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Southwestern drought likely to continue through 2100, research finds

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The drought in the Southwestern US is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO.

“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a PhD student in geosciences at University of Texas at Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”

Currently, the Southwestern US is experiencing a megadrought resulting in the aridification of the landscape, a decades-long drying of the region brought on by climate change and the overconsumption of the region’s water. That’s led to major rivers and their basins, such as the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, seeing reduced flows and a decline of the water stored in underground aquifers, which is forcing states and communities to reckon with a sharply reduced water supply. Farmers have cut back on the amount of water they use. Cities are searching for new water supplies. And states, tribes, and federal agencies are engaging in tense negotiations over how to manage declining resources like the Colorado River going forward.

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RFK Jr. wants to change program that stopped vaccine makers from leaving US market

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RFK Jr. is targeting a little-known program that underpins childhood immunizations in the US.

US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Capitol Hill on May 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty | Tasos Katopodis

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Five months after taking over the federal agency responsible for the health of all Americans, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to overhaul an obscure but vital program that underpins the nation’s childhood immunization system.

Depending on what he does, the results could be catastrophic.

In his crosshairs is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a system designed to provide fair and quick payouts for people who suffer rare but serious side effects from shots—without having to prove that drugmakers were negligent. Congress created the program in the 1980s when lawsuits drove vaccine makers from the market. A special tax on immunizations funds the awards, and manufacturers benefit from legal protections that make it harder to win big-money verdicts against them in civil courts.

Kennedy, who founded an anti-vaccination group and previously accused the pharmaceutical industry of inflicting “unnecessary and risky vaccines” on children for profits, has long argued that the program removes any incentive for the industry to make safe products.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy condemned what he called corruption in the program and said he had assigned a team to overhaul it and expand who could seek compensation. He didn’t detail his plans but did repeat the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism and suggested, without citing any evidence, that shots could also be responsible for a litany of chronic ailments, from diabetes to narcolepsy.

There are a number of ways he could blow up the program and prompt vaccine makers to stop selling shots in the US, like they did in the 1980s. The trust fund that pays awards, for instance, could run out of money if the government made it easy for Kennedy’s laundry list of common health problems to qualify for payments from the fund.

Or he could pick away at the program one shot at a time. Right now, immunizations routinely recommended for children or pregnant women are covered by the program. Kennedy has the power to drop vaccines from the list, a move that would open up their manufacturers to the kinds of lawsuits that made them flee years ago.

Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, who served as New Jersey’s state epidemiologist and then spent a dozen years as a vaccine executive at Merck, is among those worried.

“If his unstated goal is to basically destroy the vaccine industry, that could do it,” said Bresnitz, who retired from Merck and has consulted for vaccine manufacturers. “I still believe, having worked in the industry, that they care about protecting American health, but they are also for-profit companies with shareholders, and anything that detracts from the bottom line that can be avoided, they will avoid.”

A spokesperson for PhRMA, a US trade group for pharmaceutical companies, told ProPublica in a written statement that upending the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program “would threaten continued patient access to FDA-approved vaccines.”

The spokesperson, Andrew Powaleny, said the program “has compensated thousands of claims while helping ensure the continued availability of a safe and effective vaccine supply. It remains a vital safeguard for public health and importantly doesn’t shield manufacturers from liability.”

Since its inception, the compensation fund has paid about $4.8 billion in awards for harm from serious side effects, such as life-threatening allergic reactions and Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune condition that can cause paralysis. The federal agency that oversees the program found that for every 1 million doses of vaccine distributed between 2006 and 2023, about one person was compensated for an injury.

Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has turned the staid world of immunizations on its ear. He reneged on the US government’s pledge to fund vaccinations for the world’s poorest kids. He fired every member of the federal advisory group that recommends which shots Americans get, and his new slate vowed to scrutinize the US childhood immunization schedule. Measles, a vaccine-preventable disease eliminated here in 2000, roared back and hit a grim record—more cases than the US has seen in 33 years, including three deaths. When a US senator asked Kennedy if he recommended measles shots, Kennedy answered, “Senator, if I advised you to swim in a lake that I knew there to be alligators in, wouldn’t you want me to tell you there were alligators in it?”

Fed up, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical societies sued Kennedy last week, accusing him of dismantling “the longstanding, Congressionally-authorized, science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans.” (The federal government has yet to respond to the suit.)

Just about all drugs have side effects. What’s unusual about vaccines is that they’re given to healthy people—even newborns on their first day of life. And many shots protect not just the individuals receiving them but also the broader community by making it harder for deadly scourges to spread. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that routine childhood immunizations have prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations among the generation of Americans born between 1994 and 2023.

To most people, the nation’s vaccine system feels like a solid, reliable fact of life, doling out shots to children like clockwork. But in reality it is surprisingly fragile.

There are only a handful of companies that make nearly all of the shots children receive. Only one manufacturer makes chickenpox vaccines. And just two or three make the shots that protect against more than a dozen diseases, including polio and measles. If any were to drop out, the country could find itself in the same crisis that led President Ronald Reagan to sign the law creating the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986.

Back then, pharmaceutical companies faced hundreds of lawsuits alleging that the vaccine protecting kids from whooping cough, diphtheria, and tetanus caused unrelenting seizures that led to severe disabilities. (Today’s version of this shot is different.) One vaccine maker after another left the US market.

At one point, pediatricians could only buy whooping cough vaccines from a single company. Shortages were so bad that the CDC recommended doctors stop giving booster shots to preserve supplies for the most vulnerable babies.

While Congress debated what to do, public health clinics’ cost per dose jumped 5,000 percent in five years.

“We were really concerned that we would lose all vaccines, and we would get major resurgences of vaccine-preventable diseases,” recalled Dr. Walter Orenstein, a vaccine expert who worked in the CDC’s immunization division at the time.

A Forbes headline captured the anxiety of parents, pediatricians, and public health workers: “Scared Shotless.” So a bipartisan group in Congress hammered out the no-fault system.

Today, the program covers vaccines routinely recommended for children or pregnant women once Congress approves the special tax that funds awards. (COVID-19 shots are part of a separate, often-maligned system for handling claims of harm, though Kennedy has said he’s looking at ways to add them to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.)

Under program rules, people who say they are harmed by covered vaccines can’t head straight to civil court to sue manufacturers. First, they have to go through the no-fault system. The law established a table of injuries and the time frame for when those conditions must have appeared in order to be considered for quicker payouts. A tax on those vaccines — now 75 cents for every disease that a shot protects against — flows into a trust fund that pays those approved for awards. Win or lose, the program, for the most part, pays attorney fees and forbids lawyers from taking a cut of the money paid to the injured.

The law set up a dedicated vaccine court where government officials known as special masters, who operate like judges, rule on cases without juries. People can ask for compensation for health problems not listed on the injury table, and they don’t have to prove that the vaccine maker was negligent or failed to warn them about the medical condition they wound up with. At the same time, they can’t claim punitive damages, which drive up payouts in civil courts, and pain and suffering payments are capped at $250,000.

Plaintiffs who aren’t satisfied with the outcome or whose cases drag on too long can exit the program and file their cases in traditional civil courts. There they can pursue punitive damages, contingency-fee agreements with lawyers and the usual evidence gathering that plaintiffs use to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing.

But a Supreme Court ruling, interpreting the law that created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, limited the kinds of claims that can prevail in civil court. So while the program isn’t a full liability shield for vaccine makers, its very existence significantly narrows the cases trial lawyers can file.

Kennedy has been involved in such civil litigation. In his federal disclosures, he revealed that he referred plaintiffs to a law firm filing cases against Merck over its HPV shot in exchange for a 10 percent cut of the fees if they win. After a heated exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation proceedings, Kennedy said his share of any money from those cases would instead go to one of his adult sons, who he later said is a lawyer in California. His son Conor works as an attorney at the Los Angeles law firm benefiting from his referrals. When ProPublica asked about this arrangement, Conor Kennedy wrote, “I don’t work on those cases and I’m not receiving any money from them.”

In March, a North Carolina federal judge overseeing hundreds of cases that alleged Merck failed to warn patients about serious side effects from its HPV vaccine ruled in favor of Merck; an appeal is pending.

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program succeeded in stabilizing the business of childhood vaccines, with many more shots developed and approved in the decades since it was established. But even ardent supporters acknowledge there are problems. The program’s staff levels haven’t kept up with the caseload. The law capped the number of special masters at eight, and congressional bills to increase that have failed. An influx of adult claims swamped the system after adverse reactions to flu shots became eligible for compensation in 2005 and serious shoulder problems were added to the injury table in 2017.

The quick and smooth system of payouts originally envisioned has evolved into a more adversarial one with lawyers for the Department of Justice duking it out with plaintiffs’ attorneys, which Kennedy says runs counter to the program’s intent. Many cases drag on for years.

In his recent interview with Carlson, he described “the lawyers of the Department of Justice, the leaders of it” working on the cases as corrupt. “They saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice, and we’re going to change all that,” he said. “And I’ve brought in a team this week that is starting to work on that.”

The system is “supposed to be generous and fast and gives a tie to the runner,” he told Carlson. “In other words, if there’s doubts about, you know, whether somebody’s injury came from a vaccine or not, you’re going to assume they got it and compensate them.”

Kennedy didn’t identify who is on the team reviewing the program. At one point in the interview, he said, “We just brought a guy in this week who’s going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.”

The HHS employee directory now lists Andrew Downing as a counselor working in Kennedy’s office. Downing for many years has filed claims with the program and suits in civil courts on behalf of clients alleging harm from shots. Last month, HHS awarded a contract for “Vaccine Injury Compensation Program expertise” to Downing’s firm, as NOTUS has reported.

Downing did not respond to a voicemail left at his law office. HHS didn’t reply to a request to make him and Kennedy available for an interview and declined to answer detailed questions about its plans for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In the past, an HHS spokesperson has said that Kennedy is “not anti-vaccine—he is pro-safety.”

While it’s not clear what changes Downing and Kennedy have in mind, Kennedy’s interview with Carlson offered some insights. Kennedy said he was working to expand the program’s three-year statute of limitations so that more people can be compensated. Downing has complained that patients who have certain autoimmune disorders don’t realize their ailments were caused by a vaccine until it’s too late to file. Congress would have to change the law to allow this, experts said.

A key issue is whether Kennedy will try to add new ailments to the list of injuries that qualify for quicker awards.

In the Carlson interview, Kennedy dismissed the many studies and scientific consensus that shots don’t cause autism as nothing more than statistical trickery. “We’re going to do real science,” Kennedy said.

The vaccine court spent years in the 2000s trying cases that alleged autism was caused by the vaccine ingredient thimerosal and the shot that protects people from measles, mumps, and rubella. Facing more than 5,000 claims, the court asked a committee of attorneys representing children with autism to pick test cases that represented themes common in the broader group. In the cases that went to trial, the special masters considered more than 900 medical articles and heard testimony from dozens of experts. In each of those cases, the special masters found that the shots didn’t cause autism.

In at least two subsequent cases, children with autism were granted compensation because they met the criteria listed in the program’s injury table, according to a vaccine court decision. That table, for instance, lists certain forms of encephalopathy—a type of brain dysfunction—as a rare side effect of shots that protect people from whooping cough, measles, mumps, and rubella. In a 2016 vaccine court ruling, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. explained, “The compensation of these two cases, thus does not afford any support to the notion that vaccinations can contribute to the causation of autism.”

Hastings noted that when Congress set up the injury table, the lawmakers acknowledged that people would get compensated for “some injuries that were not, in fact, truly vaccine-caused.”

Many disabling neurological disorders in children become apparent around the time kids get their shots. Figuring out whether the timing was coincidental or an indication that the vaccines caused the problem has been a huge challenge.

Devastating seizures in young children were the impetus for the compensation program. But in the mid-1990s, after a yearslong review of the evidence, HHS removed seizure disorder from the injury table and narrowed the type of encephalopathy that would automatically qualify for compensation. Scientists subsequently have discovered genetic mutations that cause some of the most severe forms of epilepsy.

What’s different now, though, is that Kennedy, as HHS secretary, has the power to add autism or other disorders to that injury table. Experts say he’d have to go through the federal government’s cumbersome rulemaking process to do so. He could also lean on federal employees to green-light more claims.

In addition, Kennedy has made it clear he’s thinking about illnesses beyond autism. “We have now this epidemic of immune dysregulation in our country, and there’s no way to rule out vaccines as one of the key culprits,” he told Carlson. Kennedy mentioned diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, seizure disorders, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, peanut allergies, and eczema.

President Donald Trump’s budget estimated that the value of the investments in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program trust fund could reach $4.8 billion this year. While that’s a lot of money, a life-care plan for a child with severe autism can cost tens of millions of dollars, and the CDC reported in April that 1 in 31 children is diagnosed with autism by their 8th birthday. The other illnesses Kennedy mentioned also affect a wide swath of the US population.

Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for years has sparred with Kennedy over vaccines. Offit fears that Kennedy will use flawed studies to justify adding autism and other common medical problems to the injury table, no matter how much they conflict with robust scientific research.

“You can do that, and you will bankrupt the program,” he said. “These are ways to end vaccine manufacturing in this country.”

If the trust fund were to run out of money, Congress would have to act, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at University of California Law San Francisco who has studied the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Congress could increase the excise tax on vaccines, she said, or pass a law limiting what’s on the injury table. Or Congress could abolish the program, and the vaccine makers would find themselves back in the situation they faced in the 1980s.

“That’s not unrealistic,” Reiss said.

Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, last year proposed the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which would have allowed people to bypass the no-fault system and head straight to civil court. His press release for the bill—written in September, before Kennedy’s ascension to HHS secretary—quoted Kennedy saying, “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield.”

The legislation never came up for a vote. A spokesperson for the congressman said he expects to introduce it again “in the very near future.”

Renée Gentry, director of the George Washington University Law School’s Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely Congress will blow up the no-fault program. But Gentry, who represents people filing claims for injuries, said it’s hard to predict what Congress, faced with a doomsday scenario, would do.

“Normally Democrats are friends of plaintiffs’ lawyers,” she said. “But talking about vaccines on the Hill is like walking on a razor blade that’s on fire.”

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EU presses pause on probe of X as US trade talks heat up

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While Trump and Musk have fallen out this year after developing a political alliance on the 2024 election, the US president has directly attacked EU penalties on US companies calling them a “form of taxation” and comparing fines on tech companies with “overseas extortion.”

Despite the US pressure, commission president Ursula von der Leyen has explicitly stated Brussels will not change its digital rulebook. In April, the bloc imposed a total of €700 million fines on Apple and Facebook owner Meta for breaching antitrust rules.

But unlike the Apple and Meta investigations, which fall under the Digital Markets Act, there are no clear legal deadlines under the DSA. That gives the bloc more political leeway on when it announces its formal findings. The EU also has probes into Meta and TikTok under its content moderation rulebook.

The commission said the “proceedings against X under the DSA are ongoing,” adding that the enforcement of “our legislation is independent of the current ongoing negotiations.”

It added that it “remains fully committed to the effective enforcement of digital legislation, including the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act.”

Anna Cavazzini, a European lawmaker for the Greens, said she expected the commission “to move on decisively with its investigation against X as soon as possible.”

“The commission must continue making changes to EU regulations an absolute red line in tariff negotiations with the US,” she added.

Alongside Brussels’ probe into X’s transparency breaches, it is also looking into content moderation at the company after Musk hosted Alice Weidel of the far-right Alternative for Germany for a conversation on the social media platform ahead of the country’s elections.

Some European lawmakers, as well as the Polish government, are also pressing the commission to open an investigation into Musk’s Grok chatbot after it spewed out antisemitic tropes last week.

X said it disagreed “with the commission’s assessment of the comprehensive work we have done to comply with the Digital Services Act and the commission’s interpretation of the Act’s scope.”

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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Rough road to “energy dominance” after GOP kneecaps wind and solar

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Experts argue that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase costs for consumers.

As the One Big Beautiful Bill Act squeaked its way through Congress earlier this month, its supporters heralded what they described as a new era for American energy and echoed what has become a familiar phrase among President Donald Trump’s supporters.

“Congress has taken decisive action to advance President Trump’s energy dominance agenda,” said American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers in a statement after the House passed the bill.

Republicans concurred, with legislators ranging from Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus, to Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky releasing statements after the bill’s passage championing its role in securing “energy dominance.”

The idea and rhetoric of energy dominance has its roots in the first Trump administration, although a formal definition for the phrase is hard to come by. When Trump signed an executive order this February establishing the National Energy Dominance Council, he included expanding energy production, lowering prices and reducing reliance on foreign entities among the council’s goals, while also emphasizing the importance of oil production and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.

The phrase has become something of a battle cry among the president’s supporters, with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin writing in the Washington Examiner on July 8 that “Trump is securing America’s energy future in a modern-day version of how our Founding Fathers secured our freedom.”

“Through American energy dominance, we’re not just powering homes and businesses,” Zeldin said. “We’re Powering the Great American Comeback.”

But despite claims from Republican officials and the fossil fuel industry that the megabill will help secure energy dominance, some experts worry that the legislation’s cuts to wind and solar actually undermine those goals at a time when electricity demand is rising, limiting America’s ability to add new generation capacity, raising prices for consumers and ceding global leadership in the clean energy transition.

Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at the climate policy think tank Energy Innovation, said the bill will increase domestic production of oil and gas by increasing lease sales for drilling—mostly in the Gulf of Mexico, onshore and in Alaska, O’Brien said.

A January study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute reported that a legislatively directed offshore oil and natural gas leasing program, which API says is similar to the measures included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act months later, would increase oil and natural gas production by 140,000 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per day by 2034.

That number would rise to 510,000 BOE per day by 2040, the study says.

Losses likely to outweigh the gains

However, O’Brien said the gains America can expect from the fossil fuel industry pale in comparison to losses from renewable energy.

Energy Innovation’s analysis projects that less than 20 gigawatts of additional generation capacity from fossil fuels can be expected by 2035 as a result of the bill, compared to a decrease of more than 360 gigawatts in additional capacity from renewable energy.

The difference between those numbers—a decrease of 344 gigawatts—is roughly equivalent to the energy use of about 100 million homes, O’Brien said.

According to O’Brien, if the One Big Beautiful Bill had not been passed, the US could have expected to add around 1,000 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity in the next 10 years.

But as a result of the bill, “around a third of that will be lost,” O’Brien said.

Those losses largely stem from the bill’s rollback of incentives for wind and solar projects.

“Solar and wind are subject to different—and harsher—treatment under the OBBB than other technologies,” according to the law firm Latham & Watkins. Tax credits for those projects are now set to phase out on a significantly faster timeline, rolling back some of the commitments promised under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Lucero Marquez, the associate director for federal climate policy at the Center for American Progress, said that removing those incentives undercuts America’s ability to achieve its energy needs.

“America needs affordable, reliable, and domestically produced energy, which wind and solar does,” Marquez said. “Gutting clean energy incentives really just does not help meet those goals.”

New projects will also be subject to rules “primarily intended to prevent Chinese companies from claiming the tax credits and to reduce reliance on China for supply chains of clean energy technologies,” the Bipartisan Policy Center wrote in an explainer.

However, those rules are “extremely complex” and could lead to “decreased U.S. manufacturing and increased Chinese dominance in these supply chains, contrary to their goal,” according to the think tank.

Surging energy prices

O’Brien said Energy Innovation’s modeling suggests that the loss in additional generation capacity from renewable energies will lead existing power plants, which are more expensive to run than new renewable energy projects would have been, to run more frequently to offset the lack of generation from wind and solar projects not coming online.

The consequences of that, according to O’Brien, are that energy prices will rise, which also means the amount of energy produced will go down in response to decreased demand for the more expensive supply.

An analysis by the REPEAT Project from the Princeton ZERO Lab and Evolved Energy Research similarly predicted increased energy prices for consumers as a result of the bill.

According to that analysis, average household energy costs will increase by over $280 per year by 2035, a more than 13 percent hike.

One of the authors of that analysis, Princeton University professor Jesse D. Jenkins, did not respond to interview requests for this article but previously wrote in an email to Inside Climate News that Republicans’ claims about securing energy dominance through the bill “don’t hold up.”

In an emailed statement responding to questions about those analyses and how their findings align with the administration’s goals of attaining energy dominance, White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers wrote that “since Day One, President Trump has taken decisive steps to unleash American energy, which has driven oil production and reduced the cost of energy.”

“The One, Big, Beautiful Bill will turbocharge energy production by streamlining operations for maximum efficiency and expanding domestic production capacity,” Rogers wrote, “which will deliver further relief to American families and businesses.”

In an emailed statement, Rep. Guthrie said that the bill “takes critical steps toward both securing our energy infrastructure and bringing more dispatchable power online.”

“Specifically, the bill does this by repairing and beginning to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that was drained during the Biden-Harris Administration, and through the creation of the Energy Dominance Financing program to support new investments that unleash affordable and reliable energy,” the Energy and Commerce chairman wrote.

Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, also said that the bill “advances the administration’s stated goal of energy dominance,” but added that it does so “primarily in sunsetting, last-generation technologies, while ceding the renewable energy future to others.”

“It wants lower energy costs at home and more U.S. energy exports abroad—for both economic and strategic reasons … the OBBB delivers on that agenda,” Hendrix said.

Still, Hendrix added that “the United States that emerges from all this may be a bigger player in a declining sector—fossil fuels—and a massively diminished player in a rapidly growing one: renewable energy.”

“It will help promote the Trump administration’s ambitions of fossil dominance (or at least influence) but on pain of helping build a renewable energy sector for the future,” Hendrix wrote. “That is net-negative globally (and locally) from a holistic perspective.”

Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argued that he sees a lot in the bill “that is going to move us in the opposite direction from energy dominance.”

“They should have named this bill the ‘Energy Inflation Act,’ because what it’s going to mean is less energy generated and higher costs for households and for businesses, and particularly manufacturing businesses,” Hersh said.

Hersh also said that even if the bill does lead to increased exports of US-produced energy, that would have a direct negative impact on costs for consumers at home.

“That’s only going to increase domestic prices for energy, and this has long been known and why past administrations have been reluctant to expand exports of LNG,” Hersh said. “That increased demand for the products and competition for the resources will mean higher energy prices for U.S. consumers and businesses.”

“Pushing against energy dominance”

Frank Maisano, a senior principal at the lobbying firm Bracewell LLP, said that although the bill creates important opportunities for things such as oil and gas leasing and the expansion of geothermal and hydrogen energy, the bill’s supporters “undercut themselves” by limiting opportunities for growth in wind and solar.

“The Biden folks tried to lean heavily onto the energy transition because they wanted to limit emissions,” Maisano said. “They wanted to push oil and gas out and push renewables in.”

Now, “these guys are doing the opposite, which is to push oil and gas and limit wind and solar,” Maisano said. “Neither of those strategies are good strategies. You need to have a combination of all these strategies and all these generation sources, especially on the electricity side, to make it work and to meet the challenges that we face.”

Samantha Gross, director of the Brookings Institution’s Energy Security and Climate Initiative, said that while she isn’t concerned about whether the US will build enough electricity generation to meet the needs of massive consumers like data centers and AI, she is worried that the bill pushes the next generation of that growth further towards fossil fuels.

“I don’t think energy dominance—not just right this instant, but going forward—is just in fossil fuels,” Gross said.

Even beyond the One Big Beautiful Bill, Gross said that many of the administration’s actions run counter to their stated objectives on energy.

“You hear all this talk about energy dominance, but for me it’s just a phrase, because a lot of things that the administration is actually doing are pushing against energy dominance,” Gross said.

“If you think about the tariff policy, for instance, ‘drill, baby, drill’ and a 50 percent tariff on pipeline steel do not go together. Those are pulling in completely opposite directions.”

Aside from domestic energy needs, Gross also worried that the pullback from renewable energy will harm America’s position on the global stage.

“It’s pretty clear which way the world is going,” Gross said. “I worry that we’re giving up … I don’t like the term ‘energy dominance,’ but future leadership in the world’s energy supply by pulling back from those.”

“We’re sort of ceding those technologies to China in a way that is very frustrating to me.”

Yet even in the wake of the bill’s passage, some experts see hope for the future of renewable energy in the US.

Kevin Book, managing director at the research firm ClearView Energy Partners, said that the bill “sets up a slower, shallower transition” toward renewable energy. However, he added that he doesn’t think it represents the end of that transition.

“Most of the capacity we’re adding to our grid in America these days is renewable, and it’s not simply because of federal incentives,” Book said. “So if you take away those federal incentives, there were still economic drivers.”

Still, Book said that the final impacts of the Trump administration’s actions on renewable energy are yet to be seen.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is not the end of the story,” Book said. “There’s more coming, either regulatorily and/or legislatively.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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BYD has caught up with Tesla in the global EV race. Here’s how.

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“Tesla has partnered with Baidu [a Chinese search and AI group] but Baidu can’t disclose all the data points to Tesla,” Duo adds. “The real-world data is definitely more valuable.”

Home field advantage

While BYD might have home turf advantage when it comes to data collection and security, Wang’s late pivot to driverless functionality has created some risks for the group.

One is question marks over financial sustainability. Price wars among Chinese carmakers are putting margins and the industry’s balance sheet under strain as Beijing demands more action to protect suppliers in the world’s largest car market.

It has also opened up some rare gaps in BYD’s otherwise formidable vertical integration. Its market leadership has also enabled it to pressure suppliers for price cuts and extended payment terms, allowing it to rigorously control costs.

But according to Chris McNally, an analyst with US investment bank Evercore, the God’s Eye platform uses software and hardware partners, including Momenta, a Chinese group backed by General Motors in the US, and some chips from Nvidia.

BYD EVP next to car

BYD’s executive vice-president Stella Li said competition with Tesla in EVs and autonomous technology would accelerate innovation, ultimately making BYD a “better’” company.

Credit: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

BYD’s executive vice-president Stella Li said competition with Tesla in EVs and autonomous technology would accelerate innovation, ultimately making BYD a “better’” company. Credit: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

For years, the risks associated with reliance on US-made chips in particular have hovered over the Chinese car sector—plans for driverless systems could be held back at any moment by US export controls or sanctions.

“Given the geopolitical environment, no one will invest in a technology with such a high risk that they’re still relying on foreign technology,” says Raymond Tsang, an automotive technology expert with Bain in Shanghai.

However, these vulnerabilities might not persist. Analysts believe BYD will soon develop most of its driverless systems in house and increasingly swap out Nvidia chips for those made by Beijing-based Horizon Robotics. “This is the BYD way to drive costs down,” McNally says.

It would also be consistent with a broader shift towards self-reliance in key technologies, in response to Washington’s steadily increasing restrictions on technology exports to China.

Yuqian Ding, a veteran Beijing-based auto analyst with HSBC, says that while BYD has not talked about developing a robotaxi service, executives have made “very clear” their plans to develop in-house all the important software and hardware needed for autonomous vehicles.

Wang, the BYD boss, has also previously indicated to analysts that the company has all the tech and know-how to develop robots, in another potential long-term challenge to Musk.

“With more than 5 million scale per annum, they can do everything,” Ding says, adding: “That’s the ultimate goal … Their target is much closer to Tesla.”

In an interview with the Financial Times this year, BYD’s executive vice-president Stella Li said competition with Tesla in EVs and autonomous technology would accelerate innovation, ultimately making BYD a “better” company.

“In the future, if you are not producing an electric car, if you’re not introducing technology in intelligence and autonomous driving, you will be out,” she warned.

Additional reporting by Gloria Li in Hong Kong

Graphic illustration by Ian Bott and data visualisation by Ray Douglas

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

BYD has caught up with Tesla in the global EV race. Here’s how. Read More »

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5 big EV takeaways from Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”

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Plus, OBBB got rid of penalties for automakers who fail to meet Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. These standards have ramped up over the last 50 years and forced auto companies to make their vehicles more gas-efficient. They pushed manufacturers to, for example, get into hybrids, and build some of the first modern electrics. Now, they’ll no longer have that extra incentive to get clean, emission-wise.

Keep your eye on your city or state

Just because federal EV support is going away doesn’t mean all government support is over in the US. “I do think we’ll see states step in to fill the gap,” says Harris. So it’s worth doing a bit of research to see what incentives exist where you live.

To date, 11 states—California, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington—have joined together to experiment with new polices and programs that promote cleaner vehicles.

And last month, in the middle of a fight with the Trump administration over California’s power to set its own clean air rules, California governor Gavin Newsom directed state agencies to come up with new and innovative ways to support zero-emission vehicles. The state still plans to phase out sales of new gas cars by 2035.

Stay optimistic, EV fans

Industry watchers seem certain of one thing: Despite this setback in the US, electric vehicles are the future. So while American consumers and automakers try to figure out how to cope with uncertainty, electric progress will continue all over the world.

Expect China to continue to put out well-built and -priced EVs, and export them all over the world. “Americans are paying more and closer attention to those offerings, and eventually there’s going to be demand,” says Nigro. American companies are going to have to keep up—or else. ”That’s the existential crisis the industry faces,” he says.

Yoon, the Edmunds analyst, also expects the new bill to result in short-term electric pain. But he believes there’s light ahead. In fact, Yoon is so optimistic, he allows himself an auto metaphor. “Ultimately, this will be a speed bump rather than a true obstacle,” he says.

This story originally appeared at wired.com.

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In the Southwest, solar panels can help both photovoltaics and crops

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Cultivation in a harsh climate

Solar arrays can shade crops from sun while moisture cools the panels to increase their productivity.

Volunteers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory work at Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, Colorado. Credit: Bryan Bechtold/NREL

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

“We were getting basil leaves the size of your palm,” University of Arizona researcher Greg Barron-Gafford said, describing some of the benefits he and his team have seen farming under solar panels in the Tucson desert.

For 12 years, Barron-Gafford has been investigating agrivoltaics, the integration of solar arrays into working farmland. This practice involves growing crops or other vegetation, such as pollinator-friendly plants, under solar panels, and sometimes grazing livestock in this greenery. Though a relatively new concept, at least 604 agrivoltaic sites have popped up across the United States, according to OpenEI.

Researchers like Barron-Gafford think that, in addition to generating carbon-free electricity, agrivoltaics could offer a ray of hope for agriculture in an increasingly hotter and drier Southwest, as the shade created by these systems has been found to decrease irrigation needs and eliminate heat stress on crops. Plus, the cooling effects of growing plants under solar arrays can actually make the panels work better.

But challenges remain, including some farmers’ attitudes about the practice and funding difficulties.

Overcoming a climate conundrum

While renewable electricity from sources like solar panels is one of the most frequently touted energy solutions to help reduce the carbon pollution that’s driving climate change, the warming climate itself is making it harder for solar arrays to do their job, Barron-Gafford said. An optimal functioning temperature for panels is around 75° Fahrenheit, he explained. Beyond that, any temperature increase reduces the photovoltaic cells’ efficiency.

“You can quickly see how this solution for our changing climate of switching to more renewable energy is itself sensitive to the changing climate,” he said.

This problem is especially pertinent in the Southwest, where historically hot temperatures are steadily increasing. Tucson, for instance, saw a record-breaking 112 days of triple-digit heat in 2024, according to National Weather Service Data, and the US Environmental Protection Agency reports that every part of the Southwest experienced higher average temperatures between 2000 and 2023 compared to the long-term average from 1895 to 2023.

However, planting vegetation under solar panels—as opposed to the more traditional method of siting solar arrays on somewhat barren land—can help cool them. In one set of experiments, Barron-Gafford’s team found that planting cilantro, tomatoes and peppers under solar arrays reduced the panels’ surface temperature by around 18 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s because plants release moisture into the air during their respiration process, in which they exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide.

“This invisible power of water coming out of plants was actually cooling down the solar panels,” Barron-Gafford said.

Throwing shade

While Barron-Gafford said some laughed him off when he first proposed the idea of growing crops in the shade of solar panels, this added sun shield can actually help them grow better, especially in the Southwest, where many backyard gardeners already employ shade cloths to protect their gardens from the blazing heat.

“Many people don’t understand that in Colorado and much of the West, most plants get far too much sunlight,” said Byron Kominek, owner/manager of Jack’s Solar Garden in Boulder County, Colorado, which began implementing agrivoltaics in 2020. “Having some shade is a benefit to them.”

Jack’s Solar Garden has integrated 3,276 solar panels over about four acres of farmland, growing crops like greens and tomatoes. Meg Caley with Sprout City Farms, a nonprofit that helps with farming duties at Jack’s Solar Garden, said they’ve been able to produce Swiss chard “the size of your torso.”

“The greens just get huge,” she said. “You have to chop them up to fit them in your refrigerator.”

She added that the shade seems to improve the flavor of the vegetables and prevents them from bolting, when plants prematurely produce flowers and seeds, diverting energy away from leaf or root growth.

“Plants when they’re stressed out can have more of a bitter flavor,” she explained. “So the arugula that we grow is not as bitter or spicy. It’s sweeter. The spinach is sweeter too.”

Barron-Gafford and his team are seeing the same thing in Arizona, where they grow a variety of produce like beans, artichokes, potatoes, kale, and basil.

“We’ve grown 30-plus different types of things across different wet winters and dry winters and exceptionally hot summers, dry summers, average or close to average summers,” he said of the solar-shaded crops. “And across everything we’ve done, we’ve seen equal or greater production down here in the Southwest, the dry land environments, where it really benefits to get some shade.”

As in Colorado, some of those crops are growing to epic proportions.

“We’ve made bok choy the size of a toddler,” Barron-Gafford said.

All that shade provides another important benefit in a drought-stricken Southwest—lower water requirements for crops. Because less direct sunlight is hitting the ground, it decreases the evaporation rate, which means water stays in the soil longer after irrigation. Barron-Gafford and his team have been running experiments for the last seven or so years to see how this plays out with different crops in an agrivoltaic setting.

“What is the evaporation rate under something that’s big and bushy like a bean or potato plant versus something thinner above ground, like a carrot?” is one of the questions Barron-Gafford said they have tried to answer. “For the most part, I would say that we are able to cut back our irrigation by more than half.”

They are partnering with Jack’s Solar Farm on water research in Colorado and have so far found similar results there.

This shade has another benefit in a warming world—respite for farmworkers. Heat-related illnesses are a growing concern for people who work outside, and one recent study predicted climate change will quadruple U.S. outdoor workers’ exposure to extreme heat conditions by 2065.

But with solar arrays in the fields, “if you really carefully plan out your day, you can work in the shade,” a factor that can help increase worker safety on hot days, Caley said.

The AgriSolar Clearinghouse performed skin temperature readings under solar panels and full sun at a number of sites across the United States, finding a skin temperature decrease of 15.3° in Boulder and 20.8° in Phoenix.

“I don’t know what the future holds”

Despite the benefits of agrivoltaics, the up-front cost of purchasing a solar array remains a barrier to farmers.

“Once people see the potential of agrivoltaics, you run into the next challenge, which is how do you fund someone getting into this on their site?” Barron-Gafford said. “And depending on the amount of capital or access to capital that a farmer has, you’re going to get a wildly different answer.”

While expenses are dependent on the size of the installation, a 25-kilowatt system would require an upfront cost of around $67,750, according to AgriSolar Clearinghouse. For comparison, the median size of a residential solar array in 2018 was around 6 kW, the organization stated, which would cost around $16,260 to install.

Kominek said the total initial cost of implementing a 1.2 megawatt capacity agrivoltaics setup on his farm in Colorado was around $2 million, but that the investment has paid off. In addition to the revenue he earns from farming, all of the energy produced by the arrays is sold to clients in the community through a local utility company, earning the farm money.

The Rural Energy for America program has been one resource for farmers interested in agrivoltaics, offering loans and grants to help install solar. However, it’s unclear how this program will move forward amid current federal spending cuts.

Meanwhile, some of the federal grant programs that Barron-Gafford has relied on have suddenly come to a halt, he said, putting his research in danger. But, as federal support dries up, some states are charging on with their own funding opportunities to develop farm field solar projects. For instance, Colorado’s Agrivoltaics Research and Demonstration Grant offers money for demonstrations of agrivoltaics, research projects, and outreach campaigns.

There are other challenges as well. Caley, for instance, said farming around solar panels is akin to working in an “obstacle course.” She and her team, who mostly work manually, have found ways to work around them by being aware of their surroundings so that they don’t accidentally collide with the panels or strike them with their tools. This job is also made easier since Kominek invested between $80,000 and $100,000 to elevate his farm’s panels, which better allows animals, taller crops and farming equipment to operate beneath.

Still, a 2025 University of Arizona study that interviewed farmers and government officials in Pinal County, Arizona, found that a number of them questioned agrivoltaics’ compatibility with large-scale agriculture.

“I think it’s a great idea, but the only thing … it wouldn’t be cost-efficient … everything now with labor and cost of everything, fuel, tractors, it almost has to be super big … to do as much with as least amount of people as possible,” one farmer stated.

Many farmers are also leery of solar, worrying that agrivoltaics could take working farmland out of use, affect their current operations or deteriorate soils.

Those fears have been amplified by larger utility-scale initiatives, like Ohio’s planned Oak Run Solar Project, an 800 megawatt project that will include 300 megawatts of battery storage, 4,000 acres of crops and 1,000 grazing sheep in what will be the country’s largest agrivoltaics endeavor to date. Opponents of the project worry about its visual impacts and the potential loss of farmland.

An American Farmland Trust survey found that Colorado farmers would prefer that utility-scale solar projects be sited on less productive or underutilized farmland rather than on highly productive or actively farmed land. They also expressed concern for the potential negative impact that solar projects could have on farm productivity and the health of the land, including soil quality.

Some farmers also worry that the solar panels could leach metals into the ground, contaminating their crops, Barron-Gafford said. But while agrivoltaic systems are put together in a way that makes that highly unlikely, there’s no reason not to add soil sampling studies into the work they’re doing to reassure farmers, he added.

And agrivoltaics advocates say that the practice could actually improve soil health by reducing erosion, increasing the amount of organic matter and enhancing soil biology with cooler, moister conditions.

“I wish more people spent time listening to the folks on the ground and the folks experiencing these transitions,” Barron-Gafford added. “Because you understand more that way in terms of what their motivations or concerns actually are.”

“We don’t have to choose”

While Caley understands farmers’ concerns, she sees agrivoltaics as a way for them to keep agricultural land in production while also benefiting from solar electricity.

“The tension in a lot of communities seems to be that people don’t want to see agricultural land taken out of production in order to bring a solar farm in,” she said. “The idea here is that we don’t have to choose. We can have both.”

Kominek encourages people to envision what our landscapes and climate will look like in the next 20 to 30 years, adding that in his part of Colorado, it only stands to get hotter and drier, making agrivoltaics a smart solution for farming and clean energy production.

“Communities around the world need to figure out what changes they need to make now to help people adapt to what our climates and landscapes will be in the future,” he said. “Agrivoltaics is a climate adaptation tool that will benefit any community where such systems are built as the decades pass.”

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Mighty mitochondria: Cell powerhouses harnessed for healing

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rescuing suboptimal organs

Researchers hope a new technique can treat a variety of damaged organs.

James McCully was in the lab extracting tiny structures called mitochondria from cells when researchers on his team rushed in. They’d been operating on a pig heart and couldn’t get it pumping normally again.

McCully studies heart damage prevention at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and was keenly interested in mitochondria. These power-producing organelles are particularly important for organs like the heart that have high energy needs. McCully had been wondering whether transplanting healthy mitochondria into injured hearts might help restore their function.

The pig’s heart was graying rapidly, so McCully decided to try it. He loaded a syringe with the extracted mitochondria and injected them directly into the heart. Before his eyes, it began beating normally, returning to its rosy hue.

Since that day almost 20 years ago, McCully and other researchers have replicated that success in pigs and other animals. Human transplantations followed, in babies who suffered complications from heart surgery—sparking a new field of research using mitochondria transplantation to treat damaged organs and disease. In the last five years, a widening array of scientists have begun exploring mitochondria transplantation for heart damage after cardiac arrest, brain damage following stroke, and damage to organs destined for transplantation.

This graphic depicts the basic steps and results of mitochondrial transplantation. Scientists think that donor mitochondria fuse with the recipient cells’ mitochondrial networks. Then they work to shrink the size of the infarct (the area of tissue dying from lack of blood and oxygen), among other effects. Scientists have studied such transplants in kidneys, livers, muscle, brains, hearts, and lungs. Credit: Knowable Magazine

Mitochondria are best known for producing usable energy for cells. But they also send molecular signals that help to keep the body in equilibrium and manage its immune and stress responses. Some types of cells may naturally donate healthy mitochondria to other cells in need, such as brain cells after a stroke, in a process called mitochondria transfer. So the idea that clinicians could boost this process by transplanting mitochondria to reinvigorate injured tissue made sense to some scientists.

From studies in rabbits and rat heart cells, McCully’s group has reported that the plasma membranes of cells engulf the mitochondria and shuttle them inside, where they fuse with the cell’s internal mitochondria. There, they seem to cause molecular changes that help recover heart function: When comparing blood- and oxygen-deprived pig hearts treated with mitochondria to ones receiving placebos, McCully’s group saw differences in gene activity and proteins that indicated less cell death and less inflammation.

About 10 years ago, Sitaram Emani, a cardiac surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, reached out to McCully about his work with animal hearts. Emani had seen how some babies with heart defects couldn’t fully recover after heart surgery complications and wondered whether McCully’s mitochondria transplantation method could help them.

During surgery to repair heart defects, surgeons use a drug to stop the heart so they can operate. But if the heart is deprived of blood and oxygen for too long, mitochondria start to fail and cells start to die, in a condition called ischemia. When blood begins flowing again, instead of returning the heart to its normal state, it can damage and kill more cells, resulting in ischemia-reperfusion injury.

Since McCully’s eight years of studies in rabbits and pigs hadn’t revealed safety concerns with mitochondria transplantation, McCully and Emani thought it would be worth trying the procedure in babies unlikely to regain enough heart function to come off heart-lung support.

Parents of 10 patients agreed to the experimental procedure, which was approved by the institute’s review board. In a pilot that ran from 2015 to 2018, McCully extracted pencil-eraser-sized muscle samples from the incisions made for the heart surgery, used a filtration technique to isolate mitochondria and checked that they were functional. Then the team injected the organelles into the baby’s heart.

Eight of those 10 babies regained enough heart function to come off life support, compared to just four out of 14 similar cases from 2002 to 2018 that were used for historical comparison, the team reported in 2021. The treatment also shortened recovery time, which averaged two days in the mitochondrial transplant group compared with nine days in the historical control group. Two patients did not survive — in one case, the intervention came after the rest of the baby’s organs began failing, and in another, a lung issue developed four months later. The group has now performed this procedure on 17 babies.

The transplant procedure remains experimental and is not yet practical for wider clinical use, but McCully hopes that it can one day be used to treat kidney, lung, liver, and limb injuries from interrupted blood flow.

The results have inspired other clinicians whose patients suffer from similar ischemia-reperfusion injuries. One is ischemic stroke, in which clots prevent blood from reaching the brain. Doctors can dissolve or physically remove the clots, but they lack a way to protect the brain from reperfusion damage. “You see patients that lose their ability to walk or talk,” says Melanie Walker, an endovascular neurosurgeon at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. “You just want to do better and there’s just nothing out there.”

Walker came across McCully’s mitochondrial transplant studies 12 years ago and, in reading further, was especially struck by a report on mice from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School that showed the brain’s support and protection cells—the astrocytes—may transfer some of their mitochondria to stroke-damaged neurons to help them recover. Perhaps, she thought, mitochondria transplantation could help in human stroke cases too.

She spent years working with animal researchers to figure out how to safely deliver mitochondria to the brain. She tested the procedure’s safety in a clinical trial with just four people with ischemic stroke, using a catheter fed through an artery in the neck to manually remove the blockage causing the stroke, then pushing the catheter further along and releasing the mitochondria, which would travel up blood vessels to the brain.

The findings, published in 2024 in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism, show that the infused patients suffered no harm; the trial was not designed to test effectiveness. Walker’s group is now recruiting participants to further assess the intervention’s safety. The next step will be to determine whether the mitochondria are getting where they need to be, and functioning. “Until we can show that, I do not believe that we will be able to say that there’s a therapeutic benefit,” Walker says.

Researchers hope that organ donation might also gain from mitochondria transplants. Donor organs like kidneys suffer damage when they lack blood supply for too long, and transplant surgeons may reject kidneys with a higher risk of these injuries.

To test whether mitochondrial transplants can reinvigorate them, transplant surgeon-scientist Giuseppe Orlando of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem and his colleagues injected mitochondria into four pig kidneys and a control substance into three pig kidneys. In 2023 in the Annals of Surgery, they reported fewer dying cells in the mitochondria-treated kidneys and far less damage. Molecular analyses also showed a boost in energy production.

It’s still early days, Orlando says, but he’s confident that mitochondria transplantation could become a valuable tool in rescuing suboptimal organs for donation.

The studies have garnered both excitement and skepticism. “It’s certainly a very interesting area,” says Koning Shen, a postdoctoral mitochondrial biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of an overview of the signaling roles of mitochondria in the 2022 Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. She adds that scaling up extraction of mitochondria and learning how to store and preserve the isolated organelles are major technical hurdles to making such treatments a larger reality. “That would be amazing if people are getting to that stage,” she says.

“I think there are a lot of thoughtful people looking at this carefully, but I think the big question is, what’s the mechanism?” says Navdeep Chandel, a mitochondria researcher at Northwestern University in Chicago. He doubts that donor mitochondria fix or replace dysfunctional native organelles, but says it’s possible that mitochondria donation triggers stress and immune signals that indirectly benefit damaged tissue.

Whatever the mechanism, some animal studies do suggest that the mitochondria must be functional to impart their benefits. Lance Becker, chair of emergency medicine at Northwell Health in New York who studies the role of mitochondria in cardiac arrest, conducted a study comparing fresh mitochondria, mitochondria that had been frozen then thawed, and a placebo to treat rats following cardiac arrest. The 11 rats receiving fresh, functioning mitochondria had better brain function and a higher rate of survival three days later than the 11 rats receiving a placebo; the non-functional frozen-thawed mitochondria did not impart these benefits.

It will take more research into the mechanisms of mitochondrial therapy, improved mitochondria delivery techniques, larger trials and a body of reported successes before mitochondrial transplants can be FDA-approved and broadly used to treat ischemia-reperfusion injuries, researchers say. The ultimate goal would be to create a universal supply of stored mitochondria — a mitochondria bank, of sorts — that can be tapped for transplantation by a wide variety of health care providers.

“We’re so much at the beginning—we don’t know how it works,” says Becker. “But we know it’s doing something that is mighty darn interesting.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

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Wildfires are challenging air quality monitoring infrastructure

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Can the US’s system to monitor air pollutants keep up with a changing climate?

The Downtown Manhattan skyline stands shrouded in a reddish haze as a result of Canadian wildfires on June 6, 2023. Credit: Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Ten years ago, Tracey Holloway, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, would have said that air pollution in the United States was a huge success story. “Our air had been getting cleaner and cleaner almost everywhere, for almost every pollutant,” she said. But in June 2023, as wildfire smoke from Canada spread, the air quality dropped to historically low levels in her home state of Wisconsin.

Just last month, the region’s air quality dipped once more to unhealthy levels. Again, wildfires were to blame.

While the US has made significant strides in curbing car and industrial pollution through setting emission limits on industrial facilities and automakers, the increasing frequency and intensity of fires are “erasing the gains that we have obtained through this pollutant control effort,” said Nga Lee “Sally” Ng, an aerosol researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology.

The changing dynamics present a challenge for both residents and researchers tracking air quality. Many of the high-quality monitors used to measure pollution reside near large cities and stationary sources, such as coal-powered plants, and don’t cover the US uniformly. Regions that lack such stations are called air quality monitoring deserts, and they may leave vulnerable populations in the dark about their local conditions.

The current infrastructure also isn’t set up to fully account for the shifting behavior of wildfire smoke, which can travel hundreds of miles or more from fire sources to affect air quality and public health in distant communities. That smoke can also include toxins, such as lead when cars and homes burn.

“Fires are really changing the story,” said Holloway.

Since the introduction of the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955, air quality has been recognized as a national issue in the United States. Then with the enactment of the Clean Air Act in 1970 and following amendments, researchers and federal agencies began to monitor the level of pollutants, particularly carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide, to identify if these were up to the established National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

The Environmental Protection Agency uses these pollutant levels to calculate an air quality index, or AQI, a numerical and color-coded system scaled from 0 to 500 that informs the public how safe the air is. Higher numbers, associated with red, purple, and maroon, indicate worse quality; in June 2023, for example, parts of Wisconsin topped 300, indicating “hazardous” air. All residents were advised to stay indoors as much as possible.

The EPA and other federal agencies make use of various networks of advanced ground monitors that can pick up on different air pollutants, and many experts say that the US has one of the most advanced air quality tracking systems in the world.

Still, there are gaps: Regulatory monitors cost around $50,000 upfront and require continuous maintenance, so states place them in locations where researchers expect pollution may be high. Currently, there are 4,821 active monitors across the US in the EPA’s AirData system—many of which were installed in the 1990s and 2000s—but they are more likely to be near more populated areas and in states in the West and Northeast, creating air quality monitoring deserts elsewhere, according to a new study published in April.

When looking at their distribution, researchers at The Pennsylvania State University found that 59 percent of US counties—home to more than 50 million people—lacked an air quality monitoring site. Many of those air quality monitoring deserts were in rural areas in the South and Midwest. Counties with higher poverty rates and a higher concentration of Black and Hispanic residents were also more likely to be air quality monitoring deserts when accounting for population.

Similarly, a Reuters investigation found that 120 million Americans live in counties that have no monitors for small particle pollution and that in 2020, “the government network of 3,900 monitoring devices nationwide has routinely missed major toxic releases and day-to-day pollution dangers,” including those linked to refinery explosions. (In response to a request for comment, an EPA spokesperson noted that the agency “continues to work closely with state, local, and tribal monitoring programs to expand the use of air sensors to improve measurement coverage, which provide near-real time data to a number of publicly available sources, such as the AIRNow Fire and Smoke Map.”)

These gaps in coverage can be accentuated with wildfires, which often originate in sparsely populated areas without monitor coverage. Wildfires can also be unpredictable, making it difficult to identify priority sites for new monitors. “You certainly can’t anticipate what areas are going to see wildfire smoke,” said Mary Uhl, executive director of Western States Air Resources Council, which shares air quality information across 15 western state air agencies. Meanwhile, wildfire pollutants can spread widely from their original source, and smoke particles can sometimes travel for up to 10 days, Ng pointed out.

Such shifting dynamics are driving researchers to expand their monitoring infrastructure and complement it with crowdsourced and satellite data to capture the widespread pollution. “There will be potential to increase the spatial covering of these monitoring networks,” said Ng. “Because, as you can see, we could still make use of better measurement, maybe at the different community level, to better understand the air that we are being exposed to.”

To expand coverage in a cost-efficient way, agencies are investigating a variety of different approaches and technologies. Low-cost monitors now allow people to crowdsource data about air quality in their communities. (However, these tend to be less precise and accurate than the high-grade instruments.) State, local, and tribal agencies also play a critical role in monitoring air quality, such as New York’s Community Air Monitoring Initiative, which tracked pollution for a year using mobile monitoring in 10 disadvantaged communities with high air pollution burdens. And the EPA has a pilot program that loans compact mobile air monitoring systems to air quality professionals, who can set them up in their vehicles to map air quality during and after wildfires.

Satellites can also provide critical information since they can estimate levels of gases and pollutants, providing data about where pollution levels are highest and how pollutants are transported. “We can see where we’re missing things in those deserts,” said Uhl.

This strategy might be helpful to address the challenge with wildfires because satellites can get a more global view of the spread of pollutants. Fires “change season to season, so they’re not always coming from the same place,” said Holloway, who leads a team that uses NASA satellite data to monitor air quality. “And I think really what you need is a way of evaluating what’s going on over a wide area. And these satellites up in space, I think, offer exactly the tool for the job.”

Other advancements allow scientists to study the composition of pollution more granularly, since different pollutants can have different toxicities and health effects. For example, particulate matter 2.5, or PM2.5—which has a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less—can cause respiratory and heart problems. Ng led the establishment of a system called ASCENT, or the Atmospheric Science and Chemistry Measurement Network, which measures the specific chemical constituents in PM2.5 to identify which particles might be the most toxic to human health, along with aiming to answer many other scientific questions.

After the Eaton Canyon and Palisades fires that burned across Los Angeles County in January 2025, Ng and colleagues used the system and identified that lead concentration increased approximately 110 times over the average levels, likely due to the ignition of the lead-ridden vehicles, plastics, buildings, and other fuel. The system works as a “magnifying glass to look into PM2.5,” said Ng. Currently, they have 12 sites and hope to expand ASCENT to more locations in the future if resources are available.

Different approaches to collecting air quality monitoring data, along with computational modeling, could be combined to improve researchers’ understanding of air pollution and expand air quality information to underserved populations, said Holloway.

Today, although wildfires represent a new challenge, “we have all these additional tools to help us understand air quality,” said Uhl. “And in the end, that’s what we want to do: We want to understand it. We want to be able to have some ideas, some ways to predict it, to ultimately protect public health.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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As California faces court battles, states scramble to save their climate goals

climate goals, electrification, EVs, Policy, Science, syndication / /

With or without authority to regulate heightened emissions, states plan to meet climate goals.

Traffic jam forms on Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles. Credit: Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News

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When President Donald Trump signed legislation to revoke California’s authority to enforce stricter tailpipe emissions standards and to ban sales of gas-powered cars by 2035, the effects rippled far beyond the Golden State.

Seventeen states relied on California’s Clean Air Act waivers to adopt stronger vehicle pollution rules on their own, including New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Washington.

California, joined by several states, immediately sought a court injunction, calling the revocation illegal on the basis that the waivers are not subject to congressional review and that it violated decades of legal precedent and procedure. These same states recently launched an Affordable Clean Cars Coalition to coordinate legal action and policy to defend their rights to transition to cleaner vehicles.

As the legal battle plays out, states that have relied on the waivers are leaning into expanding multimillion-dollar ways to keep their EV transitions on track. Among their efforts: amping up rebates, tightening rules on the carbon intensity of fuels, and cracking down on pollution where trucks congregate.

“Climate change is still around, whether we have the waiver or not. So we have to figure out ways to make sure that we’re doing what we can to address the problem at hand,” said Michelle Miano, who heads the New Mexico environment protection division of the Environment Department.

According to data from the California Air Resources Board, the states that have passed tougher pollution rules account for about 40 percent of new light-duty vehicle registrations and 25 percent of new heavy-duty vehicle registrations in the United States, where the transportation sector is the highest source of greenhouse gas emissions as of 2022.

Among these stronger rules are the Advanced Clean Cars (ACC) I and II and Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT), which require automakers to sell a growing share of electric passenger cars and medium and heavy-duty trucks to reduce emissions from gasoline-powered counterparts.

The goal is for all new vehicles sold to be electric by 2035.

Bolstering incentives 

Without ACC and ACT, states are betting they can increase demand for EVs by reducing the costs of buying a vehicle with rebates, vouchers, and grants and boosting the number of charging stations in their states. These incentives can range from a few thousand dollars for individual EV purchases to hundreds of thousands for building charging infrastructure and fleet upgrades.

On June 18, New York announced a $53 million expansion to its voucher program for electrifying last-mile truck fleets, offering vouchers from $340,000 to $425,000 for each truck, depending on the model.

“Despite the current federal administration’s efforts to erode certainty in the ongoing transition to cleaner vehicles, New York State will continue to act to protect our air, lands, and waters,” said Amanda Lefton, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation.

In Oregon, where over a third of in-state emissions are from transportation use, the government this month opened applications for $34 million in grants toward the purchase of zero-emission trucks and developing charging stations for EVs or retrofitting diesel trucks. Lawmakers are considering expanding a popular rebate program through a bill introduced in February. The program so far has given car owners almost $100 million for EV purchases. (The program has been suspended twice after running out of money. It resumed as of May 2025.)

In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey promised in May to announce “dedicated additional grant funding” for electric vehicles and vowed to increase “grant funding opportunities” for charging. Advocacy groups, including the Environmental League of Massachusetts, are counting on increased funding for its MOR-EV rebate program, which provides up to $3,500 for new EV purchases. This year, the rebate program has distributed $15.7 million in total incentives, according to the program’s statistics page.

In Washington state, lawmakers earmarked $126 million—a $16 million increase from 2024—to subsidize purchases of electric truck fleets and chargers. Many states are targeting trucks because they account for a huge share in emissions relative to their number on the road.

Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, credited state rebates and investments in charging infrastructure for helping Colorado reach a 20 percent electric vehicle market share in the first quarter of 2025. One in five new cars sold in the state was electric. Toor also credited the state agency’s EV buyer’s education campaign launched in late 2022, which promoted available rebates and incentives for prospective EV owners.

The scope and generosity of these programs vary widely depending on each state’s climate priorities, budget capacity, and access to federal or market-based funding streams.

“Those types of incentives can be expensive,” said Terrence Gray, director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. “In Rhode Island, our budget is tight. There’s not a lot of funding available right now, so we would have to make a very strong argument that there’s a strong cost benefit to invest in these types of areas.”

With the Trump administration threatening to cut down federal funding for EV rebates through the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, states will have to increasingly rely on themselves to fund these programs.

“The federal government isn’t going to come save us,” said Alex Ambrose, an analyst with the nonpartisan think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective.

Some are already ahead on this. California and Washington state have devised carbon markets that charge major polluters—like oil refiners, power plants, large industrial facilities, and fuel suppliers—for each ton of carbon dioxide they release. California’s auctions bring in about $3 to $4 billion per year, which support programs such as public transit and EV rebates. Washington’s system, launched in 2023, covers around 97 major emitters and has raised over $3 billion in its first two years, funding clean transportation, air quality devices, and EV chargers.

The states of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and other Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states have signed up to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, which is a cooperative cap-and-invest program launched in 2009 that limits emissions from the power sector and reinvests proceeds into clean energy programs like EV rebates.

Making fuels greener

While many states focus on promoting electric vehicles, others are also targeting the fuel of gas-powered cars, by adopting or developing standards that lower the carbon intensity.

These policies require fuel producers and importers to blend cleaner alternatives like biofuels, renewable diesel, or electricity into the fuel mix.

Patterned after California, Washington has a clean fuel standard in effect since 2023, targeting a 20 percent reduction in carbon intensity of transportation fuels by 2034 compared to 2017 levels.

Oregon has a similar program in place that aims to reduce carbon intensity in fuels by 37 percent by 2035.

New Mexico approved its Clean Transportation Fuel Standard in March 2024. A formal adoption hearing before the Environmental Improvement Board is scheduled to begin in September.

“We know that those (electric) vehicles aren’t for everyone and so we are very respectful of folks that decide to not purchase them,” said Miano, New Mexico’s environment protection division head.

No East Coast states have enacted a clean fuel standard, but New York state legislators may change that.

There are bills in the State Senate and Assembly that, if passed, would require fuel providers to reduce the carbon intensity of their transportation fuels by at least 20 percent by 2030. (Legislation has passed the Senate but remains at the committee level in the Assembly as of June.)

Michigan also had bills introduced in its Senate and House in 2023, but neither passed before the 2024 session ended. Similar bills have not been introduced since then.

Some of these clean fuel standards have faced criticism from environmental advocates, who argue that they allow polluters to buy their way out of reducing emissions.

But Trisha DelloIacono, policy head at advocacy group CALSTART, said the fuel standards remain one of the few politically viable tools to gradually shift the transportation sector toward cleaner fuels.

“What we need to be looking at right now is incremental changes and incremental progress in a place where we’re fighting tooth and nail to hold on to what we have,” DelloIacono said.

Where trucks congregate

There’s also a policy tool called indirect source rules, or ISR.

The rules are called “indirect” because they don’t regulate the vehicles themselves, but the facilities that attract emissions-heavy traffic, like large warehouses, ports, or rail yards. The rules hold the facilities owners or operators responsible for reducing or offsetting the pollution from their profitable traffic.

Studies show that the pollution from these trucks often ends up in nearby neighborhoods, which are disproportionately lower-income and communities of color.

California is currently the only state enforcing ISRs.

In Southern California, large warehouses must take steps to reduce the pollution caused by truck visits, either by switching to electric vehicles, installing chargers, or paying into a clean air fund. It’s the first rule of its kind in the country and it survived a court challenge in 2023, paving the way for other states to consider similar action.

New York is one of them. Its lawmakers introduced a bill in January that could require warehouses with over 50,000 square feet to reduce emissions from trucks by meeting certain benchmarks, such as hosting electric deliveries or offering bike loading zones. New York City has its own version of the rule under deliberation in the Council. As of June 2025, the bill remains stalled in the environmental committee. City Council has until December to act before the bill expires.

In New Jersey, where warehouse growth has boomed, legislators in 2024 proposed a bill that would require “high-traffic facilities” to apply for air pollution permits and provide plans to reduce diesel truck pollution.

“This is really being pushed by the community groups and environmental justice communities, especially in North Jersey. But also, warehouses are starting to pop up even in very rural parts of South Jersey. So this is very quickly becoming a statewide issue in New Jersey,” said Ambrose of the New Jersey Policy Perspective.

In Colorado, its regional air quality council in April announced plans to ask its air quality control commission to use ISR for areas with the worst air quality.

Industry groups, especially in the logistics sector, are pushing back. The industry group Supply Chain Federation told The Wall Street Journal that the southern California ISR was a “backdoor approach [that] does little to cut emissions and instead raises costs, disrupts supply chains.”

Still, experts say this may be one of the few options left for states to cut emissions from traffic-heavy facilities. Because these rules don’t directly regulate the car companies or trucks themselves, they don’t need federal approval.

“We definitely have to be nimble and fluid and also understand the kind of landscape in the state,” DelloIacono said.

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GOP budget bill poised to crush renewable energy in the US

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An early evaluation shows the administration’s planned energy policies would result in the drilling of 50,000 new oil wells every year for the next few years, he said, adding that it “ensures the continuation of land devastation… the poisoning of soil and groundwater due to fossil fuels and the continuation of gas blowouts and fires.”

There is nothing beneficial about the tax, he said, “only guaranteed misery.”

An analysis by the Rhodium Group, and energy policy research institute, projected that the Republican regime’s proposed energy policies would result in about 4 billion tons more greenhouse gas emissions than a continuation of current policies—enough to raise the average global temperature by .0072° Fahrenheit.

The overall budget bill was also panned in a June 28 statement by the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey.

McGarvey called it “a massive insult to the working men and women of North America’s Building Trades Unions and all construction workers.”

He said that, as written, the budget “stands to be the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country,” potentially costing as many jobs as shutting down 1,000 Keystone X pipeline projects, threatening an estimated 1.75 million construction jobs and over 3 billion work hours, which translates to $148 billion in lost annual wages and benefits.

“These are staggering and unfathomable job loss numbers, and the bill throws yet another lifeline and competitive advantage to China in the race for global energy dominance,” he said.

Research in recent years shows how right-wing populist and nationalist ideologies have used anti-renewable energy arguments to win voters, in defiance of environmental logic and scientific fact, in part by using social media to spread misleading and false information about wind, solar and other emissions-free electricity sources.

The same forces now seem to be at work in the US, said Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol who studies how people respond to misinformation and propaganda, and why people reject well-established scientific facts, such as those regarding climate change.

“This is a bonus for fossil fuels at the expense of future generations and the future of the American economy,” he said. “Other countries will continue working towards renewable-energy economies, especially China. That competitive advantage will eventually pay out to the detriment of American businesses. You can’t negotiate with the laws of physics.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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NIH budget cuts affect research funding beyond US borders

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European leaders say they will fill the funding void. Is that realistic?

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Rory de Vries, an associate professor of virology in the Netherlands, was lifting weights at the gym when he noticed a WhatsApp message from his research partners at Columbia University, telling him his research funding had been cancelled. The next day he received the official email: “Hi Rory, Columbia has received a termination notice for this contract, including all subcontracts,” it stated. “Unfortunately, we must advise you to immediately stop work and cease incurring charges on this subcontract.”

De Vries was disappointed, though not surprised—his team knew this might happen under the new Trump administration. His projects focused on immune responses and a new antiviral treatment for respiratory viruses like Covid-19. Animals had responded well in pre-clinical trials, and he was about to explore the next steps for applications in humans. But the news, which he received in March, left him with a cascade of questions: What would happen to the doctoral student he had just hired for his project, a top candidate plucked from a pool of some 300 aspiring scientists? How would his team comply with local Dutch law, which, unlike the US, forbids terminating a contract without cause or notice? And what did the future hold for his projects, two of which contained promising data for treating Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses in humans?

It was all up in the air, leaving de Vries, who works at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam and whose research has appeared in top-tier publications scrambling for last-minute funding from the Dutch government or the European Union.

Of the 20 members in his group, he will soon run out of money to pay the salaries for four. As of June, he

estimated that his team has enough to keep going for about six months in its current form if it draws money from other funding sources.

But that still leaves funding uncertain in the long-term: “So, yeah, that’s a little bit of an emergency solution,” he said.

Cuts to science funding in the US have devastated American institutions, hitting cancer research and other vital fields, but they also affect a raft of international collaborations and scientists based abroad. In Canada, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere, projects receiving funds from the National Institutes of Health have been terminated or stalled due to recent budget cuts.

Researchers in Europe and the US have long collaborated to tackle tough scientific questions. Certain fields, like rare diseases, particularly benefit from international collaboration because it widens the pool of patients available to study. European leaders have said that they will step into the gap created by Trump’s NIH cuts to make Europe a magnet for science—and they have launched a special initiative to attract US scientists. But some researchers doubt that Europe alone can truly fill the void.

In many European countries, scientist salaries are modest and research funding has lagged behind inflation in recent years. In a May press release, a French scientists’ union described current pay as “scandalously low” and said research funding in France and Europe as a whole lags behind the US, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Europe and its member states would need to increase research funding by up to 150 billion euros (roughly USD $173 billion) per year to properly support science, said Boris Gralak, general secretary of the French union, in an interview with Undark.

The shifts are not just about money, but the pattern of how international research unfolds, said Stefan Pfister, a pediatric cancer specialist in Germany who has also received NIH funds. The result, he said, is “this kind of capping and compromising well-established collaborations.”

Funding beyond US borders

For decades, international researchers have received a small slice of the National Institutes of Health budget. In 2024, out of an overall budget of $48 billion, the NIH dispensed $69 million to 125 projects across the European continent and $262 million in funding worldwide, according to the NIH award database.

The US and Europe “have collaborated in science for, you know, centuries at this point,” said Cole Donovan, associate director of science and technology ecosystem development at the Federation of American Scientists, noting that the relationship was formalized in 1997 in an agreement highlighting the two regions’ common interests.

And it has overall been beneficial, said Donovan, who worked in the State Department for a decade to help facilitate such collaborations. In some cases, European nations simply have capabilities that do not exist in the US, like the Czech Republic and Romania, he said, which have some of the most sophisticated laser facilities in the world.

“If you’re a researcher and you want to use those facilities,” he added, “you have to have a relationship with people in those countries.”

Certain fields, like rare diseases, particularly benefit from international collaboration because it widens the pool of patients available to study.

The shared nature of research is driven by personal connections and scientific interest, Donovan said: “The relationship in science and technology is organic.”

But with the recent cuts to NIH funding, the fate of those research projects—particularly on the health effects of climate change, transgender health, and Covid-19—has been thrown into question. On May 1, the NIH said it would not reissue foreign subawards, which fund researchers outside the US who work with American collaborators—or agree to US researchers asking to add a foreign colleague to a project. The funding structure lacked transparency and could harm national security, the NIH stated, though it noted that it would not “retroactively revise ongoing awards to remove foreign subawards at this time.” (The NIH would continue to support direct foreign awards, according to the statement.)

The cuts have hit European researchers like de Vries, whose institution, Erasmus MC, was a sub-awardee on three Columbia University grants to support his work. Two projects on Covid-19 transmission and treatment have ended abruptly, while another, on a potential treatment for measles, has been frozen, awaiting review at the end of May, though by late June he still had no news and said he assumed it would not be renewed. “We’re trying to scrape together some money to do some two or three last experiments, so we at least can publish the work and that it’s in literature and anyone else can pick it up,” he said. “But yeah, the work has stopped.”

His Ph.D. students must now shift the focus of their theses; for some, that means pivoting after nearly three years of study.

De Vries’ team has applied for funds from the Dutch government, as well as sought industry funding, for a new project evaluating a vaccine for RSV—something he wouldn’t have done otherwise, he said, since industry funding can limit research questions. “Companies might not be interested in in-depth immunological questions, or a side-by-side comparison of their vaccine with the direct competition,” he wrote in an email.

International scientists who have received direct awards have so far been unaffected, but say they are still nervous about potential further cuts. Pfister, for example, is now leading a five-year project to develop treatments for childhood tumors; with the majority of funding coming from NIH and Cancer Research U.K., a British-based cancer charity, “not knowing what the solution will look like next year,” he said, “generates uncertainties.”

The jointly funded $25 million project—which scientists from nine institutions across five countries including the US are collaborating on—explores treatments for seven childhood cancers and offers a rare opportunity to make progress in tackling tumors in children, Pfister added, as treatments have lagged in the field due to the small market and the high costs of development. Tumors in children differ from those in adults and, until recently, were harder to target, said Pfister. But new discoveries have allowed researchers to target cancer more specifically in children, and global cooperation is central to that progress.

The US groups, which specialize in drug chemistry, develop lead compounds for potential drugs. Pfister’s team then carries out experiments on toxicity and effectiveness. The researchers hope to bring at least one treatment, into early-phase clinical trials.

Funding from NIH is confirmed for this financial year. Beyond that, the researchers are staying hopeful, Pfister said.

“It’s such an important opportunity for all of us to work together,” said Pfister, “that we don’t want to think about worst-case scenarios.”

Pfister told Undark that his team in Heidelberg, Germany, has assembled the world´s biggest store of pediatric cancer models; no similar stock currently exists in the US The work of the researchers is complementary, he stressed: “If significant parts would drop out, you cannot run the project anymore.”

Rare diseases benefit from international projects, he added. In these fields, “We don’t have the patient numbers, we don’t have the critical mass,” in one country alone, he said. In his field, researchers conduct early clinical trials in patients on both sides of the Atlantic. “That’s just not because we are crazy, but just because this the only way to physically conduct them.”

The US has spearheaded much drug development, he noted. “Obviously the US has been the powerhouse for biomedical research for the last 50 years, so it’s not surprising that some of the best people and the best groups are sitting there,” he said. A smaller US presence in the field would reduce the critical mass of people and resources available, which would be a disaster for patients, he said. “Any dreams of this all moving to Europe are illusions in my mind.”

While Europe has said it will step in to fill the gap, the amounts discussed were not enough, Gralak said. The amount of money available in Europe “is a very different order of magnitude,” Pfister said. It also won’t help their colleagues in the US, who European researchers need to thrive in order to maintain necessary collaborations, he said. “In the US, we are talking about dozens of billions of dollars less in research, and this cannot be compensated by any means, by the EU or any other funder.” Meanwhile, the French scientists’ union said the country has failed to meet funding promises made as long ago as 2010.

And although Europe receives a sliver of NIH funds, these cuts could have a real impact on public health. De Vries said that his measles treatment was at such an early stage that its potential benefits remained unproven, but if effective it could have been the only treatment of its kind at a time when cases are rising.

And he said the stalling of both his work and other research on Covid-19 leaves the world less prepared for a future pandemic. The antiviral drug he has developed had positive results in ferrets but needs further refinement to work in humans. If the drugs were available for people, “that would be great,” he said. “Then we could actually work on interrupting a pandemic early.”

New opportunities for Europe

The shift in US direction offers an opportunity for the EU, said Mike Galsworthy, a British scientist who campaigned to unite British and EU science in the wake of Brexit. The US will no longer be the default for ambitious researchers from across the world, he said: “It’s not just US scientists going to Canada and Europe. There’s also going to be the huge brain diversion.” he said. “If you are not a native English speaker and not White, you might be extra nervous about going to the States for work there right now,” he added.

And in recent weeks, European governments have courted fleeing scientists. In April, France launched a platform called Choose France for Science, which allows institutions to request funding for international researchers, and highlights an interest in health, climate science, and artificial intelligence, among other research areas Weeks later, the European Union announced a new program called Choose Europe for Science, aiming to make Europe a “magnet for researchers.” It includes a 500 million Euro (roughly USD $578 million) funding package for 2025-2027, new seven-year “super grants,” to attract the best researchers, and top-up funds that would help scientists from outside Europe settle into their new institution of choice.

The initial funding comes from money already allocated to Horizon Europe—the EU’s central research and innovation funding program. But some researchers are skeptical. The French union leader, Gralak, who is also a researcher in mathematical physics, described the programs as PR initiatives. He criticized European leaders for taking advantage of the problems in US science to attract talent to Europe, and said leaders should support science in Europe through proper and sufficient investment. The programs are “derisory and unrealistic,” he said.

“It’s not just US scientists going to Canada and Europe. There’s also going to be the huge brain diversion.”

Others agreed that Europe’s investment in science is inadequate. Bringing scientists to Europe would be “great for science and the talent, but that also means that will come from a line where there’s normally funding for European researchers,” said de Vries, the researcher from Rotterdam. As Mathilde Richard, a colleague of de Vries who works on viruses and has five active NIH grants, told Undark: “Why did I start to apply to NIH funds? And still, the most straightforward answer is that there isn’t enough in Europe.”

In the Netherlands, a rightwing government has said it will cut science funding by a billion euros over the next five years. And while the flagship program Horizon Europe encourages large-scale projects spanning multiple countries, scientists spend years putting together the major cross-country collaborations the system requires. Meanwhile, European Research Council grants are “extremely competitive and limited,” de Vries said.

Richard’s NIH grants pay for 65 percent of her salary and for 80 percent of her team, and she believes she’s the most dependent on US funds of anyone in her department at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. She applied because the NIH funding seemed more sustainable than local money, she said. In Europe, too often funding is short-term and has a time-consuming administrative burden, she said, which hinders researchers from developing long-term plans. “We have to battle so much to just do our work and find funds to just do our basic work,” she said. “I think we need to advocate for a better and more sustainable way of funding research.”

Scientists, too, are worried about what US cuts mean for global science, beyond the short-term. Paltry science funding could discourage a generation of talented people from entering the field, Pfister suggested: “In the end, the resources are not only monetary, but also the brain resources are reduced.”

Let’s not talk about it

A few months ago, Pfister attended a summit in Boston for Cancer Grand Challenges, a research initiative co-funded by the NIH’s National Cancer Institute and Cancer Research U.K. Nobody from the NIH came because they had no funding to travel. “So we are all sitting in Boston, and they are sitting like 200 miles away,” he said.

More concerning was the fact that those present seemed afraid to discuss why the NIH staff were absent, he said. “It was us Europeans to basically, kind of break the ice to, you know, at least talk about it.”

Pfister said that some European researchers are now hesitant about embarking on US collaborations, even if there is funding available. And some German scientists are taking steps to ensure that they are protected if a similar budget crackdown occurred in Germany, he said—devising independent review processes, separating research policy from funding, and developing funding models less dependent on government-only sources, he said. “I think the most scary part is that you know, this all happened in three months.”

Despite the worry and uncertainty, de Vries offered a hopeful view of the future. “We will not be defeated by NIH cuts,” he said. “I feel confident that Europe will organize itself.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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