Media Mentions

An article by Kenneth Mack: In our present racial crisis, the words of the writer and essayist James Baldwin have reemerged and become ubiquitous in American public discourse. Baldwin’s writings, sometimes shorn of context, are now quoted endlessly on social media and have been prominently displayed during protests against police brutality. Documentary filmmakers and feature film directors, including Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins, have mined his work for their craft. The noted writer and theater critic Hinton Als has curated a multimedia art exhibit dedicated to a complex representation of his life and persona. In addition, Baldwin’s queerness — his status as a gay black man — seems to invest his words with a special prescience for us. Baldwin achieved the height of his fame in the middle of the 1960s, when the novelist and former boy preacher’s beautiful and evocative words seemed to capture the stakes of the black freedom movement like nothing else — particularly for white liberals. It is that prophetic aspect of Baldwin that Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chairman of Princeton’s African American studies department, seeks to recover in his book “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.” The strength of Glaude’s book depends on how well he makes the case that Baldwin speaks directly to our times. “Begin Again” is, in fact, two different books. The first takes the reader on a deeply researched tour of Baldwin’s essays and actions from the mid-1960s forward. Glaude wants to rescue Baldwin’s legacy from many critics who contend that his art and insightfulness declined once he became an international icon and felt the need to speak for black America. Indeed, Baldwin’s novels and essays from the late ’60s on often received tepid or negative reviews. He sympathized with the emerging black power movement but endured withering, homophobic criticism from figures like Eldridge Cleaver.

In our latest episode of NothingWasted!, we chat with Emily Broad Leib, Clinical Professor and Director, Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), Harvard Law School. The Food Law and Policy Clinic provides legal advice to nonprofits and government agencies seeking to increase access to healthy foods, prevent diet-related diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, and reduce barriers to market entry for small-scale and sustainable food producers, while educating law students about ways to use law and policy to impact the food system. We spoke with Emily about global food bank trends and laws; organic waste bans; and food waste as it relates to COVID-19, climate change and more. Here’s a glimpse into Emily’s observations.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has become a frequent topic in the news and political debate. In the past few months alone, the “law that created the internet” has faced attacks ranging from President Trump’s Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship to calls by Sen. Josh Hawley and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to revoke Section 230. But what does Section 230 actually say? Despite all the debate, there’s a remarkable lack of consistency among the law’s critics about its substance. It often seems that Section 230 means different things to different people for different reasons. To address this issue, I convened a weeklong lunch series of five 90-minute webinars...The fifth and final panel moved from the present to the future of Section 230, asking: What would the world look like without Section 230 in it? To begin the conversation, Kendra Albert, lawyer at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, and Lorelei Lee, a writer and sex worker advocate, described the effects of SESTA/FOSTA, legislation that endangered Section 230 protections for platforms organizing or hosting advertisements for sex work. Though proponents of SESTA/FOSTA argued it would hold sites liable for potentially advertising for sex trafficking, both Albert and Lee described how the loss of immunity had done little to help solve the problem of sex trafficking and only served to further marginalize an already at-risk community. The writer and activist Cory Doctorow spoke about early reform attempts on the internet, such as copyright, that had resulted in more censorship and harm to minority communities. Rejoining the conversation, Daphne Keller reminded the panel of how changes to Section 230 shape the global conversation—and, in turn, how the U.S. can learn from international bodies. The main struggle of the internet, the panelists discussed, is the tension of allowing people to minimize harms against themselves while maximizing the internet’s positive effects—which Doctorow framed as balancing tools for “self-reliance” against “inter-operability.”

A federal district judge’s decision striking down the Trump administration’s rollback of methane emissions standards could fuel other litigation over an obscure tool used to study the impacts of climate change. California Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers last week rebuked the Bureau of Land Management for eliminating Obama-era restrictions on releases of the potent greenhouse gas from oil and gas infrastructure on public and tribal lands. Her opinion included a detailed assault on how the land agency used a metric called the social cost of methane, calling the approach “riddled with flaws.” Industry advocates say the judge improperly substituted her own judgment instead of deferring to the agency. But legal scholars expect litigants to use the decision to push for enhanced climate analysis in other federal decisions. “This decision will certainly be important as we work through litigation in other contexts,” said Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program...Similar debates over the social cost of greenhouse gases—or about proper cost-benefit analysis more generally—are cropping up in litigation over the Trump administration’s decisions to undercut Obama-era targets for vehicle emissions, and constrain how the Environmental Protection Agency weighs the collateral benefits of air pollution rules. “It doesn’t bode well for some of their other rulemakings,” Vizcarra said of the Trump administration. District court decisions don’t create binding precedent for other courts, but they can be persuasive. What’s less clear, Vizcarra said, is whether the ruling will help climate advocates force agencies to use the social cost of carbon in the first place. The California court’s frustrations stemmed from the fact that the Obama administration used one approach, and the Trump administration used a very different one without adequate justification, she said.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made two decisions yesterday that affect renewable energy, prompting starkly opposing reactions from wind and solar supporters. In a unanimous vote, FERC rejected a contentious petition that sought to end nationwide net metering, a practice that requires utilities to pay rooftop solar owners for the extra electricity they generate...The commission rejected the petition by the New England Ratepayers Association (NERA) on procedural grounds, saying the request didn't identify a specific controversy or harm for the agency to address. Republican Commissioners James Danly and Bernard McNamee offered comments about the petition, raising questions about whether the commission might have an appetite to examine federal jurisdiction over net metering in the future...Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program who has been critical of NERA's petition, said in general, he doesn't see the commission picking the issue back up, however. "Although perhaps yes if [Republicans] hold the majority for another five years, which might provide enough time for someone to file a more specific petition/enforcement action," he wrote in an email. Peskoe said Danly seemed to suggest parties might now bring lawsuits in federal court to challenge net metering. "Perhaps he knows something. His premise is that various courts might draw different conclusions about FERC's jurisdiction, and that would be a bad result," he said. "He therefore appears to suggest that FERC ought to weigh in, to ensure a uniform national approach to FERC's jurisdiction." He added that a court faced with a net-metering lawsuit could simply ask FERC to weigh in as has happened in the past.

State election officials are bracing for two trains on a possible collision course this fall: potential record turnout for the Nov. 3 general election, and an expected surge of the highly contagious and sometimes deadly COVID-19...Though the federal government can provide money and offer assistance, states control every aspect of voting except the date of Election Day, such as how elections are run, how and when voter registration takes place, the methods used to cast votes, what ballots look like, and how close races are handled. That local control comes with a price. “The core problem with the U.S. is you don’t have a single expert federal authority that runs elections that could have lots of resources, lots of expertise. You have 50 political secretaries of state; you have thousands of counties, all of which administer their own elections, and so, you’re never going to have uniform improvement or uniform competence when you have such a decentralized electoral system,” said Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an election law expert at Harvard Law School...The case Stephanopoulos said he’s most closely watching is one filed by the Republican National Committee and several affiliated organizations that seeks to bar the state of California from sending ballots to every eligible voter. State officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, say they want to avoid forcing citizens to choose between exercising their right to vote and risking their health. But Republicans, including President Trump and Attorney General William Barr, claim without evidence that mail-in voting invites fraud and makes it easier for foreign actors to interfere in elections. In June, the president said the “biggest risk” to his reelection is losing these legal fights to stop the expansion of mail-in voting.

An article by Bruce Schneier: Twitter was hacked this week. Not a few people’s Twitter accounts, but all of Twitter. Someone compromised the entire Twitter network, probably by stealing the log-in credentials of one of Twitter’s system administrators. Those are the people trusted to ensure that Twitter functions smoothly. The hacker used that access to send tweets from a variety of popular and trusted accounts, including those of Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, as part of a mundane scam—stealing bitcoin—but it’s easy to envision more nefarious scenarios. Imagine a government using this sort of attack against another government, coordinating a series of fake tweets from hundreds of politicians and other public figures the day before a major election, to affect the outcome. Or to escalate an international dispute. Done well, it would be devastating. Whether the hackers had access to Twitter direct messages is not known. These DMs are not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that they are unencrypted inside Twitter’s network and could have been available to the hackers. Those messages—between world leaders, industry CEOs, reporters and their sources, heath organizations—are much more valuable than bitcoin. (If I were a national-intelligence agency, I might even use a bitcoin scam to mask my real intelligence-gathering purpose.) Back in 2018, Twitter said it was exploring encrypting those messages, but it hasn’t yet. Internet communications platforms—such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—are crucial in today’s society. They’re how we communicate with one another. They’re how our elected leaders communicate with us. They are essential infrastructure. Yet they are run by for-profit companies with little government oversight. This is simply no longer sustainable.

Massachusetts House leaders reviewing the Senate policing bill received hundreds of emails Friday with testimony ranging from police officers opposing changes to qualified immunity to civil rights activists who say the bill does not go far enough to tackle institutionalized racism in law enforcement. The Senate approved a massive omnibus bill early Tuesday after an all-night session debating the provisions, including how the bill would change qualified immunity standards when misconduct is alleged...Katy Naples-Mitchell, legal fellow at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, urged the legislature to extend its session beyond July 31 to ensure the omnibus bill includes provisions that involve the input of people affected by institutionalized racism. One concern Naples-Mitchell raised was the proposed temporarily facial recognition ban exempting the Registrar of Motor Vehicles. “The Registry may continue to suspend people’s licenses using a technology we know to be racist and unreliable, which the chief of police in Detroit says misidentifies people 96% of the time,” Naples-Mitchell’s testimony states. Perhaps one of the biggest concerns she raised was that the bill would create several commissions and councils to study problems she said are already known to exist, based on existing data and research. “These commissions are nothing but a delay tactic and a way to preserve power for an elite professional class, putting off for tomorrow what this body refuses to do today,” Naples-Mitchell wrote.

Donald Trump announced this week one of the biggest rollbacks of established environmental law in a generation, declaring in a speech in Atlanta that his administration was moving forward with a fundamental overhaul of the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)...Trump’s overhaul of NEPA reverses those protections and processes. If it survives the expected legal challenges, it will undo 50 years of NEPA precedent and interpretations by federal agencies and the courts and make it much more difficult for communities burdened by pollution or worried about climate change to push back on destructive projects.  “Less projects will now go through environmental review, and when an environmental review is performed, many impacts will be excluded from discussion, consideration, and public knowledge,” Caitlin McCoy, a fellow for the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University, told Sierra. “We will not have a full accounting of the impacts of these projects, how they will affect our health, environment, and communities.” ...In the past, projects could be evaluated for their impact on the environment in the future, such as on climate change. When projects emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, those gases build up in the atmosphere over time and cause damage over time. Under the new regulations, impacts that occur either later in time or are geographically removed in distance from the project can no longer be considered. “Climate change is a tremendous and breathtaking threat to our planet and our lives,” McCoy said. “There is almost no deeper irony than the fact that these changes to our foundational environmental statute are laser focused on excluding climate impacts from environmental review. And it’s happening now during a global pandemic, which seems to be more deadly if you breathe polluted air, when we’re reckoning with racial justice, and, at a time when the climate crisis is accelerating.”

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made two decisions yesterday that affect renewable energy, prompting starkly opposing reactions from wind and solar supporters. In a unanimous vote, FERC rejected a contentious petition that sought to end nationwide net metering, a practice that requires utilities to pay rooftop solar owners for the extra electricity they generate. That sparked praise from renewable groups that also blasted the agency for a separate, final rule updating the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), a 1970s energy law meant to promote the adoption of small-scale, independent wind and solar projects...Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program who has been critical of NERA's petition, said in general, he doesn't see the commission picking the issue back up, however. "Although perhaps yes if [Republicans] hold the majority for another five years, which might provide enough time for someone to file a more specific petition/enforcement action," he wrote in an email. Peskoe said Danly seemed to suggest parties might now bring lawsuits in federal court to challenge net metering. "Perhaps he knows something. His premise is that various courts might draw different conclusions about FERC's jurisdiction, and that would be a bad result," he said. "He therefore appears to suggest that FERC ought to weigh in, to ensure a uniform national approach to FERC's jurisdiction." He added that a court faced with a net-metering lawsuit could simply ask FERC to weigh in as has happened in the past.

It’s well over a hundred days into the Covid-19 crisis, and I have to make a confession. I hate doing everything over video chat. I hated it at the start, and I hate it in new ways now. You’ve probably heard of the term “Zoom fatigue.” I’ve transcended Zoom fatigue. At this stage in the pandemic, I’m experiencing something more advanced, like that moment on a long run when you’ve fought through fatigue, tapped into your body’s store of endorphins, and also lost a toenail. Whether I like it or not, most of my work life and social life will happen via webcam in the weeks and months to come. Despite my complaints, however, this does not have to be a bad thing. Even when the pandemic ends, video chat will play an increasingly important role at work, for school, in health care, and in our relationships with friends and family. The pandemic not only pushed this technology into new scenarios of our daily lives but also forced everyone to learn how to use it...Zoom fatigue is the feeling of utter hopelessness you get after your ninth video call of the day, and experts say it’s brought on because the technology overtaxes your brain. Presented with a cropped, often blurry image of a human and a few milliseconds of lag throughout the conversation, your mind splits its attention between what people are saying and what’s happening on the screen, longing for nonverbal cues that just don’t cross over. Some call it “Zoom burnout,” though the “fatigue” descriptor better encapsulates how we’re tired of video calls but have to keep doing it. Others suggest the real problem is that we’re all depressed by the state of our lives in the pandemic. Regardless, video chat has always had fundamental flaws that make it prone to creating unsatisfying experiences. “We are constantly presented with the promise of instantaneous connection that seamlessly connects us with the people we love and the people we work with, and that’s always a fiction,” Jason Farman, a faculty associate with Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, explained. “I think we’ve seen that promise for well over 100 years.”

The Trump administration gave its final rewrite of a rule on how agencies conduct environmental reviews a better chance of surviving legal challenges by backing away from clear language that may have been vulnerable to attack, but in doing so, it may have created new problems by leaving certain terms up to agencies to define. The White House on Wednesday stepped back from the proposed rule's total ban on consideration of a project's "indirect" effects on the environment during a National Environmental Policy Act review, while declining to completely spell out what types of projects are exempt from NEPA reviews. By avoiding hard-line positions that environmental groups and more liberal states could have challenged as arbitrary or capricious, the White House Council on Environmental Quality gave more protection to its final rule from one line of attack. Yet the choice to be less clear leaves blanks for federal agencies to fill — and that opens a Pandora's box of potential litigation, experts say. "So much is going to depend on the way that this is implemented," Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney with the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, said. "By opening up a lot of different elements of these regulations to interpretation in order to avoid taking hard positions that could be challenged as arbitrary, CEQ is just exposing all of the agencies to a huge round of litigation." ...That means while the rule might be more legally sound and helps fulfill the goal of narrowing the types of projects that require NEPA reviews — creating more certainty for project proponents and speeding up the process — there still will be lots of chances for opponents to thwart those aims at the agency level, McCoy said.

An article by Margaret Bourdeaux, Beth Cameron and Jonathan Zittrain: As Covid-19 cases surge to their highest levels in dozens of states, the nation’s testing effort is on the brink of paralysis because of widespread delays in getting back results. And that is very bad news, because even if testing is robust, the pandemic cannot be controlled without rapid results. This is the latest failure in our national response to the worst pandemic in a century. Since the Trump administration has abdicated responsibility, governors must join forces to meet this threat before the cataclysm that Florida is experiencing becomes the reality across the country. Testing should be the governors’ first order of business. Despite President Trump’s boast early this month that testing “is so massive and so good,” the United States’ two largest commercial testing companies, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, have found themselves overwhelmed and unable to return results promptly. Delays averaging a week or longer for all but top-priority hospital patients and symptomatic health care workers are disastrous for efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Without rapid results, it is impossible to isolate new infections quickly enough to douse flare-ups before they grow. Slow diagnosis incapacitates contact tracing, which entails not only isolating those who test positive but also alerting the infected person’s contacts quickly so they can quarantine, too, and avoid exposing others to the virus unwittingly. Among those who waited an absurdly long time for her results was the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms. “We FINALLY received our test results taken 8 days before,” she tweeted last week. “One person in my house was positive then. By the time we tested again, 1 week later, 3 of us had COVID. If we had known sooner, we would have immediately quarantined.”

The impact that pretrial risk or risk and needs assessment (RNA) tools have on criminal justice decisions is usually relative to each jurisdiction. After all, states use different tools at different times for different purposes. How much risk assessment tools exacerbate or mitigate bias within criminal justice processes, therefore, often comes down to how they’re designed, validated and considered by a judge or correctional officer. But outside of individual implementations, the use of risk assessments as a whole, and the value—or lack thereof—they provide is a matter of intense debate...Both judges and assessment tools are “relying [on] and using court-provided and criminal information, [and] both sources of those information are biased,” says Colin Doyle, staff attorney at the Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program, who works on pretrial reform and bail issues. “Whether you’re a judge or an algorithm, that bias is baked into your thinking about predicting future crimes.” Are risk assessment tools, then, inherently biased? The answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer: ones that are designed and validated poorly certainly can be...Essentially, the data used on these risk assessment tool “is not neutral,” Doyle says. “It’s a record of police activity and not people’s activity. When you use that to evaluate people’s risk, whatever police do will distort your system.” ...Others have said that if local criminal justice systems continue to use risk assessment tools, then at the very least, there needs to be more open discussions about how they work. “We probably have to do a better job of communicating about these tools,” Doyle says. He notes, however, that some jurisdictions, such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, have allowed for community involvement and transparency in their risk assessment roll-outs.

President Trump's rewrite of a Nixon-era environmental law — if it withstands expected legal challenges and the November election — could have major implications for energy projects, including oil and gas pipelines nationwide. Trump yesterday announced the completion of rules to overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act, vowing the move would lead to quicker turnarounds for buildings and "better roads, bridges, tunnels and highways." He reserved his remarks on energy to bash his presumed Democratic presidential challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, using the second official White House event in two days to accuse Biden of pitching an energy plan that "would kill" oil and gas development...As critics expected, the final rule excludes the word "cumulative" effects from the NEPA review process. The plan stated a project's effects that are "remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain" should generally not be considered. That means impacts like greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to larger problems over time are less likely to be weighed in consideration of projects. The rule also stated effects under the purview of the law "do not include those effects that the agency has no ability to prevent due to its limited statutory authority." Caitlin McCoy, an attorney at Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program, said the language in the final rule is "intentionally vague." "It'll be up to the agencies," she said...McCoy noted that the final rule states that projects using "minimal federal funding" would not trigger a NEPA review. The catch, she noted, is that the rule gives no dollar amount for what counts as "minimal."

Environmental regulation is shaping up as a defining issue in the presidential race, with President Trump doubling down on his bid to ratchet back government oversight and former Vice President Joe Biden promising to reverse Mr. Trump’s regulatory rollbacks. The rivals this week outlined diametrically opposed views. Mr. Trump ordered a streamlining of environmental reviews and said he would keep shrinking the reach of government to help business. Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, released a $2 trillion clean-energy plan he said would spur job growth through investments in new technology...Shortly after taking office, Mr. Trump also issued a hiring freeze designed to starve agencies through attrition. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which investigates and regulates workplaces for health and safety issues, has the lowest number of inspectors in more than four decades and has seen inspection tallies plummet. The Environmental Protection Agency has seen similar decreases in inspections when compared with the Obama era, according to government reports. “The administration came into office with an unnervingly good understanding of how the machinery of regulation works and they did a pretty effective job of sabotaging it,” said Joe Goffman, executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. The approach will make it tougher for a new administration to carry out its objectives.

The Trump Administration wants faster reviews of pipeline and other large projects, but its latest move to achieve that leaves the question of climate impact assessment for such projects unclear. Overhauling NEPA marks the Trump Administration's latest efforts to cut down on what it sees as "mountains and mountains of bureaucratic red tape in Washington, D.C.," the president said in his Wednesday speech. His administration first proposed its changes to the 50-year-old law in January, and in June Trump signed an executive order loosening compliance requirements for the law in response to COVID-19-related delays. Fundamentally, the law's changes are twofold, Caitlin McCoy, staff attorney at Harvard's Environmental and Energy Law Program, told Utility Dive: it would reduce the number of projects subject to NEPA review and exclude certain effects of the project from being considered significant. For a project to trigger NEPA review, it needs to pose "significant" impacts to environmental quality or be federally funded, but under revised NEPA standards, projects would be exempt if they received "minimal federal funding" or "involvement" from the government, said McCoy. It's unclear whether a pipeline would trigger NEPA under these rules, she said — the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission needs to issue a certification for interstate pipelines, but "it has no control over whether the project is ultimately built or not, how it operates, pipeline safety or security." ... If a project does trigger NEPA, it is less clear how climate impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, hydrofluorocarbon emissions and other climate-related incidentals common to major infrastructure projects would be considered, said McCoy. The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) initially proposed reviews focus only on "direct effects" of a project, but now says effects "generally not be considered if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain." The word "generally" has been added since the change was first proposed and could leave the door open to considering potential climate impacts, McCoy said.

On Wednesday, President Trump achieved a longstanding goal in weakening environmental protection: The administration significantly narrowed the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law that requires the government to study the impact of federal projects on the communities and wild areas around them. By skipping steps and shortening deadlines, these changes help to fast-track fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines and highways, a move that leaves out the voices of poor neighborhoods and people of color on the pollution in their communities...Twice a year, the administration publishes a Unified Regulatory Agenda that details its plans for new regulations and rollbacks. The experts who keep track of environmental rollbacks for Harvard’s Regulatory Tracker noticed an exceptionally long list in the recently updated agenda from early July. It shows 317 items  in proposed or final stages lined up for both the Department of Interior and Environmental Protection Agency. Of those 317, the rules in final stages are most important to watch, because they close enough to the finish line that Trump could conceivably rush them out the door before January if he loses the election. There are 64 EPA rules and 74 Interior rules in the final stage, according to the same list, slightly higher than the EPA and Interior had planned for the fall. “If they meet their schedule, virtually every big ticket item will be across the finish line,” says Harvard University’s Joseph Goffman, who was a senior clean air attorney under the Obama EPA... “If that happens, if there ever is a Democratic administration coming in that has any kind of ambitious regulatory agenda,” Goffman says, “they’re going to have to overcome whatever of those restrictive legal interpretations that were upheld by the courts.”

The Trump administration is rolling back major environmental protections that require the US government to comprehensively analyze how proposed projects like pipelines and highways affect surrounding communities. Trump announced the changes on Wednesday afternoon from a UPS airport hub in Atlanta, where he backed the widening of commercial truck lanes on Interstate Highway 75. The White House said projects like the Atlanta expansion would have taken seven years to permit and now should take less than two years. The White House Council on Environmental Quality finalized the changes to the regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa), which the Republican president Richard Nixon signed into law in 1970. The new rules reduce the number of projects subject to review, narrow the scope of reviews and exclude effects related to climate change from being considered significant...Less than 1% of projects funded or permitted by federal agencies require full environmental impact statements under the law. But those that do are significant. Before Nepa, “you could wake up one day and see half your neighborhood bulldozed,” said Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney for the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard. In 1956, the federal government demolished hundreds of houses in an African American neighborhood in St Paul, Minnesota, to make room for Interstate 94. “We’ve spent so much time talking about the Trump administration’s ‘rollbacks’, and most of that has been focused on how the Trump administration has sought to undo regulations that were put in place under the Obama administration … but this one is really significant because these regulations have been in place since 1978 and only small changes have been made over the years,” McCoy said. “It shows how far the Trump administration is willing to go and how emboldened they feel three and a half years in.”

People start lining up as early as 6 a.m. these days outside an emergency food pantry in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. Theresa Gilbert, a 61-year-old in-home care giver waiting in line on a recent scorching-hot day, said money has been tight since March, when she caught a cold on the job and the agency she works for sent her home. She hasn’t worked since, and the food she gets here helps make ends meet. “Whatever I have, I make it do,” Ms. Gilbert said. Demand for the free vegetables, milk and canned goods on offer here has surged since the coronavirus pandemic torpedoed the U.S. economy, closing businesses and thrusting millions out of work...Hunger-relief organization Feeding America, a nationwide network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs, estimates the pandemic could push an additional 17 million people into what it calls food insecurity this year. More than 82% of U.S. food banks are serving more people than they were last year, with an average increase of 50%, according to a June survey by the group. “The pandemic is putting pressure on a system that was already struggling to make sure all the food we are producing finds its way to people,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

How far has the diplomatic relationship between the United States and China sunk? It’s gotten to the point where China watchers are increasingly invoking a fuzzy but extreme concept: “decoupling.” In its purest form, the term refers to a halt in the flows of information, money, ideas, and people between the world’s two powers. And there’s plenty of evidence the two countries are headed in that direction...But how realistic is a pure decoupling – and what does decoupling, in any form, mean for our collective future? To help answer this question, I gathered a group of China experts with backgrounds in finance, trade, government and technology...Joining me for the virtual discussion...[is] Mark Wu, Vice Dean and professor of international trade at Harvard Law School... "When we use the term decoupling, we have to think of it as a spectrum. There are a range of options and it will differ depending on which sector. What's the nature of that company? It will also differ based on where that company earns its revenue globally. One possibility is definitely the zero-sum choice that Samm alluded to. But for other companies, this is a question about simply not putting all your eggs in one basket. So you've seen some companies depend overwhelmingly on either Chinese or American suppliers. And now [they are] thinking, we better have other sources in case unexpected developments happen. Then there is another alternative, which is to say nothing's going to change about how we operate currently, but we may have to change our future plans. Chinese companies right now who operate with a 'China for China' type of strategy may now be thinking about going towards a 'China for the world' strategy."