok could avoid a ban with a successful sale or court challenge, the new law means Americans might want to start imagining an online world without TikTok. The push to either ban TikTok or excise the platform from its owner has been around for years. For instance, then-President Trump announced plans to ban the app in the summer of 2020, although Trump now says he thinks banning TikTok is a bad idea and that people should be mad at Biden about it. The threat of a TikTok ban has always been a little weird and complicated, drawing from a mixture of valid concerns and questionable moral panics about the ills of social media. As I’ve written previously, TikTok’s moderation failures and data privacy concerns are hardly unique, even as some lawmakers seem to persist in holding TikTok uniquely responsible for perpetuating them. With that in mind, let’s break down the implications of this new law, why it’s happening, and what the internet would look like if TikTok disappeared. What you need to know about the ban Now that Biden has signed the bill into law, ByteDance has at least nine months — and possibly one year — to sell TikTok. It’s not clear, though, whether the law will survive a court challenge, which TikTok has already vowed to do. The government is likely prepared for this, as the new law was the result of years of planning by lawmakers, triggering waves of opposition from TikTok executives and the app’s huge user base, which includes 170 million Americans, according to TikTok. Congress made one earlier attempt to pass such a ban in March. That bill, which passed the House but didn’t make it through the Senate, gave ByteDance just six months to sell TikTok. The new version’s extended deadline may have helped sway some people in the Senate to vote for the bill. It certainly didn’t hurt that the TikTok ban was attached to a $95 billion aid deal that would provide support to Ukraine and Israel. TikTok CEO Shou Chew said Wednesday that the app wasn’t “going anywhere” and that the company believes the courts will ultimately find the ban unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment. The US government would need to meet a high standard to prove that a ban is necessary to protect the nation’s security and privacy in order to prevail. Montana’s statewide ban of TikTok was blocked by a federal judge late last year as a likely violation of the First Amendment. The state is appealing that decision. ByteDance could also, you know, sell. However, the Chinese government has previously said that it would oppose a forced sale of TikTok. Why is this happening? Great question! The lawmakers leading the charge on this ban have cited national security concerns stemming from the app’s Chinese ownership. Specifically, they’ve mentioned the possibility of the Chinese government accessing the data of American users and using the app to spread propaganda or influence foreign elections. Members of Congress have referred to information they learned in security briefings about the potential for TikTok to harm American interests, but the contents of those briefings are not public. Arguments in favor of banning TikTok note that the app’s Chinese ownership puts user data at risk of access by an unfriendly foreign government; critics note that the Chinese government could access a lot of the same data by simply buying it from a data broker. There’s another driving force here, though. As we’ve previously noted, the current push for a ban in Congress gained a lot of attention after a viral but unfounded accusation spread that TikTok was brainwashing the youth of America with anti-Israel content in the first days of the Israel-Hamas war. That narrative seemed to rekindle a lot of fears about the power of TikTok to become a propaganda tool. What changes if TikTok goes away in the US? This isn’t the first time a major force in internet culture has faced extinction (RIP Vine). In fact, this churn is increasingly part of being online now. But TikTok, arguably, is the most influential online platform in the US, and it won’t be easily replaced. If TikTok goes away, other platforms will try to jump into the void it will leave. As the Washington Post’s Will Oremus wrote, a TikTok ban would provide an open space for Meta and Google to move in. Meta has already adapted a lot of TikTok’s features via Reels, and Google’s YouTube has its Shorts video format, but neither quite has the cultural force behind them that TikTok has right now. A lot of bigger creators — those with resources, managers, and huge followings — will be able to switch to another platform, if they haven’t already. Everyone else might see things shift more dramatically. Earlier this year, Zari A. Taylor, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies media and culture, explained to me that the biggest loss to online culture if TikTok goes away will be in the uniqueness of how the platform promotes videos into user feeds. TikTok is good at recommending videos by accounts with small followings, whose makers are often not professional content creators. These creators “don’t have the audience that could help them evolve into other areas of the entertainment industry,” she said, and will likely lose their audience should the ban stand. In some ways, the constant threat of a ban has already taken a toll on TikTok’s appeal for creators. After the first wave of TikTok ban threats back in 2020, I spoke with Ryan Beard, a creator who at the time had nearly 2 million TikTok followers. The threat of a ban from President Trump sent his livelihood into a spiral, and he accelerated his efforts to get views and followers on other apps. These days, he’s all but stopped posting on TikTok and has instead become a commentary YouTuber. When TikTok rose in influence, it was better than any other app at showing users what they wanted to see, for better or for worse. Short, vertical-format videos might be available on any old platform these days, but the format doesn’t replicate what keeps people scrolling. Some, like Beard, will turn their modest TikTok success into views on another platform. For many others, even the threat of the ban is a harsh reminder of the realities of making content on the internet: Your livelihood is tied to the success and attention of platforms you don’t control. A version of this story was published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

The world might soon see a sustained decline in greenhouse gas emissions. | Eric Yang/Getty Images Greenhouse gas emissions might have already peaked. Now they need to fall — fast. Earth is coming out of the hottest year on record, amplifying the destruction from hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, and drought. The oceans remain alarmingly warm, triggering the fourth global coral bleaching event in history. Concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere have reached levels not seen on this planet for millions of years, while humanity’s demand for the fossil fuels that produce this pollution is the highest it has ever been. Yet at the same time, the world may be closer than ever to turning a corner in the effort to corral climate change. Last year, more solar panels were installed in China — the world’s largest carbon emitter — than the US has installed in its entire history. More electric vehicles were sold worldwide than ever. Energy efficiency is improving. Dozens of countries are widening the gap between their economic growth and their greenhouse gas emissions. And governments stepped up their ambitions to curb their impact on the climate, particularly when it comes to potent greenhouse gases like methane. If these trends continue, global emissions may actually start to decline. Climate Analytics, a think tank, published a report last November that raised the intriguing possibility that the worst of our impact on the climate might be behind us. “We find there is a 70% chance that emissions start falling in 2024 if current clean technology growth trends continue and some progress is made to cut non-CO2 emissions,” authors wrote. “This would make 2023 the year of peak emissions.” “It was actually a result that surprised us as well,” said Neil Grant, a climate and energy analyst at Climate Analytics and a co-author of the report. “It’s rare in the climate space that you get good news like this.” The inertia behind this trend toward lower emissions is so immense that even politics can only slow it down, not stop it. Many of the worst-case climate scenarios imagined in past decades are now much less likely. The United States, the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter, has already climbed down from its peak in 2005 and is descending further. In March, Carbon Brief conducted an analysis of how US greenhouse gas emissions would fare under a second Trump or a second Biden administration. They found that Trump’s stated goals of boosting fossil fuel development and scrapping climate policies would increase US emissions by 4 billion metric tons by 2030. But even under Trump, US emissions are likely to slide downward. This is a clear sign that efforts to limit climate change are having a durable impact. Carbon Brief US emissions are on track to decline regardless of who wins the White House in November, but current policies are not yet in line with US climate goals. However, four months into 2024, it seems unlikely that the world has reached the top of the mountain just yet. Fossil fuel demand is still poised to rise further in part because of more economic growth in developing countries. Technologies like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies are raising overall energy demand as well. Still, that it’s possible at all to conceive of bending the curve in the near term after more than a century of relentless growth shows that there’s a radical change underway in the relationship between energy, prosperity, and pollution — that standards of living can go up even as emissions from coal, oil, and gas go down. Greenhouse gases are not a runaway rocket, but a massive, slow-turning cargo ship. It took decades of technology development, years of global bickering, and billions of dollars to wrench its rudder in the right direction, and it’s unlikely to change course fast enough to meet the most ambitious climate change targets. But once underway, it will be hard to stop. We might be close to an inflection point on greenhouse gas emissions Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, greenhouse gas emissions have risen in tandem with wealth and an expanding population. Since the 1990s and the 2000s, that direct link has been separated in at least 30 countries, including the US, Singapore, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Their economies have grown while their impact on the climate has shrunk per person. In the past decade, the rate of global carbon dioxide pollution has held fairly level or risen slowly even as the global economy and population has grown by wider margins. Worldwide per capita emissions have also held steady over the past decade. “We can be fairly confident that we’ve flattened the curve,” said Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at SEI US, an environmental think tank, who was not involved in the Climate Analytics study. Still, this means that humanity is adding to the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and doing so at close to its fastest pace ever. It’s good that this pace is at least not accelerating, but the plateau implies a world that will continue to get warmer. To halt rising temperatures, humans will have to stop emitting greenhouse gases, zeroing their net output, and even start withdrawing the carbon previously emitted. The world thus needs another drastic downward turn in its emissions trajectory to limit climate change. “I wouldn’t get out any balloons or fireworks over flattening emissions,” Lazarus said. Then there’s the clock. In order to meet the Paris climate agreement target of limiting warming this century to less than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) on average above pre-industrial temperatures, the world must slash carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. That means power generators, trucks, aircraft, farms, construction sites, home appliances, and manufacturing plants all over the world will have to rapidly clean up. The current round of international climate commitments puts the planet on track to warm by 5.4°F (3°C) by the end of the century. That’s a world in which the likelihood of a major heat wave in a given year would more than double compared to 2.7°F of warming, where extreme rainfall events would almost double, and more than one in 10 people would face threats from sea level rise. “That puts us in this race between the really limited time left to bend the emissions curve and start that project towards zero, but we are also seeing this sort of huge growth, an acceleration in clean technology deployment,” Grant said. “And so we wanted to see which of these factors is winning the race at the moment and where we are at.” Grant and his team mapped out three scenarios. The first is a baseline based on forecasts from the International Energy Agency on how current climate policies and commitments would play out. It shows that fossil fuel-related carbon dioxide emissions would reach a peak this year, but emissions of other heat-trapping gases like methane and hydrofluorocarbons would keep rising, so overall greenhouse gas emissions would level off. The second scenario, dubbed “low effort,” builds on the first, but also assumes that countries will begin to fulfill their promises under agreements like the Global Methane Pledge to cut methane pollution 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030 and the Kigali Amendment to phase out HFCs. Under this pathway, total global emissions reach their apex in 2025. The third scenario imagines a world where clean technology — renewable energy, electric vehicles, energy efficiency — continues gaining ground at current rates, outstripping energy demand growth and displacing coal, oil, and natural gas. That would mean greenhouse gases would have already peaked in 2023 and are now on a long, sustained decline. Climate Analytics Global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to fall in the coming years, but the rate of decline depends on policies and technology development. The stories look different when you zoom in to individual countries, however. While overall emissions are poised to decline, some developing countries will continue to see their output grow while wealthier countries make bigger cuts. As noted, the US has already climbed down from its peak. China expects to see its emissions curve change directions by 2025. India, the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter, may see its emissions grow until 2045. All three of these pathways anticipate some sort of peak in global emissions before the end of the decade, illustrating that the world has many of the tools it needs to address climate change and that a lot of work in deploying clean energy and cleaning up the biggest polluters is already in progress. There will still be year-to-year variations from phenomena like El Niño that can raise electricity demand during heat waves or shocks like pandemics that reduce travel or conflicts that force countries to change their energy priorities. But according to the report, the overall trend over decades is still downward. To be clear, the Carbon Analytics study is one of the more optimistic projections out there, but it’s not that far off from what other groups have found. In its own analysis, the International Energy Agency reports that global carbon dioxide emissions “are set to peak this decade.” The consulting firm McKinsey anticipates that greenhouse gases will begin to decline before 2030, also finding that 2023 may have been the apogee. Global emissions could just as easily shoot back up if governments and companies give up on their goals Within the energy sector, Ember, a think tank, found that emissions might have peaked in 2022. Research firm Rystad Energy expects that fossil fuel emissions will reach their pinnacle in 2025. Bending the curve still requires even more deliberate, thoughtful efforts to address climate change — policies to limit emissions, deploying clean energy, doing more with less, and innovation. Conversely, global emissions could just as easily shoot back up if governments and companies give up on their goals. “Peaking is absolutely not a guarantee,” Grant said. And if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, even at a slower rate, Earth will continue heating up. It means more polar ice will melt, lifting sea levels along every ocean, increasing storm surges and floods during cyclones. It means more dangerous heat waves. It means more parts of the world will be unlivable. We’re close to bending the curve — but that doesn’t mean the rest will be easy There are some other caveats to consider. One is that it’s tricky to simply get a full tally of humanity’s total impact on the climate. Scientists can measure carbon dioxide concentrations in the sky, but it’s tougher to trace where those molecules came from. Burning fossil fuels is the dominant way humans add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Since they’re closely tracked commercial commodities, there are robust estimates for their contributions to climate change and how they change over time. But humans are also degrading natural carbon-absorbing ecosystems like mangrove forests. Losing carbon sinks increases the net amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Altering how we use land, like clearing forests for farms, also shifts the balance of carbon. These changes can have further knock-on effects for the environment, and ecosystems like tropical rainforests could reach tipping points where they undergo irreversible, self-propagating shifts that limit how much carbon they can absorb. All this makes it hard to nail down a specific time frame for when emissions will peak and what the consequences will be. There’s also the thorny business of figuring out who is accountable for which emissions. Fossil fuels are traded across borders, and it’s not always clear whose ledger high-polluting sectors like international aviation and shipping should fall on. Depending on the methodology, these gray areas can lead to double-counting or under-counting. “It’s very difficult to get a complete picture, and even if we get the little bits and pieces, there’s a lot of uncertainty,” said Luca Lo Re, climate and energy analyst at the IEA. Even with these uncertainties, it’s clear that the scale of the course correction needed to meet climate goals is immense. According to the Climate Analytics report, to meet the 2030 targets for cutting emissions, the world will need to stop deforestation, stop any new fossil fuel development, double energy efficiency, and triple renewable energy. Another way to illustrate the enormity of this task is the Covid-19 pandemic. The world experienced a sudden drop in global emissions as travel shut down, businesses closed, people stayed home, and economies shrank. Carbon dioxide output has now rebounded to an even higher level. Reducing emissions on an even larger scale without increasing suffering — in fact, improving welfare for more people — will require not just clean technology but careful policy. Seeing emissions level off or decline in many parts of the world as economies have grown in recent decades outside of the pandemic is an important validation that the efforts to limit climate change are having their intended effect. “Emissions need to decrease for the right reasons,” Lo Re said. “It is reasonable to believe our efforts are working.” The mounting challenge is that energy demand is poised to grow. Even though many countries have decoupled their emissions from their GDPs, those emissions are still growing. Many governments are also contending with higher interest rates, making it harder to finance new clean energy development just as the world needs a massive buildout of solar panels, wind turbines, and transmission lines. And peaking emissions isn’t enough: They have to fall. Fast. The longer it takes to reach the apex, the steeper the drop-off needed on the other side in order to meet climate goals. Right now, the world is poised to walk down a gentle sloping hill of greenhouse gas emissions instead of the plummeting roller coaster required to limit warming this century to less than 2.7°F/1.5°C. It’s increasingly unlikely that this goal is achievable. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change To meet global climate targets, greenhouse gas emissions need to fall precipitously. Finally, the ultimate validation of peak greenhouse emissions and a sustained decline can only be determined with hindsight. “We can’t know if we peaked in 2023 until we get to 2030,” said Lazarus. The world may be closer than ever to bending the curve on greenhouse gas emissions downward, but those final few degrees of inflection may be the hardest. The next few years will shape the warming trajectory for much of the rest of the century, but obstacles ranging from political turmoil to international conflict to higher interest rates could slow progress against climate change just as decarbonization needs to accelerate. “We should be humble,” Grant said. “The future is yet unwritten and is in our hands.”

Photo credit should read Umer Qadir/ Eyepix Group/Future Publishing via Getty Images It is almost hard to believe just how effective vaccines are at saving infants’ lives. The world has become a much safer place to be a young child in the last 50 years. Since 1974, infant mortality worldwide has plummeted. That year, one in 10 newborns died before reaching their first birthday. By 2021, that rate had fallen by over two-thirds. A lot of factors drove this change: lower poverty and better nutrition, cleaner air and water, and readily available antibiotics and other treatments. But one of the biggest contributors, a new study from the World Health Organization (WHO) concludes, was vaccines. Vaccines alone, the researchers find, accounted for 40 percent of the decline in infant mortality. The paper — authored by a team of researchers led by WHO epidemiologist and vaccine expert Naor Bar-Zeev — estimates that in the 50 years since 1974, vaccines prevented 154 million deaths. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}});window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded',function(){var i=document.createElement("iframe");var e=document.getElementById("datawrapper-c6v50");var t=e.dataset.iframeTitle||'Interactive graphic';i.setAttribute("src",e.dataset.iframe);i.setAttribute("title",t);i.setAttribute("frameborder","0");i.setAttribute("scrolling","no");i.setAttribute("aria-label",e.dataset.iframeFallbackAlt||t);i.setAttribute("title",t);i.setAttribute("height","400");i.setAttribute("id","datawrapper-chart-c6v50");i.style.minWidth="100%";i.style.border="none";e.appendChild(i)})}() Of that 154 million, 146 million lives saved were among children under 5, including 101 million infants. Because the averted deaths were so concentrated among young people, who on average would go on to live for 66 years, vaccines gave their beneficiaries an astounding 9 billion additional years of life. The paper was commissioned on the 50th anniversary of the WHO’s Expanded Programme on Immunization, which launched in 1974 to build on the success of the agency’s work eradicating smallpox. It covers a critical period of time. The previous decades had seen a spree of important, newly developed vaccines: a joint diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccine in 1948, a polio vaccine in 1955, a measles vaccine in 1963. While rolled out quickly in wealthy countries, these immunizations were, as of 1974, not broadly available in the Global South, even as the diseases they prevented wreaked massive damage. Over the ensuing half-century, through vaccination campaigns led by the WHO and later Gavi (a multilateral group formerly called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), that changed radically. In sub-Saharan Africa in 2021, 68 percent of 1-year-olds received a first dose of the measles vaccine, 78 percent received the tuberculosis vaccine, and 70–71 percent received the vaccines against hepatitis B, polio, and diphtheria/tetanus/pertussis. This progress yielded massive gains. The measles vaccine, in particular, deserves pride of place in this story. The researchers conclude that it averted 93.7 million deaths from 1974 onward, accounting for the most deaths averted by vaccines in general. In terms of lives saved, the runners-up — tetanus (28 million saved), pertussis (13.2 million), and tuberculosis (10.9 million) — pale in comparison. Stamping out measles through vaccination enabled it to go from an omnipresent, fast-spreading lethal threat to a relic of the past — though anti-vaccine activists threaten to undo some of that progress. The data is a reminder that vaccines have historically been one of our best tools for saving lives and that redoubling efforts to discover and distribute new ones for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis could have a similarly transformative effect. How the researchers tracked the benefit of vaccines Studying the effect of vaccines across all continents, and across a 50-year time frame, is a daunting project. It’s not for nothing that this paper has 21 authors. (And let’s give them the credit they’re due. They are: Andrew Shattock, Helen Johnson, So Yoon Sim, Austin Carter, Philipp Lambach, Raymond Hutubessy, Kimberly Thompson, Kamran Badizadegan, Brian Lambert, Matthew Ferrari, Mark Jit, Han Fu, Sheetal Silal, Rachel Hounsell, Richard White, Jonathan Mosser, Katy Gaythorpe, Caroline Trotter, Ann Lindstrand, Katherine O’Brien, and Naor Bar-Zeev.) The paper is essentially combining three separate kinds of data and research results: Actual infant, child, and overall mortality across countries from 1974 to 2024, based on the UN World Population Projections dataset through 2021 as well as its projections for mortality in 2022–2024. Vaccine coverage by country and year, using both WHO databases and those from the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium. Empirically verified models of how measles, polio, hepatitis B, and several other diseases spread in the absence of vaccines, as well as estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study of the effect of vaccination on diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and tuberculosis. Put simply: They used what we know about how many people got vaccinated in the last five decades and how well vaccines work to construct a version of history where all that vaccination didn’t occur, and adjusted actual death rates and health statistics accordingly. This necessarily involves filling in some gaps in the data. They note that in many countries, our data on vaccine coverage starts in 1980, not 1974; in these places, they argue that vaccine coverage was so meager that assuming no coverage in 1974 and a steady increase thereafter is appropriate. They also conduct sensitivity analyses showing that other ways of handling this problem produce similar headline results. The years of health life data allows another vantage point on gains from vaccination. Some diseases, like polio, are less lethal than the likes of measles but can cause lifelong negative health impacts, up to and including muscle paralysis. (For instance, while many doctors no longer think Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s paralysis was due to polio, it easily could have been.) Any way you slice the data, vaccines saved a ton of lives and prevented a ton of suffering. The past few years have been wonderful for vaccination, mostly due to the tremendously positive impact of the rapidly developed Covid-19 vaccines, but also somewhat perilous. In the US, the share of adults saying all children should be vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella has fallen, specifically among Republicans, a likely aftershock of how polarized the Covid vaccine issue has gotten. In that context, it’s important to remember just how much immunization has given us. In a half-century, it’s given people 9 billion additional years to live their lives. That’s nothing short of miraculous.

Getty Images Seasonal allergies making you miserable? Here’s what you need to know. It’s a sneezy, snotty, itchy-eyed time for many Americans — perhaps more so than ever before. Seasonal allergies are the effects of the immune system’s overreaction to pollen spewed into the air by trees, grasses, and ragweed, most commonly in the spring (although really, year-round). Climate change is making allergy season worse: As warm seasons get warmer and last longer, more plants release more pollen for longer periods. Although the risk of developing allergies is hereditary, experts suspect higher pollen levels are tipping more genetically prone adults into developing seasonal allergies for the first time. If your airways are among the afflicted, you know that finding relief can be a challenge. There’s lots of advice and an overwhelming array of products out there, and it’s sometimes hard to know what’s true and where to begin. Here are a few tips for thinking through what’s causing your symptoms and what to do to stop the streams of liquid constantly coming out of your head. Not everything that makes your nose run is allergies Lots of things make people sneezy and snotty — who cares what the reason is? Well, you should. One of the biggest mistakes people make in the course of seeking relief from allergy symptoms is thinking they have an allergy when they don’t, says Jonathan Bernstein, a Cincinnati allergist and lead author on a recently published review article on allergic nasal symptoms. “So first and foremost, are they diagnosed properly?” When an allergic response is responsible for nasal symptoms, what’s happening in the background is an invisible biochemical cascade involving lots of moving parts, many of which are the targets of allergy medications. It’s a very different process from what happens when airways are just irritated (for example, by dust, smoke, or perfume), infected (as with a cold or another infection), or reacting to changes in temperature or pressure. Therefore, treating a non-allergic cause with an allergy medicine won’t work and can lead to unnecessary side effects, expense, and frustration. Allergic reactions to pollen don’t usually happen the first time you’re exposed to it. The first time your immune system meets those tiny particles, it merely determines that particular type of pollen is an outsider it doesn’t like. Your immune system might react a little bit in the moment, perhaps with a little sneezing and a mild runny nose. The most consequential work it’s doing at this stage is teaching the rest of your immune system to overreact next time the invader shows up and storing the memory of that invader in memory cells. This part of the allergic response is called sensitization. The next time your immune system meets that pollen, it’s primed — and it reacts fast, unleashing hellfire on the invader within 30 to 60 minutes. Some of the key players in this quick response are mast cells, which release histamine. This chemical dilates the nasal blood vessels, causing inflammation; gooses the sensory nerves in the face, causing sneezing and nasal itching; and stimulates mucus-producing glands in the nose, leading to water, water everywhere. One way to tell your symptoms aren’t allergic is by taking note of what they include: If a fever accompanies irritated airways, it’s more likely you have an infection (likely a viral cold) than allergies. Also, if your symptoms don’t respond well to allergy medications, that’s a good clue you might not be dealing with an allergy, says David Shulan, a retired allergist who used to practice in Albany, New York. When medications seem variably effective — or if they’re effective but you can’t figure out what you’re allergic to or your symptoms are severe — he says a helpful next step might be allergy testing. Severe symptoms are subjective, says Pedro Lamothe, a pulmonologist who treats and researches allergic asthma and lung disease at Emory University in Atlanta. “If the symptoms are resistant to treatment [or] are impacting your daily life because you can’t be going outside, because you can’t do your job,” he says, “that’s the definition of severe symptoms.” If you do get allergy testing, it’s best to get it done by a physician who’s an allergy specialist. “You have to correlate it with the individual’s history and their exposure,” Bernstein says. Letting allergy symptoms run their course won’t “build immunity” to the allergen. It just makes it worse next time. It’s not uncommon for people with seasonal allergy symptoms to just ride them out. The reasons for this vary, but sometimes, people power through because they believe doing so will make future allergic reactions land softer. That’s the opposite of the truth, says Lamothe. More allergic reactions just means more sensitization — that is, more opportunities for your immune system to learn how to overreact to a stimulus and to store that information so it can react even more ferociously next time. Letting allergic reactions run their course won’t make you stronger, he says, “You’re going to make your allergic responses stronger.” Another consequence of waiting to treat an allergic reaction: You’ll ultimately need much more medication to subdue your symptoms in their later stages than if you’d treated the response in its earlier stages. “These medications are much more effective at preventing the symptoms that are getting rid of them once they’ve already started,” says Lamothe. It’s best to stop the allergic reaction before the cascade gets into motion and before the immune system gets too smart for your own good — and it’s ideal to prevent the reaction altogether, says Lamothe. He recommends people with persistent seasonal symptoms actually start taking their medications before allergy season starts. In the relatively temperate climes of Georgia, that might mean starting the medications in February. Taking a proactive approach is particularly important for people with seasonal allergy-related asthma, which can be life-threatening. Asthma is effectively an allergic reaction localized to the lungs; in allergy-related asthma, the allergic reaction starts with the upper airways — the nose, mouth, and throat — and extends to the lungs, leading to wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath. If you have seasonal allergies that lead to breathing problems, take note of how often you use your asthma medications, says Cherie Zachary, an allergist who practices in Minneapolis. If you’re using a rescue medication (like an albuterol inhaler) more than three times a week or you’ve needed to take an oral steroid like prednisone more than once in the past year, get additional help controlling both your asthma and your allergies, she says. People with allergy-induced asthma sometimes get so used to breathing poorly during certain seasons — or even year-round — that they forget it’s not normal to feel breathless at baseline. That may be especially true when many others around them also aren’t breathing well. Older patients may also have had bad experiences with ineffective treatments or with the medical system that administers them, leading them to put off getting care even when they’re feeling really ill. That should no longer be a deterrent. “We have good treatments now for allergies and asthma, which we certainly didn’t have 35 years ago,” says Zachary. The higher your risk of allergy-related asthma, the lower your threshold should be to seek care if you’re having uncontrolled symptoms during allergy season, she says. “Especially for the asthma patients, don’t ignore your symptoms.” Certain risk groups are more likely to have life-threatening outcomes from pollen exposure and should have a lower threshold for getting treatment Seasonal allergies play out differently in different racial and ethnic groups in the US. White adults are more likely to be diagnosed with seasonal allergies than are others, but in one study, Black people were twice as likely as white people to end up in an emergency room with pollen-related asthma exacerbations. More broadly, Black and Puerto Rican Americans are more likely than others to have asthma of any type, including severe and life-threatening flares. The reasons for these disparities are complicated, but are in part related to how well people’s allergies are controlled on a day-to-day basis — which is itself related to issues of insurance coverage and health care access and trust. Environmental factors may also be at play: Exposure to industrial toxins and air pollution is thought to increase people’s risk of developing allergies and asthma, including the kinds related to pollen. Higher concentrations of these pollutants in neighborhoods and workplaces where people of color live could in part explain the higher prevalence of seasonal allergies — and their most severe consequences — in these groups. “When you look at the risk factors and you look at redlining, they really do correlate,” says Zachary. Your first-line allergy medication might not be one you take by mouth The best treatment for allergies is prevention, and experts have lots of strategies for reducing your face time with whichever allergen is your particular nemesis. Shulan suggests minimizing your time outdoors during peak pollen time, which is typically around midday; there’s usually less pollen in the air before dawn, after sunset, and during or immediately after rain. You can also try wearing a face mask outdoors if the air temperature doesn’t make it intolerable, says Lamothe. As best you can, avoid tracking pollen into your home: Wipe down your face (including eyebrows and any facial hair), change your clothes and remove your shoes when coming home (and keep them outside the bedroom), and consider removing makeup, which pollen loves to stick to. Keeping bedroom windows closed and running an air conditioner with or without a separate air filtration unit can also help minimize nighttime symptoms. If you typically hang your clothes outside to dry, avoid doing so during allergy season. Cleaning the surfaces of your upper airways with saline nasal spray or nasal irrigation (like with a Neti pot) can also be helpful. While some people advocate eating local honey to reduce allergy symptoms, several experts told me there isn’t great data to support this practice, but “the placebo effect is remarkably powerful,” said Shulan. Even with these preventive measures, many people need pharmaceutical help to manage their symptoms, and the array of over-the-counter allergy medicines to choose from is literally dizzying. For many people with moderate to severe seasonal allergies, a nasal spray containing a corticosteroid is a good place to start, says Lamothe. These include fluticasone (Flonase), triamcinolone (Nasacort) mometasone (Nasonex), and budesonide (Benacort). Unlike steroids taken by mouth, these act only on the interior surfaces of the nostril and upper airways where they land, so they’re relatively low-risk. Still, aim the nozzle outward when you spray to avoid drenching the nasal septum, which can lead to nosebleeds. It might take a few days to feel relief from these medications, so don’t expect immediate results. Antihistamines are faster-acting and are available as nasal sprays, eye drops, and oral medications. Again, the formulations you don’t take by mouth are less likely to have systemic effects. Modern, second-generation oral antihistamines — which include cetirizine (Zyrtec), fexofenadine (Allegra), and loratadine (Claritin) — are much less likely to cause sleepiness than diphenhydramine (Benadryl), the most common of their first-generation counterparts. Some people find cetirizine somewhat sedating; levocetirizine dihydrochloride (Xyzal), a variant of the drug, avoids this effect. Although some people appreciate the sedating effects of Benadryl, experts advise against taking it on a regular basis due to emerging data about its associations with dementia. They also recommend caution with decongestants: Occasional doses of pseudoephedrine are safe for many adults, but they can raise blood pressure and heart rate and are not safe for children. Antihistamine nasal sprays like oxymetazoline (Afrin) are dependency-forming and should not be used for more than a few days running. If allergy meds aren’t controlling your symptoms or you need more medication than you want to take to control your symptoms, immunotherapy might be an option for you, says Shulan. Most people know this treatment as allergy shots, which involve getting progressively higher amounts of the protein you’re allergic to injected under your skin until your immune system stops overreacting to it, usually for around three to five years. More recent oral formulations mean this treatment can be administered without needles for certain allergies. To date, the Food and Drug Administration has approved oral immunotherapy to treat people allergic to ragweed, grasses, and dust mites. Oral allergy drops are also on the retail market, often marketed as a “natural” solution to allergies. However, these often-pricey products are not FDA-approved and the evidence to show they make things better and not worse just isn’t there, says Zachary. “Natural is not always neutral,” she says.

Confiscated guns on display at Attorney General Letitia James’s announcement that the Attorney General’s Office, Drug Enforcement Administration, New York Police Department, and State Police took down ghost guns and narcotics trafficking ring in New York.  | Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images The fight over “ghost guns” is back before the justices. The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear Garland v. VanDerStok, a case that could open up a massive loophole in US gun laws, effectively neutralizing federal laws requiring gun buyers to submit to a background check, and also requiring guns to have a serial number that law enforcement can use to track them. That outcome, however, is fairly unlikely. The Court has already heard this case twice on its “shadow docket” — a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the Court typically handles on an expedited basis. And the Court has twice ruled against gun manufacturers seeking to weaken federal law, albeit on a temporary basis both times. So the Court’s decision in VanDerStok is likely to make permanent what the Supreme Court already said in these two temporary decisions. Nevertheless, the stakes in this case are high and the outcome is not entirely certain. The first time this case arrived at the Court, the justices split 5-4 on whether to drastically weaken US gun laws, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossing over to vote with the Court’s three Democratic appointees. The case involves “ghost guns,” weapons that are sold dismantled and in ready-to-assemble kits. A decision by three Trump appointees on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit would exempt these ghost guns from the laws requiring background checks and serial numbers. The decision of these three Trump judges is now before the Supreme Court. The laws mandating background checks and serial numbers apply to “any weapon ... which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” It also applies to “the frame or receiver of any such weapon,” the skeletal part of a firearm that houses other components, such as the barrel or trigger mechanism. Thus, even if someone purchases a series of firearm parts to assemble a gun at home, they will still face a background check when they purchase the gun’s frame or receiver. According to the Justice Department, it is often trivially easy to convert a ghost gun kit’s incomplete frame into a fully operational one. For example, some kits allow a ghost gun buyer to build a working firearm after drilling a single hole in the kit’s frame. Others merely require the user to sand off a small plastic rail. So ghost guns are a fairly obvious effort to evade federal gun regulations by selling weapons that are about 99 percent complete, and then claiming that they do not meet the federal definition of a firearm subject to certain laws. The Fifth Circuit bought this argument, claiming that a frame that is missing a single hole, or a receiver that needs to be sanded down a little are “not yet frames or receivers.” The three Trump judges also claimed that ghost guns do not count as a weapon that “may readily be converted” into a working gun because this phrase “cannot be read to include any objects that could, if manufacture is completed, become functional at some ill-defined point in the future” — even if only a trivial amount of work would be necessary to make the gun function. It is likely that a majority of the justices will again vote that ghost guns must be subject to the laws governing background checks and serial numbers. But, given how close the Court’s first vote in this case was, there is at least some risk that a justice could flip their vote and allow ghost guns to proliferate.

An activist with the Center for Popular Democracy Action holds a large photo of US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s head as the group blocks an intersection during a demonstration in front of the US Supreme Court on December 1, 2021, in Washington, DC.  | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images But it’s not yet clear they’ve settled on a rationale for doing so. A federal law requires most US hospitals to provide an abortion to patients experiencing a medical emergency if an abortion is the proper medical treatment for that emergency. This law is unambiguous, and it applies even in red states with strict abortion bans that prohibit the procedure even when necessary to save a patient’s life or protect their health. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court spent Wednesday morning discussing whether to write a new exception into this federal law, which would permit states to ban abortions even when a patient will die if they do not receive one. Broadly speaking, the Court seemed to divide into three camps during Wednesday’s argument in Moyle v. United States. The Court’s three Democrats, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all argued — quite forcefully at times — that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) means what it says and thus nearly all hospitals must provide emergency abortions. Meanwhile, the Court’s right flank — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — left no doubt that they will do whatever it takes to permit states to ban medically necessary abortions. That left three of the Court’s Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, in the middle. Kavanaugh and Barrett both asked questions that very much suggest they want states to be able to ban medically necessary abortions. But they also appeared to recognize, at times, that the arguments supporting such an outcome are far from airtight. Realistically, it is highly unlikely that EMTALA will survive the Court’s Moyle decision intact. The Court already voted last January to temporarily allow the state of Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, despite EMTALA, while this case was pending before the justices. And Kavanaugh and Barrett have both taken extraordinary liberties with the law in the past when necessary to achieve an anti-abortion outcome. Still, federal law is crystal clear that states cannot outright ban medically necessary abortions. So there is a chance that two of the Court’s Republicans will reluctantly conclude that they are bound by the law’s clear text. Moyle should be an exceptionally easy case EMTALA requires hospital emergency rooms that accept Medicare funding to provide “such treatment as may be required to stabilize the medical condition” of “any individual” who arrives at the hospital’s ER with an “emergency medical condition.” Though the law does not specifically mention abortion, it is written in capacious terms. So, if a patient has an “emergency medical condition” and the proper treatment to stabilize that condition is an abortion, the hospital must provide an abortion. Though the law only applies to Medicare-funded hospitals, that’s nearly all hospitals because Medicare provides health coverage to Americans over the age of 65. EMTALA conflicts with an Idaho law that bans abortions in nearly all circumstances. While Idaho permits an abortion when “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman,” it does not permit such an abortion if the patient faces a catastrophic health consequence other than death, such as the loss of her uterus. EMTALA requires emergency rooms to stabilize any patient who is at risk of “serious impairment to bodily functions,” “serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part,” or other nonfatal consequences that are defined as medical emergencies by EMTALA. So the federal law applies in many cases where the patient is not at risk of death. Additionally, EMTALA includes a provision saying that state and local laws must give way to the federal requirement to stabilize patients “to the extent that the [state law] directly conflicts with a requirement of this section.” So, if the Supreme Court were concerned solely with the text of EMTALA, they would hand down a unanimous decision holding that Idaho’s law is preempted by EMTALA, at least to the extent that Idaho prohibits medically necessary abortions. EMTALA does not purport to override most restrictions on abortion, but its explicit text requires hospitals to perform an abortion when necessary to stabilize a patient’s emergency medical condition. So how did the Republican justices propose getting around EMTALA’s clear text? Members of the Court’s Republican majority proposed three possible ways they could try to justify a decision permitting Idaho to ban many medically necessary abortions. The weakest of these three arguments was proposed by Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Court’s 2022 decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion. Alito pointed to a provision of EMTALA that requires hospitals to also offer stabilizing care to a pregnant patient’s “unborn child” if a medical emergency threatens the fetus’s life, though Alito did not really make a legal argument. He just expressed indignation at the very idea that a statute that uses the words “unborn child” could possibly require abortions in any circumstances. “Isn’t that an odd phrase to put in a statute that imposes a mandate to perform abortions?” Alito asked US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. As Prelogar told Alito, EMTALA reconciles the dual obligations it imposes on hospitals to treat both a pregnant patient and the patient’s fetus by only requiring the hospital to “offer” stabilizing care for both patients — so, in the tragic case where only the mother or the fetus could be saved, the hospital must offer both treatments and honor the mother’s choice. A second argument for limiting EMTALA, which was at times floated by Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett, is that reading the statute according to its actual text would raise a constitutional problem. EMTALA imposes an obligation on hospitals that accept Medicare funds, and the Supreme Court has long held that Congress may impose requirements on parties that voluntarily accept federal funding. The constitutional argument is that Congress could not use federal funding provided to a private hospital to neutralize a state ban on abortion because the state of Idaho must also consent to having its law altered in this way. There is some case law that provides theoretical support for this argument, but the bulk of the Court’s case law already establishes that a federal grant program that provides money to private parties may displace state law. Thus, for example, in Coventry Health Care v. Nevils (2017), the Court held that the federal government’s decision to offer its own employees health plans that violate Missouri law preempts that state law. And in Bennett v. Arkansas (1988), the Court held that federal Social Security law overrides an Arkansas law that allowed the state to seize an incarcerated person’s Social Security benefits. The Court could conceivably repudiate precedents like Coventry and Bennett, but that would have unpredictable consequences for all sorts of federal programs. Federal spending programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid are riddled with provisions that might conflict with one state law or another. And if the Supreme Court declares that these state law provisions overcome federal Medicare, Social Security, or Medicaid law, that is likely to disrupt those and other programs in erratic ways. That leaves one other way to achieve an anti-abortion outcome in the Moyle case, whose biggest proponent was Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh noted that Idaho has weakened its abortion ban since this litigation began and that it’s done so in ways that theoretically make it easier for doctors to claim that they needed to perform an abortion to protect a patient’s life. In light of these changes, he suggested that maybe “there shouldn’t be an injunction” against Idaho because it’s not clear that the state’s law still conflicts with EMTALA. But this argument is hard to square with the facts on the ground in Idaho. As Justice Kagan pointed out close to the end of the argument, hospitals in Idaho are still so uncertain when they can perform an abortion that many of them are flying patients to other states. She noted that just one Idaho hospital had to do so six times so that those patients could receive an emergency abortion in a location where everyone could be sure it was legal. Idaho’s lawyer, moreover, struggled so hard to explain when Idaho’s law permits a doctor to perform a medically necessary abortion that Barrett accused him of “hedging.” Kavanaugh’s argument, in other words, would require the justices to ignore what’s happening in Idaho and to pretend that Idaho is somehow complying with EMTALA, despite the fact that Idaho’s own lawyer could not explain how its abortion ban works. So the ultimate question looming over the Moyle case is whether two of the Court’s Republican appointees will be so troubled by the weakness of the anti-abortion arguments in this case, and so embarrassed by the fact that there’s really only one plausible way to read EMTALA, that they will begrudgingly apply the law as written. That’s not the most likely outcome in this case. But, at the very least, the Court’s Republican majority does not appear to have settled on a way to explain a decision creating an abortion exception to the EMTALA statute.

Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images The Columbia protests and the debate over pro-Palestinian college students, explained. Protests over the war in Gaza erupted on Columbia University’s campus last week and have sparked demonstrations at other universities across the country. The demonstrations have resulted in some intense crackdowns and political scrutiny, all coming in the wake of recent congressional hearings on antisemitism on campus and amid an uptick in both antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment in the US. Protests have emerged across the country, including at Yale University, New York University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Miami University in Ohio, and Temple University in Philadelphia, among other campuses. Once again, top universities have become the locus around which America litigates questions about the US’s support of Israel amid its deadly war in Gaza, free speech, antisemitism, and anti-Muslim discrimination — and a convenient target for political elites looking to make a point. For example: Lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson today, are visiting Columbia’s campus. The protests are calling on universities to divest from firms that they contend profit from Israel’s war and occupation in Palestine, more than six months after the start of the war and as the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 34,000. Some groups at universities that conduct military research, like New York University, are also requesting their schools end work contributing to weapons development as well. At Columbia, Yale, and New York University, students have faced mass arrests as administrators seek to quell the unrest. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests have become a prominent feature on college campuses since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. They reached a fever pitch in December when the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania gave controversial testimony before Congress about campus antisemitism, both real and hypothetical. Tensions reignited last week after Columbia president Nemat Shafik gave congressional testimony that, per the Associated Press, focused on “fighting antisemitism rather than protecting free speech.” Students erected tents on Columbia’s main lawn to show solidarity with Gaza. Then Shafik took the controversial step of calling in the police to arrest those involved. That contentious decision wasn’t just jarring to Columbia students particularly because of the university’s history, but also sparked outrage among onlookers both at the site and on social media. The controversy at Columbia and other campuses has illustrated how universities have struggled to uphold their dual commitments to free speech and protecting their students during a fraught political moment when more young people sympathize with the Palestinian cause than with the Israeli government. Concerns about antisemitism at the protests (often attributed to students, but largely perpetrated by outsiders according to anecdotal reporting) also piqued national attention; amid this all, Columbia University switched to remote learning on Monday, April 22 — which also happened to be the first day of the Jewish holiday of Passover. “Calling the police on campus is such a breach of the culture of a college or university,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is representing arrested Columbia students, told Vox. “To do so in response to nonviolent student protest is beyond the pale, and it really undermines the standing of the university in the eyes of a broad swath of the population as a place of free, open, and robust dialogue and debate.” What’s actually happening on college campuses Last Wednesday, students pitched more than 50 tents on the Columbia lawn in what they called a “Liberated Zone.” But the tents stayed up only about a day and a half before Shafik intervened. “The current encampment violates all of the new policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students,” she wrote in a letter to the Columbia community on Thursday. The police arrived shortly thereafter to arrest students for trespassing and removed more than 100 protesters, tying their hands with zip ties. Some have also been suspended and removed from student housing. In the days since, pro-Palestinian student groups on other university campuses have staged similar protests in solidarity with their counterparts at Columbia. Students have also erected encampments at Yale, the University of Michigan, New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. A total of 47 students were arrested at Yale on Monday, and more than 150 were arrested at New York University overnight Tuesday. On Monday, a group of Columbia professors staged a walkout to support the student protests. A lot of the national attention has focused less on the protesters’ demands or the US-Israeli relationship — and the destruction of Gaza — and more on allegations that the protests are inherently antisemitic for criticizing Israel, or that specific antisemitic incidents have occurred. Shafik announced that all Columbia classes would be virtual on Monday (and now hybrid through the end of the academic year) to provide a “reset” on the conversation and in light of students’ safety concerns — Rabbi Elie Buechler, a rabbi associated with Columbia University’s Orthodox Union Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, had urged hundreds of Orthodox Jewish students to go home and urged them to stay there for their safety. “I cannot but agree that this is motivated by trying to pacify congressional members who are trying to interfere in the running of this university and, at this point, all universities,” Marianne Hirsch, professor emerita of English and comparative literature and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University, said at a press conference in front of Shafik’s house Tuesday. Student protests on Columbia’s campus have been nonviolent so far. Representatives from the New York Police Department said during a press conference Monday that there had been some incidents in which Israeli flags were snatched from students and unspecified hateful things said. But they said that there have not been any reports of Columbia students being physically harmed or any credible threats made against individuals or groups associated with the university community ahead of the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The police only enter Columbia’s campus when asked, given that it is a private university. They have established off-campus “safe corridors” where officers are stationed and will intervene in incidents involving harassment, threats, or menacing behavior — which does not constitute protected speech under the First Amendment. However, a video surfaced over the weekend of what appeared to be masked pro-Palestinian protesters outside of Columbia’s gates shouting, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” at Jewish students. It’s not clear whether those shouting were affiliated with the university. Just after the video was circulated, President Joe Biden issued a statement: “This blatant Antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous — and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.” That statement served as a “blanket condemnation of the Columbia protests,” said Matt Berkman, an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. It failed to distinguish those featured in the video who may not have been affiliated with the university from the vast majority of student protesters, who based on many different accounts, have been peaceful. “Pro-Israel activists are clearly invested in painting everyone at Columbia, whether inside or outside the gates, with the same broad brush,” Berkman added. On Tuesday, a student draped in an Israeli flag spoke to reporters from within the fenced-in area of the encampment. Jewish students who have been suspended from Columbia and Barnard stated that they had celebrated a Passover Seder within the encampment at a press conference. There are antisemitic incidents in the United States, which represent real danger to Jewish communities and individuals — and they have increased since the Hamas attacks on October 7. In December, the Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents had increased by nearly 340 percent since then. Complicating its data, however, is the fact that the ADL does not always differentiate between violent antisemitic incidents like assault and anti-Zionist protests and calls in support of BDS. Removing all Israel-related incidents from their count, America has a smaller but still big problem: Non-Israel-related antisemitic incidents still rose by 65 percent compared to 2022, per their data. Columbia students aren’t alone in facing broad accusations of antisemitism. Students at Yale, the Ohio State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others have all been called out by the ADL for engaging in Palestine solidarity protests as well as for specific incidents of antisemitism. Nor are they alone in facing arrest; NYU students and faculty and students at Yale have also been arrested. Police involvement in the protests — particularly on New York City campuses — has been met with backlash, particularly from university faculty and activists. Veronica Salama, who as a staff attorney at NYCLU is part of the team defending these students, told Vox that Shafik called the police as part of her emergency powers — but in doing so violated university policy. Vox has reached out to Columbia for comment and will update with its response. According to an email obtained by Vox, university administration set a deadline of midnight Tuesday night to reach an agreement to dismantle the encampment; if none is reached, the email says, the administration “will have to consider alternative options for clearing the West Lawn and restoring calm to campus.” Negotiations about removing the encampment, however, continued into Wednesday. What’s behind the protests? In many ways, the demands of the protesters have been overshadowed by the controversy. At Columbia, the protesters belong to a coalition, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which formed in 2016 to demand Columbia and Barnard College disclose investments in and divest — or remove from its investment portfolio— from Israeli and American companies and institutions that support Israel, citing its wars in Gaza and oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. The coalition’s demands are of a piece with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement started by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. BDS cites as its inspiration the anti-apartheid activists of the 1980s who targeted South Africa’s apartheid government with boycotts. While that movement wasn’t decisive in bringing down that government, it was successful in alienating the apartheid government from major global players like Barclays bank, the Olympics, and the International Cricket Conference, forcing countries and international institutions to confront their complicity in South Africa’s racist policies. In addition to divestment from “companies profiting from Israeli apartheid,” CUAD has a list of five other demands, including a call for an immediate ceasefire from government officials including President Joe Biden, and, importantly, an end to the dual degree program that Columbia has with Tel Aviv University. These demands echo those of student groups at other colleges and universities. NYU student activists are also demanding the university shut down its Tel Aviv campus and “divest from all corporations aiding in the genocide,” including weapons companies, and ban weapons tech research that benefits Israel. Critics allege that BDS and anti-Zionism are at their core antisemitic, arguing that BDS delegitimizes Israel and “effectively reject[s] or ignore[s] the Jewish people’s right of self-determination, or that, if implemented, would result in the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state, are antisemitic,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. The nature and tenor of the campus anti-war protests has been at the forefront of both media coverage and congressional hearings on antisemitism and campus free speech. But administrative response to them — particularly calling the police and issuing suspensions — has added a new dimension to the debate. It’s all part of a broader fight over free speech and antisemitism on college campuses Universities have struggled to balance their goals of protecting free speech and combatting antisemitism since the outbreak of war in Gaza, which has proved a political minefield. In December, a trio of university presidents who testified before Congress were accused (if not fairly) of being too permissive of free speech in the face of antisemitism or being too legalistic in their explanations of their situation. Now, some universities seem to be changing their tack. Shafik called in the police on protesters despite Columbia’s longstanding reputation as a bastion of free speech. The University of Southern California recently canceled the commencement speech of its pro-Palestinian valedictorian over campus safety concerns. And now NYU has also instituted a police crackdown on protesters. Private universities, like many of those experiencing protests today, have long maintained policies that protect free speech similarly to the First Amendment: permitting anything up to genuine threats of violence and threatening behavior that would warrant punishment or even referrals to the criminal system. But the last six months have seemingly made many of them question not just when and where a threat begins, but also maybe even those commitments to students’ free speech more broadly. And complicating this all is a years-long history of pro-Palestinian activists saying they face targeted harassment. Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that if Columbia wants to remain committed to free speech, it has an obligation to apply its speech policies in an equitable manner that is unbiased against any particular viewpoint and to ensure that students currently facing disciplinary action are offered due process. “Columbia providing due process, while fairly and consistently applying its viewpoint-neutral speech policies, will be absolutely mandatory here if Columbia wants to start back on the right path,” Morey said. Prohibiting students from camping out or blocking entrances or exits is “all above board” if applied uniformly, Morey added. But schools should see calling the police to enforce any such policies as a last resort, said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law. “I understand the very strong desire to protect the safety of all the students involved,” he said. “At the end of the day, the presumption should be in favor of free speech and free expression, and there are exceptions to that, but [starting] with that presumption often brings a lot of clarity to these vital decisions.”

A coyote in the El Capitan meadow area at sunrise in Yosemite National Park. | Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Your taxes fundan obscure government program that kills millions of wild animals to benefit Big Ag. A red fox killed with a cyanide bomb. A gray wolf gunned down from an airplane. A jackrabbit caught in a neck snare. These are just a few of the 1.45 million animals poisoned, shot, and trapped last year by the euphemistically named Wildlife Services, a little-known but particularly brutal program of the US Department of Agriculture. The program kills wildlife for many reasons, including poisoning birds to prevent them from striking airplanes and destroying beavers that sneak onto golf courses. But one of the primary purposes of the mostly taxpayer-funded $286 million program is to serve as the meat and dairy industries’ on-call pest control service. “We were the hired gun of the livestock industry,” said Carter Niemeyer, who worked in Wildlife Services and related programs from 1975 to 2006. Niemeyer specialized in killing and trapping predators like coyotes and wolves that were suspected of killing farmed cattle and sheep. Wildlife Services has also killed hundreds of endangered gray wolves, threatened grizzly bears, and highly endangered Mexican gray wolves, often at the behest of the livestock industry and enabled by exemptions from the Endangered Species Act. The top three species Wildlife Services killed in 2023 were European starlings, feral pigs, and coyotes, according to data released last month. How these animals were targeted — from shooting coyotes to poisoning birds — has prompted Congress to fund nonlethal initiatives within the program and conservation groups to call for sweeping changes to how Wildlife Services operates. The USDA didn’t respond to several questions sent via email. “God was our only witness out there,” Niemeyer said about agents killing animals in the field. “You just hope that everybody makes [choices] morally and ethically acceptable and as humane as possible.” To Wildlife Services’ credit, the vast majority of its work entails nonlethally scaring animals off. Controversy, though, has dogged the program for decades, as critics like Niemeyer and other former employees say much of its predator killing is unnecessary, imprecise, and inhumane. Conservation groups say it’s ecologically destructive, as such predators are crucial to ecosystem health and biodiversity. Predator hysteria, explained Adrian Treves, an environmental science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the origins of today’s rampant predator killing can be found in America’s early European settlers, who brought with them the mentality that wolves were “superpredators,” posing a dangerous threat to humans. “We’ve been fed this story that the eradication of wolves was necessary for livestock production,” he said. Today, Wildlife Services’ most controversial work is its killings of coyotes and other predators for the supposed threat they pose to American ranchers and the food supply. But according to a USDA estimate, predation accounted for just 4.7 percent of cattle mortality in 2015. Conservation groups say that figure is exaggerated because it’s based on self-reported data from ranchers and shoddy methodology. According to an analysis of USDA data by the Humane Society of the United States, predation accounts for only 0.3 percent of cattle mortality. (Disclosure: I worked at the Humane Society of the United States from 2012 to 2017 on unrelated agricultural issues.) The Humane Society points to several flaws in the USDA data, including the fact that ranchers reported livestock predation from grizzly bears in six states that don’t have any grizzly bears. In the Northern Rocky Mountains region, the rate of livestock predation reported by ranchers was 27 times higher than data provided by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which had actually confirmed livestock deaths by predators. “When I first went to work, there was just sort of this acceptance that if a rancher called and he said he had a coyote problem, we assumed that [he] had a coyote problem,” Niemeyer said. “We didn’t question it. I didn’t see a lot of meticulous necropsy work done” to investigate the cause of death. The numbers reported to the USDA by ranchers, he now believes, are “exaggerated and embellished.” USDA-APHIS A coyote caught in a foothold trap. The USDA financially compensates ranchers for livestock killed by wolves and some other species, which can create an incentive to attribute farm animal deaths to predators. Robert Gosnell, a former director of New Mexico’s USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service who administered the state’s Wildlife Services program, told the Intercept in 2022 that the agency’s field inspectors had been ordered to report livestock deaths as “wolf kills” for ranchers. “My guys in the field were going and rubber-stamping anything those people asked them to,” Gosnell said. Niemeyer is not opposed to killing individual coyotes or wolves suspected of killing a particular cow or sheep. But much of Wildlife Services’ predator control, he said (and another former employee has alleged), is done preventively in an attempt to reduce coyote populations. “Every coyote is suspected of potentially being a killer,” Niemeyer said, which he characterizes as coyote or wolf “hysteria.” Last year, 68,000 coyotes were taken down by a variety of means, including ingestion of Compound 1080, a poison that causes acute pain in the form of heart blockage, respiratory failure, hallucinations, and convulsions. Thousands more animals are killed as collateral damage. Last year, over 2,000 were killed unintentionally, a consequence of setting out untold numbers of traps and baited cyanide bombs. These devices have also injured a small number of humans and, between 2000 and 2012, killed more than 1,100 dogs. Some employees have died on the job, and there have even been allegations of orders within the agency to cover up unintentional kills of pets and a federally protected golden eagle. USDA-APHIS A hawk caught in a trap. An irrational bias against predators has made it hard for Americans, and its regulators, to recognize predators’ many ecological and social benefits. One study in Wisconsin, for example, found that wild wolf populations keep deer away from roadways, which in turn reduces costly, and sometimes deadly, car crashes. And killing predators may, counterintuitively, lead to more livestock deaths, Treves said. Some predator species that experience mass killing events may compensate by having more babies at younger ages. That could partly explain why, when wolf killings increased in some Western states, livestock predation went up, too. And when you wipe out some animals, others may fill the void. Coyotes significantly expanded their range in the 1900s after America’s centuries-long wolf extermination campaign. Finally, Treves said, killing suspected predators from one ranch may simply drive the remaining population into neighboring ranches. One study he co-authored on wolf kills in Michigan found “a three times elevation of risk to livestock on neighboring properties after a farm received lethal control of wolves from Wildlife Services.” Agricultural sprawl and the war on “invasive” species Wildlife Services represents yet another example of the USDA’s seeming indifference to animal welfare, but it also highlights a little-known fact of human-wildlife conflict: Most of it stems from agriculture. Almost half of the contiguous United States is now used for meat, dairy, and egg production — most of it cattle-grazing — which has crowded out wildlife and reduced biodiversity. And whenever wild animals end up on farmland that was once their habitat, they run the risk of being poisoned, shot, or trapped by Wildlife Services. That’s true for animals that find their way onto fruit, vegetable, and nut orchards for a snack, too. But Wildlife Services’ primary goal is to protect the interests of livestock producers, USDA public affairs specialist Tanya Espinosa told me in an email — yet another subsidy for an already highly subsidized industry. While much of the criticism lobbed at Wildlife Services pertains to its treatment of charismatic megafauna like coyotes, bears, and wolves, little attention is paid to the European starling, Wildlife Services’ most targeted species. Starlings accounted for a little over half of all animals killed by Wildlife Services, at 814,310 birds. Starlings, which are targeted because they like to feast on grain at dairy farms and cattle feedlots, are mostly mass-poisoned with DRC-1339, also known as Starlicide, which destroys their heart and kidney function, slowly and excruciatingly killing them over the course of three to 80 hours. It’s not uncommon for towns across the US to suddenly find thousands of starlings dropping dead out of trees or raining from the sky. Despite these deaths, starlings receive little sympathy — even from bird enthusiasts — given its status as an “invasive” species, a term often invoked to justify excluding a species from moral consideration, according to Australian ecologist Arian Wallach. Here too, as with predators, we may be in need of a reframe, or at least a broadening of our often one-track conversation about nonnative species like feral pigs and starlings. “In no way does the starling imagine itself as an invasive species — that is a human construction,” said Natalie Hofmeister, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming book Citizen Starling. Rethinking mass killing Despite Wildlife Services’ high kill counts, it has expanded its use of nonlethal methods in recent years, including guard dogs, electric fencing, audio/visual deterrents, bird repellent research, and fladry — tying flags along fences, which can scare off some predator species. “The last three years have shown a little bit of a turning of the tide for Wildlife Services,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director of the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s been more focus on preventing conflicts versus the Band-Aid of killing animals.” Matt Moyer/Getty Images A range rider in Montana hangs fladry — long red flags attached to fencing — to scare away livestock predators. Treves agrees, but is skeptical there will be meaningful change. Most importantly, he wants to see Wildlife Services experimentally test its lethal methods to see if they actually prevent livestock predation. “I am cynical,” he said. “I am frustrated that this is 20 years of arguing with this agency that’s entrenched, stubborn, and will not listen to the people who disagree with them.” There are no easy answers here. While much of Wildlife Services’ work is ecologically ruinous and unjustifiably cruel, wild animals do inflict real damage on our food supply. Better management on the part of farmers and ranchers and further USDA investment into nonlethal methods could help. Even better would be to rethink the USDA’s — and the meat industry’s — license to wage war on wildlife. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

On April 18, the United Auto Workers won the union vote at a Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images The UAW is unlocking worker power in the South. An expert explains why it matters. The Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has about 5,500 employees. On April 19, almost three-quarters of them voted to join the United Auto Workers. It’s the latest victory for one of the country’s largest labor unions, coming on the heels of a major contract win last fall with the “Big Three” American carmakers: GM, Ford, and Stellantis (which merged with Chrysler), whose workers make up about 150,000 of the UAW’s 400,000-plus membership. A union vote at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga assembly plant is big news for many reasons. For one, the US was the last country where Volkswagen workers didn’t have some form of representation. But perhaps more importantly, it’s failed twice before, once in 2014 and again in 2019; Volkswagen Chattanooga will be the first non-Big Three auto plant in the South to become unionized. The UAW has no intention of slowing down now. Union president Shawn Fain told the Guardian that the Volkswagen plant was “the first domino to fall” in a strategy targeting mainly foreign automakers in the South: In May, there’s a UAW vote at a Mercedes plant in Alabama, and organizing efforts are also beginning at BMW, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and Nissan plants, among others, across several Southern states. (The union has also set its sights on Tesla facilities in Texas, Nevada, and California.) The UAW has eyes on the South because it stands to gain huge ground there. In the last few decades, a slew of auto plants have popped up in the region, a trend that’s only accelerating as more car companies invest in making EVs and announce new manufacturing facilities in the US. States often offer tempting subsidies to attract automakers to set up shop within their borders, but companies have an extra incentive to head South: it has some of the lowest unionization rates in the nation. In South Carolina, just 2.3 percent of workers belong to a union, compared to 24.1 percent in Hawaii and 20.6 percent in New York. This stark regional difference is tied to a history of racist anti-labor laws, an outgrowth of Jim Crow laws that segregated Black and white Americans in the South until they were overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Vox spoke to Andrew Wolf, a professor of global labor and work at Cornell University, on how unionizing the South could not only raise wages for all auto workers, but also tear down some of the racial disparities workers of color experience in the economy. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Why was the union vote at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant such a big deal? This was a big deal for many reasons. There has not been an organizing victory of this size in the South in decades. It’s a place where the union had lost previously. It just has really big ramifications for the future of organized labor, and the future of the economy in the South. This is the first Volkswagen union in the US, but Volkswagen already has unionized workers in other countries. Did that make organizing easier or harder here? The existence of unions and the really strong labor laws that exist in Germany generally certainly helped. It helped compel the company to be far more neutral and less aggressive in opposing the union than, for example, what’s happening right now at Mercedes in Alabama. Yes, workers at the Alabama plant are claiming Mercedes is retaliating against their union efforts. As you noted, the Chattanooga vote is a huge deal because it’s in the South. I think I know the answer to this, but — are there many unionized auto plants in the South? No. These companies opened in the South to avoid unions, especially with the rise of neoliberalism after the general financial crisis in the 1970s. It’s a within-country version of outsourcing. More and more companies move to the South to avoid unions, to take advantage of the lower wages that are the historical legacy of Jim Crow. You see it explicitly in the comments of the governors — you had the governors of all of these states talking about how this unionization would undermine the culture and values of the South. That’s very coded language for, “We don’t let workers get representation or fair pay in the South, because it’s better for business.” In the past few years we’ve seen some high-profilewins for American unions, but the reality is that union membership rates in the US are pretty low. In the 1950s, about a third of workers were in a union. What happened in those intervening years? Many things happened — globalization, neoliberalism, change in laws. The biggest thing was just that there were declines in the industries where unions were strongest, and a lack of union organizing in the industries that were fast-growing. So that combined with increased employer hostility, increased political hostility, and weakening of labor and employment laws, drove down the rate of unionization in this country. In the South, specifically, what were the policies that led to such low unionization? As with everything in America, the answer to the question is race. Avoiding unions was part of the Jim Crow apparatus. Unions are particularly threatening to orders like Jim Crow, because they bring workers across races together in common cause. So unionization was a real threat to the economic order of the South and that has had lasting impact, with wages being significantly lower in the South, unionization rates lower in the South, and poverty rates being higher. The National Labor Relations Act passed in the ’30s, and then after World War II, Congress passes the Taft-Hartley Act, which undermined the NLRA. But specifically, [Taft-Hartley] empowers states to undermine [the NLRA]. All the Southern states passed these right-to-work laws while the more heavily unionized states in the North and Midwest didn’t institute right-to-work. Essentially, it’s a strategy that makes it both harder to organize and keep the unions funded if you do organize. And what are right-to-work laws? Right-to-work laws are laws that allow workers in unionized workplaces to refuse to pay fair-share fees. Where unions exist, workers can either become a member, in which case they pay dues, or if they don’t want to become a member they have to pay their fair-share fees, which covers the cost of the union representing them. This makes it much harder for unions to fund themselves. Then there’s other little things that exist in right-to-work laws in different states, such as requiring the union to get everyone to re-sign up for the union every single year in order to pay dues. Do workers who aren’t members of a union still benefit from them? [Yes.] For example, if you’re a worker in a shop that’s unionized in a right-to-work state, and you decide you don’t want to pay dues, but then you get fired and you want to challenge that termination — the union is still legally required to represent you, even though you have not paid for that representation. How does low unionization tie into the high rates of poverty we see in the South today? There’s two mechanisms. There’s a significant and persistent union premium, with unionized workers making more money. Additionally, there’s the spillover effects of this. If you have a high unionization rate in your locality, the other employers pay better as well, to remain competitive — a kind of “rising tides lifts all boats” situation. Without unionization, in the South, it depresses wages across the board, and then in turn it depresses wages across the country because there’s always this threat that auto companies could leave Detroit and go south. Also, many Southern states haven’t set their own minimum wage separate from the federal minimum [which is still $7.25 per hour]. Yes, exactly. And right now there’s this huge push across the South to roll back the few labor rights they do have — most prominently, removing all these child labor laws. They just rolled back health and safety laws, including heat laws in Florida for agricultural workers. To get back to Volkswagen in Chattanooga — the union vote passed with 73 percent saying yes. Is that high? Just okay? I was shocked. I mean, it’s a completely overwhelming victory, especially when you consider that the union had lost here in the past. It just really shows you how powerful this moment is right now, and how much workers are buying the message that the current UAW is selling. The Chattanooga facility voted no to unionization twice before. What do you think was different this time? Everything’s different. The biggest difference was this massive contract victory that UAW had at the Big Three last fall. When workers see unions win, it increases interest in the unions — so it had a real galvanizing effect. There was so much publicity on it, talking about these big wage increases. I think these workers down in the South were looking at their paychecks and comparing, right, and realizing the raw deal they have. Additionally, you had the experience of the pandemic, where all these workers were told they were essential, but then they weren’t compensated as if they were essential. It’s just spurred this massive upsurge in labor organizing since the pandemic. What did you think when you heard that the UAW was going to try to unionize the South? It just struck me as really smart, to leverage this big contract victory to go out and try to improve conditions more generally in the industry. Because, as I said, a rising tide lifts all boats, but also, the sinking tides in the South can diminish the wages for unionized workers in the North. I think [UAW organizers] also realize there’s this imperative, that you can’t let this big disparity in auto wages exist between the North and South and continue to win these meaningful contracts. What does this portend for the upcoming Mercedes UAW vote? It’s a different state, a different company. Are there different headwinds? It will be more challenging there, because the company is being far more aggressively anti-union. We talked about how the relationship with the VW union in Germany helped in this situation. But, at the same time, I think there are reasons to be hopeful that the UAW might succeed given what we’ve seen elsewhere. I feel much better about it considering that the Chattanooga vote was 73 percent than if it had been, say, 51 percent. Right now, many foreign carmakers are trying to establish a bigger presence here as the US transitions to electric vehicles. Does that make it more pivotal that the UAW expansion happen right now? Yeah, and you saw this reflected in the contract the UAW secured with the Big Three as well. The move to electric vehicles is going to really change the auto industry — it’s probably going to result in less putting-the-car-together jobs, so to speak, but probably more parts jobs. So the UAW contracts last fall secured the right to organize some of these battery factories. It’s absolutely coming at the right time, because it’s a moment [that] would have only further undermined the UAW foothold in the industry. Do you see this as potentially inspiring for other companies and industries in the South? For sure. I would imagine that is what we would see. It’s hard, though — I don’t know if interest in movements for it will necessarily result in victory. But I think you’ll see much more labor action in the South and elsewhere across the country.

Trump speaks at an event in Pennsylvania on April 13. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Voters trust Trump to lower prices, even as his advisers put forward plans for increasing Americans’ cost of living. Donald Trump is currently leading the 2024 presidential race, in no small part because voters trust him to combat inflation. This is a bit strange since Trump has for months now been advertising plans to drastically increase consumer prices. Over the weekend, an NBC News poll found Trump leading Biden nationally by a 46 to 44 percent margin. Yet on the question of which candidate would better handle inflation and the cost of living, the Republican led the Democrat by a whopping 22 points. Trump’s landslide lead on price management is significant, since inflation was the poll’s single most commonly cited “critical issue” facing the United States. Unfortunately, Trump does not actually have a bulletproof plan for making Big Macs cheap again. To the contrary, the Republican and his advisers have developed an economic agenda that amounts to a recipe for turbocharging inflation. The claim that Trump’s policies would increase prices does not rest on a debatable interpretation of their indirect effects. Rather, some of the president’s proposals would directly increase American consumers’ costs by design. Here is a quick primer on the likely GOP nominee’s four-point plan for making your life less affordable: Step 1: Reduce the value of the U.S. dollar In the years since the Covid crisis, inflation has plagued consumers all across the wealthy world. Americans, though, have one advantage over their peers abroad: Their nation’s currency is relatively strong. The US economy is growing at nearly twice the pace of other major rich countries without suffering substantially higher inflation. Nevertheless, the Federal Reserve has kept America’s interest rates elevated. Taken together, these two realities increase demand for the dollar: Foreign investors want to place their capital in countries that are growing fast and/or that are offering high, low-risk returns on their sovereign debt. America is currently doing both. Thus, many investors abroad are swapping their local currencies for greenbacks, thereby bidding up the dollar’s value. As a result, Americans’ paychecks are going a bit farther, as a strong dollar makes imported goods cheaper for them. But Trump’s advisers want to change this. According to Politico, the former president’s policy aides are “ actively debating ways to devalue the U.S. dollar if he’s elected to a second term.” Their rationale is not hard to understand. Although a strong dollar is good for US consumers, it’s not great for US exporters, as it renders their goods more expensive to potential customers abroad. And since Trump and his former trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, have long sought to boost American manufacturing and shrink the trade deficit, they’re prepared to privilege the interests of the nation’s producers over those of its consumers. Lighthizer reportedly hopes to coerce other nations into strengthening the value of their currencies by threatening to impose tariffs on their exports if they don’t comply. Trump’s advisers are also mulling ways to weaken the dollar without foreign cooperation, according to Politico. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the US dollar is currently too strong. Plenty of analysts on both the right and left believe that America has a national interest in sustaining and growing its domestic production capacities. And all else being equal, a strong dollar does hurt American manufacturing. On the other hand, only about 8.6 percent of US workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, which suggests that a large majority of Americans have a stronger immediate interest in affordable imports than competitive exports. Further, there’s reason to believe that the Trump team’s plans would backfire, as many foreign governments would retaliate against tariffs and dollar devaluation by imposing duties on US-made goods and seeking to weaken their own currencies. Yet even if one supports Lighthizer’s priorities and proposals, an inescapable fact remains: A plan to devalue the dollar is — quite literally — a plan to make products more expensive for American consumers. And this isn’t the Trump team’s only proposal for directly increasing your household’s costs. Step 2: Apply a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports To further boost American manufacturing, Trump and his aides are considering the imposition of a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports. In practice, this would almost certainly mean that US consumers would pay roughly 10 percent more on all the foreign-made cars, electronics, toys, and other goods that they purchase. In theory, it is possible for the burdens of a tariff to fall entirely on foreign producers rather than domestic consumers. If a tariff applies only to raw commodities (such as soybeans or wheat) produced in a single country, then exporters in that country might slash their prices in response. This is because lots of countries export raw commodities, so a targeted producer would likely lose market share in the US unless they offset the impact of the tariff with a price cut. In that scenario, American consumers wouldn’t pay much higher prices for imports, but the targeted foreign producer would be forced to accept smaller profit margins. This is not how a universal tariff would work. Americans import a lot more than raw commodities. And the country cannot currently produce all the goods and production inputs that the economy requires, let alone produce them as cheaply as foreign firms do. Producers of specialty products such as advanced semiconductors will know that American consumers have nowhere else to turn. They therefore will feel little pressure to cut their prices. According to multiple studies, when Trump imposed tariffs on specialty Chinese goods such as silk embroidery, US consumers paid roughly 100 percent of the costs. Meanwhile, sheltered from foreign competition by tariffs, US manufacturers would be able to raise their prices considerably without risking a loss of customers. The result of all this would be a dramatic increase in consumer prices. This said, precisely because Trump’s universal tariff would function as a 10 percent sales tax on all foreign goods, it would somewhat reduce consumer demand. Make products less affordable for Americans and they will be forced to buy fewer of them. As consumers reduce their purchases, inflation could theoretically slow. But don’t worry, Trump’s comprehensive (if unintentional) plan for juicing inflation accounts for this possibility. Step 3: Enact massive, deficit-financed tax cuts The Republican Party’s number one fiscal priority in 2025 will be extending the Trump tax cuts. Many provisions of the former president’s 2017 tax package are set to expire at the end of next year. Merely preserving those policies will increase the federal deficit by $3.3 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). But Trump is not satisfied with merely maintaining America’s current tax rates. Rather, his team hopes to further reduce the corporate rate from 21 percent to as low as 15 percent. That would further swell the deficit by $522 billion, under conventional assumptions, according to the Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank. The president also hopes to enact a large middle-class tax cut, according to a recent report from Reuters. Specifically, Trump and his advisers are considering a cut to the federal payroll tax and/or a reduction in marginal income tax rates for middle-class households. Since the scale of these cuts has not been specified, it is impossible to say how much they would cost in fiscal terms. Since America’s middle class is large, any substantial reduction in its tax burden would be very expensive in fiscal terms. At first brush, a middle-class tax cut might seem like it would make life more affordable for Americans, at least in the short term. This would be true if such a policy came with no risk of triggering a resurgence of inflation, but unfortunately, it would entail precisely that hazard. If you increase Americans’ post-tax incomes by hundreds of billions of dollars, they will suddenly be able to dramatically boost their purchases of goods and services. If the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services does not increase at the same pace, then demand will outrun supply and consumers will bid up prices. Theoretically, Republicans could enact non-inflationary, multitrillion-dollar tax cuts without sparking inflation, but this would require offsetting the fiscal impacts of tax cuts with spending reductions. The combination of extending the 2017 tax cuts and slashing the corporate rate to 15 percent would cost nearly $4 trillion in foregone revenue. Tacking on a large middle-class tax cut could easily bring that sum total north of $6 trillion. During both the Trump and George W. Bush presidencies, congressional Republicans ultimately didn’t have the stomach to enact spending cuts anywhere near that large. Critically, offsetting the inflationary impact of tax cuts in 2025 and 2026 would require slashing spending immediately, not years down the line. Republicans have no appetite for cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits for existing beneficiaries. And coming up with $6 trillion in spending reductions without tackling entitlements would require gutting all manner of popular social programs. The path of least resistance would therefore be to deficit-finance the bulk of Trump’s tax cuts. This would likely lead to faster price growth and more interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve. Granted, if Republicans somehow found a way to rapidly increase the US economy’s productive capacity, then their tax cuts would be less inflationary and the typical American might come out ahead (at least, until the consequences of gutting future funding for Medicare and Social Security caught up with them). But Trump’s team plans to do the opposite. The final plank in their pro-inflation agenda involves abruptly shrinking the supply side of the US economy. Step 4: Shrink the American labor force As the New York Times reported in November, Trump and former White House adviser Stephen Miller have hatched plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants during his second term in office, even without Congress’s cooperation. Currently, due process rights constrain the government’s ability to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. But Miller and Trump believe they can scale back those rights under existing executive authorities. They intend to make all undocumented immigrants who’ve been in the country for less than two years subject to expedited removal. In other words, the government would be empowered to remove such immigrants without first giving them an opportunity to challenge their deportations at a legal hearing. Current law makes it more difficult to summarily expel longtime US residents, but Trump’s team thinks it can force millions of them out of the country anyway. First, they would scale up raids of workplaces and other areas where undocumented immigrants are believed to be present. Then, they would condemn the captured immigrants to indefinite detention in federal camps. These detainees would still have the right to contest their deportations in court but they would need to wait out that often years-long legal process in confinement. Miller reportedly bets that most will choose to leave the country instead of tolerating de facto incarceration. In my estimation, there are strong moral reasons to oppose these policies. But even Americans who have no empathy for their undocumented compatriots have economic incentives to oppose mass deportation. As scholars at the Brookings Institution noted last fall, the upsurge in immigration since the pandemic is one major reason why the US managed to bring inflation down without suffering a recession: Foreign-born workers increased the economy’s productive capacity, helping supply to catch up with rising consumer demand. Conversely, if America abruptly deported all undocumented workers, labor shortages would devastate myriad industries, from housing to agriculture to the care economy, and prices would soar. Some Americans might consider such labor shortages beneficial. After all, when labor is scarce, workers can demand higher wages. But there are more undocumented workers in the United States than unemployed ones. Purging America of the former would not leave the US with the same economy with higher wages for the native-born. Rather, it would leave the country with a smaller economy, where millions of existing jobs simply would not get done. When you slash the agricultural labor force, food gets scarce and thus expensive. The same principle holds for construction, hospitality, leisure, or health care. Put all of this together and you have a recipe for making the inflation rate 9 percent again: Slash the dollar’s value, insulate US producers from competition, juice demand with tax cuts, and then throttle supply with mass deportation, and prices are bound to soar. Unfortunately, Trump’s proposals and their economic consequences appear to be largely lost on the American electorate, possibly because neither have attracted much media attention. If that does not change between now and November, the country could pay a heavy price.

Finnish activist Aiski Ryökäs at a My Voice, My Choice press conference. | Varja Jovanovič A massive effort to expand access throughout Europe launches today. An unprecedented effort to expand abortion rights throughout Europe launches today, led by groups that were already fighting for reproductive freedom at the national level in their eight home countries. The My Voice, My Choice campaign aims to collect 1 million signatures in the next few months to pressure leaders of the European Union to commit to helping anyone who is not easily able to end an unwanted pregnancy where they live. While legal abortion is supported throughout Europe andis broadly more accessible and affordable in the EUcompared to the United States, there are some exceptions.Poland and Malta have near-total abortion bans, Austria and Germany generallydo not provide free abortion care through national health insurance, and in countries such as Croatia and Italy, many doctors refuse to provide the procedure. Activists say their effort could help shore up access for nearly 20 million women. Their campaign for a European Citizens’ Initiative would help address those gaps by providing financial support for people to get care internationally if needed. Activists are presenting their initiative as voluntary — member states can choose to opt in. Those states that do participate “in the spirit of solidarity” could then receive financial support from the EU to terminate pregnancies for those who lack access to safe and legal abortion where they live. The proposed EU mechanism would cover the cost of the procedure but not travel costs. “What’s really special is it’s basically being built as the largest feminist movement in Europe, which is crazy and super tiring sometimes, and also really, really beautiful,” said Nika Kovač, a Slovenian activist leading the campaign. Varja Jovanovič Nika Kovač. Kovač told Vox she decided to mobilize on the European-wide level after seeing the Supreme Court overturn legal abortion in the United States. “The whole idea for this campaign came from the despair in the US,” she said. Kovač and her colleagues at the 8th of March Institute, a Slovenian human rights group named for International Women’s Day, planned this citizens’ initiative idea in secret for about 18 months, and then started recruiting international partners in late 2023. The core coalition now includes activists from Poland, Ireland, Spain, France, Austria, Croatia, and Finland. They aim to collect 1 million signatures in advance of the European parliamentary elections in June, which occur only once every five years. Collecting so many signatures in such a short time will be difficult, and if they’re successful, it would be the fastest signature collection for a European Citizen Initiative in history. Still, success is not inconceivable given that the effort is being led by organizers with years of mobilization experience in their home countries. Signature collection can be done both in-person and online, and activists are looking to organize at big upcoming events like May Day protests. “One thing I can rely on is the stubbornness of these women,” Kovač said. “In Europe we are so often caught up in our own national context, and this is the first time I feel like we’re slowly coming out of it.” How the proposed European abortion rights measure would work The European Union, which is comprised of 27 member states, has authority to govern via international treaties, primarily in realms such as monetary policy, trade policy, environmental policy, and consumer protection. Any powers — officially known as competences — not covered by these treaties remain exclusive to the member states, and for years activists were told that reproductive rights were simply beyond the scope of what the EU could legislate on, meaning that abortion had to be left to each sovereign country. “So many European politicians and bureaucrats say nothing can be done in the context of abortion on the European level because it’s not directly one of the competencies of the European Commission,” Kovač explained. “So we had to do a lot of thinking and researching.” They convened a group of international lawyers who helped develop a novel legal strategy, positioning their citizens’ measure as one within the “supporting competence” of the EU, an established official authority that allows the European Commission to support member states for a variety of purposes, including the protection and improvement of human health. Even with broader grounds for legal exceptions in European countries with earlier gestational age limits, first-trimester bans in Europe still force thousands of pregnant people to travel internationally every year to end their unwanted pregnancies. One study published in 2023 looked at pregnant people who traveled from countries like Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, and Italy to the Netherlands or England for later abortion care. Over half of the pregnant people surveyed hadn’t learned they were even pregnant until they were at least 14 weeks along, when they had already surpassed the limits in their home countries. If activists succeed in collecting enough signatures, then members of the European Commission would need to decide if they would support the citizens’ initiative. Activists aim to press all candidates running for European Parliament in June to clarify their stance on the proposal so voters have that information when they go to the polls. “It really will depend on what the next European Commission looks like, but the important thing for us is that this will go to them and they will need to speak to it and then do something,” Kovač said. “It’s really the first concrete solution for the people in Europe.”