Environment and Health
My Autistic Child Isn’t ‘Diseased’
Finding out that your child is autistic is usually presented as a disaster, a financial and emotional drain that needs a long period of grief to come to terms with. And with one in every 68 children — one for every three classes of primary school kids — receiving this...
Gutting Climate Protections Won’t Bring Back Coal Jobs
When Barack Obama announced the Clean Power Plan, Scientific American used his own words to criticize it for not going far enough. "There is such a thing as being too late when it comes to climate change," Obama said. "The science tells us we have to do more."...
Trumpcare Was for CEOs, Not Patients
It appears that House Speaker Paul Ryan's 123-page legislative plan for Trumpcare, the GOP's so-called "replacement" for Obamacare, is dead — for now, anyway. Republicans tried to rush it through, but not before the Congressional Budget Office discovered it was...
The GOP Health Plan Would Make the Opioid Crisis Even Worse
"We will give people struggling with addiction access to the help they need," Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail in 2016. We’re in the midst of the worst opioid epidemic our country has seen. More people died last year from opioid overdoses than ever before —...
Jeff Sessions Thinks Pot Is as Bad as Heroin. That’s So Wrong.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently called marijuana use a "life-wrecking dependency" that is "only slightly less awful" than heroin. Really? If that were true, maybe my little brother would be alive. I don't know the full story of my brother's drug use. He kept...
Magical Thinking on Health Care
Donald Trump, the amazing wunderkind of global luxury living — and now our nation's phantasmagoric, fast-charging president — is proving to be a legislative magician. In his campaign, Trump's number one promise was that he would "immediately" repeal the entirety of...
A Climate of Fear
Regulations Can Favor Some Businesses — And That’s Fine
As the Trump regime's anti-environment onslaught begins, there are several terms used by men (and in the case of Trump's cabinet, it's nearly all men) attempting to turn us against protecting the air we breathe and water we drink. Polluting industries become "job...
American Hellscape
In case you were wondering what Republicans have planned for the environment, it's now clear. Some of the ideas aren't new — like mining and logging our national forests. Or giving the green light to controversial oil pipelines like the Dakota Access Pipeline, which...
Ruling by Chaos
As Donald Trump was sworn in, my inbox filled up with concerns about the future of the Environmental Protection Agency. Allegedly, scientists were being censored. References to climate change were being erased. But all that was just a warm-up act. Before we could...
