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2025-12-21 20:30:00

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Shelton Tucker is part of a novel plan to deal with the waters that are increasingly encroaching on his neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia.

Situated at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and afflicted by one of the fastest paces of sea-level rise in the United States, Hampton has long battled flooding. 

But while flood-prone coastal cities have historically defaulted to levees, pumps and miles of cement-covered storm drains, Hampton is leaning heavily on rain barrels, rain gardens, declogging creeks, and fortifying shores with oyster reefs. 

Hampton residents like Tucker have a part to play, too. The 67-year-old president of the Greater Aberdeen Community Coalition has a spot for a rain garden—a plot designed to collect and absorb stormwater runoff—prepared in the front yard of his father’s house.

“I got it all bricked out,” Tucker said. “I just need to know the plants to put in it.”

Hampton’s rain gardens and oyster reefs are part of a flood-management strategy heavily influenced by the Netherlands, dubbed “Living With Water.” At its core is a change in mindset about how to approach a future increasingly defined by rising oceans, more intense rains and soggier ground. 

Instead of fighting water, the thinking goes, let it in. Guide it to areas where it can flow and sit safely; enjoy it while it’s there. Restore natural systems that absorb, buffer and cleanse. Take steps big and small, public and private, since every little bit counts.

In practice, that means Hampton is trying to better handle large volumes of water, dotting flood-prone areas with plant-lined storage basins, inserting low weirs in rivers to slow the flow of excess water and raising some key streets that are likely to submerge regardless.

While some nearby coastal cities are proposing billion-dollar floodwalls and surge barriers, Hampton is looking at restoring marshes and “naturalizing” miles of rock-fortified shoreline with sand and marsh grasses.

At a coastal park a few blocks from Hampton City Hall, the city is building a sandy marsh over the rocks that currently line the shore, and experimenting with new types of protective sills—including 3D-printed concrete reefs seeded with oysters.

The changes mean incoming waves will be gently buffered, rather than reflected by hard surfaces as they are now, reducing flooding and erosion, said Olivia Askew, a Hampton city resilience officer. 

The water “will rise and fall in the new marsh that we’re creating, which will soften the shoreline,” she said. 

Hampton’s history dates back to 1610, when a group of English colonists seized an Algonquin village and renamed it, making it the oldest continuously occupied English settlement in the US. Nine years later, Hampton was the landing site for some of the first African slaves to be transported to the country. 

Langley Air Force Base was built in Hampton in 1917 and is still a major economic force in the area; NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was born there. 

Today, Hampton is a quiet city of 137,000. The lobby of City Hall hosts a towering decorated cake baked 40 years ago to celebrate Hampton’s 375th birthday, along with banners commemorating the five-time win, this year, of the National Civic League’s All-America City Award. The theme of that award-winning presentation was “Resilient Hampton.” It featured a video showing flooded streets, marshy shores and the line, “We can’t wall ourselves off from the water, but we can learn to adapt.”

Hampton sits at the tip of a little peninsula where the James and York Rivers flow into the Chesapeake Bay, criss-crossed by scores of smaller tributaries, creeks and canals. It is in the center of the broader Hampton Roads estuary region, which forms one of the largest and deepest natural harbors in the world.

Between rising tides and sinking shores, Hampton Roads is experiencing one of the fastest changes in sea level in the US. The city of Hampton is planning for 1.5 feet of sea rise by 2040 and 4.5 feet by 2100, although another estimate puts the potential increase at 9.5 feet. Flooding in the city is exacerbated by winds that whip up waves and send them surging ashore, rivers and drains that back up and overflow during storms and soil that doesn’t drain well. 

In the next 25 years or so, 39 miles of Hampton’s shoreline and almost 20 percent of its park land could be inundated, the city says. In 30 years, more than 80 percent of Hampton’s properties will be at risk of flooding, up from around 65 percent now, climate risk financial modeler First Street estimates. 

Tucker, who grew up near the historic black neighborhood of Aberdeen Gardens in central Hampton, said he can already see changes in how water is affecting the area. Pools left after storms are taking much longer to dry, he said. Hazardous zones on flood maps are expanding; Tucker has his eye on one such zone across the street from his house, near a creek where he crabbed as a boy; one map showed that 30 years from now, a good portion of one of the neighborhoods in greater Aberdeen could be underwater.

Higher flood risk also means higher insurance rates. “There’s an economic factor to living in areas that are deemed to be unsafe,” said Tucker. “Like I told the community members here: ‘It’s essentially your wealth is going under water.’”

Despite the rising risks, Hampton didn’t have a comprehensive strategy to deal with all that incoming water until fairly recently, said Scott Smith, an avid rower and coastal resilience engineer, who worked for the neighboring city of Norfolk before moving to Hampton city government five years ago. 

A decade ago, water management in the region was largely focused on water quality, he said. Cities in the area had flood-mitigation plans, and were starting to experience “sunny-day flooding,” where streets would regularly flood at high tide, even without a storm or heavy rain. But nobody talked about climate change or sea level rise, just “recurrent flooding,” he recalled.

Then in 2015, a New Orleans-based architect named David Waggonner brought some engineers from the Netherlands to the Hampton Roads area to discuss their approach to water. Waggonner had first reached out to Dutch experts after the devastating floods following Hurricane Katrina. Their insights, honed by centuries of experience with flooding, were so helpful that he started organizing similar workshops on Dutch-style solutions around the country.

“Building cities around water is the Dutch priority,” said Waggonner. “They would tell you that if they ignore the water system in the Netherlands, the country gets sick.”

The Dutch approach was adopted to various degrees by officials throughout the region, but it was particularly resonant in Hampton, said Mary-Carson Stiff, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a Norfolk-based nonprofit that worked with Tucker’s coalition and other community groups on resilience plans for the Aberdeen Gardens district.

Coastal flood management typically prioritizes big, expensive infrastructure projects like seawalls and levees. That requires not only a wall along the sea side, but more barriers along the back and sides, forming a kind of bathtub with the properties to be protected inside, along with pumps to remove water that comes in. “It’s a set: the bathtub and the pump,” said Smith. 

That approach might make sense in a compact area with valuable assets to protect—although it also tends to prioritize defending million-dollar homes and businesses over cheaper real estate and lower-income neighborhoods.

But the city of Hampton, with its many intersecting streams and coastline along three sides, doesn’t have an “area to tie a wall into,” said Smith.

Hampton would also strain to fund the type of pricey infrastructure proposed by larger cities in Hampton Roads like Norfolk, which is spending $2.6 billion for a set of measures centered on storm-surge barriers and flood walls, or Virginia Beach, which in 2021 voted to spend more than $500 million on things like tide gates and pumps. Virginia Beach estimates the total cost of its flood-protection projects has risen to more than $1.5 billion.

“Different municipalities can take a different approach, depending on if they have the ability to do a $500 million referendum,” said Askew, the resilience officer. “The city of Hampton doesn’t have the financial capacity to do that. We look at a piecemeal approach to funding projects.”

That piecemeal approach works well with the type of flood measures promoted by the Dutch engineers. Those feature multiple lines of defense, pockets of water storage and projects that serve more than one purpose, said Smith. 

The Dutch city of Rotterdam, which declares on its website that “we no longer see water as a problem, but as an opportunity,” has an underground parking garage that doubles as water storage during storms. Many of Hampton’s water-management projects double as recreational spaces, like one that is converting a flood-prone drainage ditch into a cleaner, broader stream with a walking path alongside.

The Dutch approach also focused on green solutions that mimic nature whenever possible, and stressed the importance of taking lots of little steps to absorb or store water. In Hampton, those include encouraging residents like Tucker to install rain barrels and rain gardens or replace walls and rocks along miles of private coastline with sand, grasses and oyster reefs.

“There’s no silver bullet,” said Smith. “It’s multiple little things. The aggregation of multiple little things can make a difference.”

One example is the recently completed $2 million retrofit of Lake Hampton, previously a scraggly artificial storage basin behind a Home Depot, near a creek that regularly flooded during high tides and storms. The city cleaned up the shoreline, raised the berm on one side to let the lake store more water and installed tidal gates to stop cross-flooding with the creek. It also built a boardwalk and lakeside path, so residents could enjoy the scenery.

The retrofit has already reduced the amount of flooding in the area, and conditions should improve further once a nearby road is raised and water-absorbing bioswales are installed, said Anna Hammond, a city resilience specialist.

There are challenges for Hampton’s living-with-water approach.

Finding money—even for modest projects—is tough. In 2020, Hampton issued $12 million in bonds to finance the work around Lake Hampton as well as the drainage ditch retrofit—projects that are expected to add 8.6 million gallons of stormwater storage capacity and serve as models for future measures. But the Trump administration earlier this year cancelled a $20 million grant that was supposed to fund the rain gardens and retrofits at Aberdeen Gardens. The city and Wetlands Watch are looking for alternate sources of financing. 

Evaluating the benefits of green infrastructure can be hard. It is easier for engineers to quantify the amount of protection a seawall would provide, versus, say, a stand of mangrove trees, said Smith. Walls take much less space than a nature-based feature that offers an equivalent level of shelter, he said. Ecological and social dividends tend to be ignored.

Bioswales, rain gardens and retrofitted creeks won’t ward off the massive amounts of water that can come from hurricanes or coastal flooding, said Smith. The city will likely still need some combination of hard, gray infrastructure and green, natural features, he said. As waters continue to rise with climate change, conditions for coastal cities will become more precarious.

“Water does mean risk,” said Wetlands Watch’s Stiff. “You’re welcoming the water in and you’re fully acknowledging that it is risky to do that.”

In Aberdeen Gardens, Tucker said the community doesn’t have much choice. “What is the alternative: not living with water?” he asked. “If you think that by not addressing the issue specifically that it will go away or it resolves, no it won’t. It’s inevitable. It’s just a matter of time.”

2025-12-20 23:20:58

On Friday, the Trump-controlled Justice Department was mandated by a nearly unanimous act of Congress to release all government files related to Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes.

But the government has made just a portion of its holdings publically available, and among the 13,000 documents released, some are extensively or virtually totally redacted. While the law permits withholding information to protect victims, obscured portions include the names and faces of numerous Epstein associates, despite the law’s dictate that nothing be withheld “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity…to any government official [or] public figure.”

According to Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who broke with his party to champion the Epstein Files Transparency Act, what the government has so far provided “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”

Epstein’s victims have similar complaints. “They are proving everything we have been saying about corruption and delayed justice,” Jess Michaels told the New York Times. “What are they protecting? The coverup continues.”  

The release is being overseen by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal defense attorney, who represented him in the criminal case related to Trump’s attempt to coverup his affair with Stormy Daniels, the adult film star. Blanche has said that the Justice Department remains at work preparing more files for disclosure in the “coming weeks,” in apparent violation of Friday’s deadline.

The law requires the department to prepare a report to Congress justifying any documents or names it may withhold, and submit it with 15 days of the “completion of the release.” But Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley Democrat who moved the bill forward with the help of a handful of GOP colleagues, aren’t waiting to begin discussing how to bring about legal consequences for Trump officials who have or may still be violating their law requiring disclosure. 

“The Justice Department’s document dump,” Khanna said in an online video, “does not comply… Pam Bondi has obfuscated for months.” He suggested that Congress consider impeaching officials or holding them in inherent contempt. “Attorney General Pam Bondi is withholding specific documents that the law required her to release by today,” Massie posted, pointedly adding that prosecutors in a future administration could eventually “convict the current AG” for breaking their law.

Friday’s release included many photos of Bill Clinton, a former president, but little new information on the current one. While Trump has variously claimed that he and Epstein “did not socialize together,” that “there was no relationship” between them, and that he “was not a fan of his,” this week a Times investigation found that “the two men forged a bond intense enough to leave others who knew them with the impression that they were each other’s closest friend.”

2025-12-20 20:30:00

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

There are few pop culture stereotypes I despise more than the one about female reporters having sex with their sources. For this reason (also paywalls), I have been less obsessed than some of my colleagues with the ongoing journalism shitshow starring Olivia Nuzzi, the former New York magazine star political reporter; her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza, another former big-deal Beltway-insider-scribe; and RFK Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, now busy destroying the public health system here and abroad.

But, like every American journalist capable of reading, I still know way, way too much about how Nuzzi, then covering the 2024 election, became embroiled in a sext and FaceTime affair with RFK Jr.—the subject of one of her profiles—while he was running for president and yes, by the way, married to actress Cheryl Hines. Meanwhile, Nuzzi was writing other pieces about Joe Biden and Donald Trump that may not have changed the course of the most important US election in my lifetime, but certainly helped to shape the narrative. Nuzzigate is to ordinary journalism scandals what the OJ Simpson case was to car chases—a story so mind-boggling and lurid that fiction can’t begin to compete. In the words of superstar tech journalist Kara Swisher, “The whole thing is just not a good look for journalists. It’s not a good look for women. It’s just it makes us look like fucking idiots.”

For which Swisher offers the pitch-perfect coda: “Make it fucking stop.”

But let us first salute the one person who emerges from this saga with her reputation intact: Swisher herself. The serial media entrepreneur—a veteran of the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal; scourge of Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, and Elon Musk—is a host of Vox’s “Pivot” podcast, among other ventures. She also used to be Nuzzi’s mentor, or so Nuzzi “writes” in what may be the worst-reviewed memoir of the past decade. But that relationship didn’t stop Swisher from taking action when she started hearing rumors about what Nuzzi and RFK Jr. had been up to.

“The minute I found out,” she told her co-host Scott Galloway on a recent “Pivot” episode, “I knew I had to tell New York magazine” (also a Vox property). Swisher said she hoped Nuzzi or Lizza would come forward on their own, “but nobody did it. And so I called. I confirmed it. I made sure it was accurate and did reporting on it.” Only after Swisher was sure of her facts did she out Nuzzi to New York editors, she added. “I said, you need to investigate, and you need to figure this out and then disclose it to our audience. And that’s all I said. I moved on.”

That’s another reason Swisher is this story’s hero: She seems to hate everything about it. The scandal broke in September 2024, but we only found out about Swisher’s role this year, as the Nuzzi-Lizza industrial complex began spewing out books, magazine articles, and Substacks detailing so many exceedingly gross violations of Journalism 101 that even my most gossip-loving friends had to take a hiatus. “I’ve been dragged back in, one, because Olivia has put me in her book, calling me her mentor and [saying] essentially, I ratted her out,” Swisher told Galloway. “But I didn’t. I did the right thing.”

When the Times came calling for comment, Swisher was gracious about Nuzzi’s talent—“Everything she said about Biden was true. Her writing was over and beyond the best political reporting out there.” She was also unyielding about what Nuzzi had done: “She just needed to come clean, and she never did,” Swisher told the Times. “It was a betrayal of the audience.”

In her “Pivot” comments, Swisher seemed even more irritated by Lizza, whose jaw-dropping Substack series—six to eight parts so far, depending on how you count, with the last couple of installments veering into Basic Instinct/Fatal Attraction territory—has been wringing the ick for maximum profit and subscribership. “I’ve told him, I think he should have written one piece if he felt he had to and moved on,” she told Galloway. Instead, Lizza disclosed her role in the scandal in a breathless cliffhanger finale to one of his posts—“like [a] really grotesque Pickwick Papers,” Swisher huffed. “And so I got dragged into the ridiculous drama. Thank you. That’s it.”

And now, having said her piece, Swisher is done. “I hate being a side character in this,” she told Galloway. “I just did the right thing, and I’d like to leave, please.” A sentiment, no doubt, many of us who are mere spectators heartily applaud. But first, please accept my heartfelt thanks for reminding the world how a bad-ass female journalist at the pinnacle of her profession actually behaves: not just with clear-eyed determination when the situation calls for it, but with a mature understanding of the lasting consequences for everyone involved (well, maybe not RFK Jr.). Too bad Nuzzi wasn’t paying closer attention.

2025-12-20 20:30:00

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a mid-November evening, at precisely 7:12 p.m., a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Florida coast. It appeared to be a perfect launch. At an altitude of about 40 miles, the rocket’s first stage separated and fell back to Earth, eventually alighting in a gentle, controlled landing on a SpaceX ship idling in the Atlantic Ocean.

The mission’s focus then returned to the rocket’s payload: 29 Starlink communication satellites that were to be deployed in low-Earth orbit, about 340 miles above the planet’s surface. With this new fleet of machines, Starlink was expanding its existing mega-constellation so that it numbered over 9,000 satellites, all circling Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour. 

Launches like this have become commonplace. As of late November, SpaceX had sent up 152 Falcon 9 missions in 2025—an annual record for the company. And while SpaceX is the undisputed leader in rocket launches, the space economy now ranges beyond American endeavors to involve orbital missions—military, scientific, and corporate—originating from Europe, China, Russia, India, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. This year the global total of orbital launches will near 300 for the first time, and there seems little doubt it will continue to climb.    

Starlink has sought permission from the Federal Communications Commission to expand its swarm, which at this point comprises the vast majority of Earth’s active satellites, so that it might within a few years have as many as 42,000 units in orbit. Blue Origin, the rocket company led by Jeff Bezos, is in the early stages of helping to deploy a satellite network for Amazon, a constellation of about 3,000 units known as Amazon Leo. European companies, such as France’s Eutelsat, plan to expand space-based networks, too.

“We’re now at 12,000 active satellites, and it was 1,200 a decade ago, so it’s just incredible,” Jonathan MacDowell, a scientist at Harvard and the Smithsonian who has been tracking space launches for several decades, told me recently. MacDowell notes that based on applications to communications agencies, as well as on corporate projections, the satellite business will continue to grow at an extraordinary rate. By 2040, it’s conceivable that more than 100,000 active satellites would be circling Earth.

But counting the number of launches and satellites has so far proven easier than measuring their impacts. For the past decade, astronomers have been calling attention to whether so much activity high above might compromise their opportunities to study distant objects in the night sky. At the same time, other scientists have concentrated on the physical dangers. Several studies project a growing likelihood of collisions and space debris—debris that could rain down on Earth or, in rare cases, on cruising airplanes.

More recently, however, scientists have become alarmed by two other potential problems: the emissions from rocket fuels, and the emissions from satellites and rocket stages that mostly ablate (that is, burn up) on reentry. “Both of these processes are producing pollutants that are being injected into just about every layer of the atmosphere,” explains Eloise Marais, an atmospheric scientist at University College London, who compiles emissions data on launches and reentries. 

As Marais told me, it’s crucial to understand that Starlink’s satellites, as well as those of other commercial ventures, don’t stay up indefinitely. With a lifetime usefulness of about five years, they are regularly deorbited and replaced by others. The new satellite business thus has a cyclical quality: launch, deploy, deorbit, destroy. And then repeat. 

The cycle suggests we are using Earth’s mesosphere and stratosphere—the layers above the surface-hugging troposphere—as an incinerator dump for space machinery. Or as Jonathan MacDowell puts it: “We are now in this regime where we are doing something new to the atmosphere that hasn’t been done before.” MacDowell and some of his colleagues seem to agree that we don’t yet understand how—or how much—the reentries and launches will alter the air. As a result, we’re unsure what the impacts may be to Earth’s weather, climate, and (ultimately) its inhabitants. 

To consider low-Earth orbit within an emerging environmental framework, it helps to see it as an interrelated system of cause and effect. As with any system, trying to address one problematic issue might lead to another. A long-held idea, for instance, has been to “design for demise,” in the argot of aerospace engineers, which means constructing a satellite with the intention it should not survive the heat of reentry.

“But there’s an unforeseen consequence of your solution unless you have a grasp of how things are connected,” according to Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. In reducing “the population of debris” with incineration, Lewis told me—and thus, with rare exceptions, saving us from encounters with falling chunks of satellites or rocket stages—we seem to have chosen “probably the most harmful solution you could get from a perspective of the atmosphere.” 

We don’t understand the material composition of everything that’s burning up. Yet scientists have traced a variety of elements that are vaporizing in the mesosphere during the deorbits of satellites and derelict rocket stages; and they’ve concluded these vaporized materials—as a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences put it—“condense into aerosol particles that descend into the stratosphere.” The PNAS study, done by high altitude air sampling and not by modeling, showed that these tiny particles contained aluminum, silicon, copper, lead, lithium, and more exotic elements like niobium.

The large presence of aluminum, signaling the formulation of aluminum oxide nanoparticles, may be especially worrisome, since it can harm Earth’s protective ozone layers and may undo our progress in halting damage done by chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. A recent academic study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters concluded that the ablation of a single 550-pound satellite (a new Starlink unit is larger, at about 1,800 pounds) can generate around 70 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles. This floating metallic pollution may stay aloft for decades. 

The PNAS study and others, moreover, suggest the human footprint on the upper atmosphere will expand, especially as the total mass of machinery being incinerated ratchets up. Several scientists I spoke with noted that they have revised their previous belief that the effects of ablating satellites would not exceed those of meteorites that naturally burn up in the atmosphere and leave metallic traces in the stratosphere. “You might have more mass from the meteoroids,” Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, said, but “these satellites can still have a huge effect because they’re so vastly different [in composition].” 

Last year, a group of researchers affiliated with NASA formulated a course of research that could be followed to fill large “knowledge gaps” relating to these atmospheric effects. The team proposed a program of modeling that would be complemented by data gleaned from in situ measurements. While some of this information could be gathered through high-altitude airplane flights, sampling the highest-ranging air might require “sounding” rockets doing tests with suborbital flights. Such work is viewed as challenging and not inexpensive—but also necessary. “Unless you have the data from the field, you cannot trust your simulations too much,” Columbia University’s Kostas Tsigaridis, one of the scientists on the NASA team, told me. 

Tsigaridis explains that lingering uncertainty about NASA’s future expenditures on science has slowed US momentum for such research. One bright spot, however, has been overseas, where ESA, the European Space Agency, held an international workshop in September to address some of the knowledge gaps, particularly those relating to satellite ablations. The ESA meeting resulted in a commitment to begin field measurement campaigns over the next 24 months, Adam Mitchell, an engineer with the agency, said. The effort suggests a sense of urgency, in Europe, at least, that the space industry’s growth is outpacing our ability to grasp its implications.

The atmospheric pollution problem is not only about what’s raining down from above, however; it also relates to what happens as rockets go up. According to the calculations of Marais’ UCL team, the quantity of heat-trapping gases like CO2 produced during liftoffs are still tiny in comparison to, say, those of commercial airliners. On the other hand, it seems increasingly clear that rocket emission plumes from the first few minutes of a mission, which disperse into the stratosphere, may, like reentries, have a significant effect on the ozone layer. 

The most common rocket fuel right now is a highly refined kerosene known as RP-1, which is used by vehicles such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9. When RP-1 is burned in conjunction with liquid oxygen, the process releases black carbon particulates into the stratosphere. A recent study led by Christopher Maloney of the University of Colorado used computer models to assess how the black carbon absorbs solar radiation and whether it can warm the upper atmosphere significantly. Based on space industry growth projections a few decades into the future, these researchers concluded that the warming effect of black carbon would raise temperatures in the stratosphere by as much as 1.5 degrees C, leading to significant ozone reductions in the Northern Hemisphere.

It may be the case that a different propellant could alleviate potential problems. But a fix isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Solid fuels, for instance, which are often used in rocket boosters to provide additional thrust, emit chlorine—another ozone-destroying element. Meanwhile, the propellant of the future looks to be formulations of liquefied natural gas (LNG), often referred to as liquid methane. Liquid methane will be used to power SpaceX’s massive Starship, a new vehicle that’s intended to be used for satellite deployments, moon missions, and, possibly someday, treks to Mars. 

The amount of black carbon emissions from burning LNG may be 75 percent less than from RP-1. “But the issue is that the Starship rocket is so much bigger,” UCL’s Marais says. “There’s so much more mass that’s being launched.” Thus, while liquid methane might burn cleaner, using immense quantities of it—and using it for more frequent launches—could undermine its advantages. Recently, executives at SpaceX’s Texas factory have said they would like to build a new Starship every day, readying the company for a near-constant cycle of launches.

One worry amongst scientists is that if new research suggests that space pollution is leading to serious impacts, it may eventually resemble an airborne variation of plastics in the ocean. A more optimistic view is that these are the early days of the space business, and there is still time for solutions. Some of the recent work at ESA, for instance, focuses on changing the “design for demise” paradigm for satellites to what some scientists are calling “design to survive.”

Already, several firms are testing satellites that can get through an reentry without burning up; a company called Atmos, for instance, is working on an inflatable “atmospheric decelerator” that serves as a heat shield and parachute to bring cargo to Earth. Satellites might be built from safer materials, such as one tested in 2024 by Japan’s space agency, JAXA, made mostly from wood. 

More ambitious plans are being discussed: Former NASA engineer Moriba Jah has outlined a design for an orbital “circular economy” that calls for “the development and operation of reusable and recyclable satellites, spacecraft, and space infrastructure.” In Jah’s vision, machines used in the space economy should be built in a modular way, so that parts can be disassembled, conserved, and reused. Anything of negligible worth would be disposed of responsibly.

Most scientists I spoke with believe that a deeper recognition of environmental responsibilities could rattle the developing structure of the space business. “Regulations often translate into additional costs,” says UCL’s Marais, “and that’s an issue, especially when you’re privatizing space.” A shift to building satellites that can survive reentry, for instance, could change the economics of an industry that, as astronomer Aaron Boley notes, has been created to resemble the disposable nature of the consumer electronics business.

Boley also warns that technical solutions are likely only one aspect of avoiding dangers and will not address all the complexities of overseeing low-Earth orbit as a shared and delicate system. It seems possible to Boley that in addition to new fuels, satellite designs, and reentry schemes, we may need to look toward quotas that require international management agreements. He acknowledges that this may seem “pie in the sky”; while there are treaties for outer space, as well as United Nations guidelines, they don’t address such governance issues. Moreover, the emphasis in most countries is on accelerating the space economy, not limiting it. And yet, Boley argues that without collective-action policy responses we may end up with orbital shells so crowded that they exceed a safe carrying capacity. 

That wouldn’t be good for the environment or society—but it wouldn’t be good for the space business, either. Such concerns may be why those in the industry increasingly discuss a set of principles, supported by NASA, that are often grouped around the idea of “space sustainability.” University of Edinburgh astronomer Andrew Lawrence told me that the phrase can be used in a way that makes it unclear what we’re sustaining: “If you look at the mission statements that companies make, what they mean is, we want to sustain this rate of growth.” 

But he doesn’t think we can. As one of the more eloquent academics arguing for space environmentalism, Lawrence perceives an element of unreality in the belief that in accelerating space activity we can “magically not screw everything up.” He thinks a goal in space for zero emissions, or zero impact, would be more sensible. And with recent private-sector startups suggesting that we should use space to build big data centers or increase sunlight on surface areas of Earth, he worries we are not entering an era of sustainability but a period of crisis.

Lawrence considers debates around orbital satellites a high-altitude variation on climate change and threats to biodiversity—an instance, again, of trying to seek a balance between capitalism and conservation, between growth and restraint. “Of course, it affects me and other professional astronomers and amateur astronomers particularly badly,” he concedes. “But it’s really that it just wakes you up and you think, ‘Oh, God, it’s another thing. I thought, you know—I thought we were safe.’” After a pause, he adds, “But no, we’re not.”

2025-12-20 16:01:00

In the mid-’90s, two high-end New York art galleries began selling one fake painting after another–works in the style of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and others. It was the largest art fraud in modern U.S. history, totaling more than $80 million. Our first story looks at how it happened and why almost no one ever was punished by authorities. 

Our second story revisits an investigation into a painting looted by the Nazis during World War II. More than half a century later, a journalist helped track it down through the Panama Papers. 

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in January 2020.

2025-12-20 04:31:28

Sometime this week in an undisclosed location, two powerful figures sat down for tense negotiations, hoping to end a cold war that had, in recent days, turned very hot. The talks were not a success, with one participant dubbing some of what the other side presented as “fake and gay.” Tensions, it’s fair to say, continued unabated.

In this case, the combatants were Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk and far-right one-woman chaos machine Candace Owens. They met to discuss Owens’ relentless trafficking of conspiracy theories about the murder of Kirk’s husband, TPUSA founder and leader Charlie. Owens, a former TPUSA communications director and close friend of the slain leader, has continued her descent into gutter antisemitism by suggesting that his assassination was orchestrated by the Israeli state, as well as suggesting that Egyptian military planes and France also may have been involved, before eventually tweeting that it’s “likely” that “the same people who killed JFK killed Charlie.” Turning Point staff have also merited her suspicion, and she tweeted last week, “I now can say with full confidence that I believe Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage.”  

As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer wrote, all this conspiratorial churn has put Owens in the midst of an all-out war with virtually everyone else in right-wing media. Right-wing podcaster and diehard beanie-wearer Tim Pool, who is not known for consistently breaking ranks with right-wing extremists, spoke loudly for the group when he dubbed her a “fucking evil scumbag” and a “degenerate cunt.” After Erika Kirk’s four-hour meeting with Owens to try to tamp down her wild accusations, Kirk emerged describing it as being “very productive.” As CNN reported, she even brought in a lawyer to explain to Owens how the investigation of her husband’s death worked. Suspicious as ever, Owens emerged, dismissing a police affidavit outlining evidence in the Kirk shooting “fake and gay.” 

Their war will likely continue, but it’s just one of dozens of feuds, internecine wars, and petty beefs rivening MAGA from top-to-bottom. As far-right British political activist Raheem Kaseem told Axios, the result of it all is a “cacophony of grifters.” The broad Trump coalition is ending its first year back in power more divided than ever. From the White House to the conspiracy media-verse, at what should be their moment of greatest strength, MAGA simply cannot stop both constant covert sniping and the occasional outright brawl.

Aside from the ongoing Candace Owens situation—a phrase that will surely become part of the national conversation in the years ahead —TPUSA also saw some robust infighting at their big AmericaFest gathering, where Politico reports that headline speakers Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro threw bitchy little digs at one another from onstage and off. “If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes, you ought to own it,” Shapiro said, a continuation of a particularly bleak piece of infighting on the right about how much antisemitism in the movement is too much.

Outside the malodorous confines of AmericaFest, the public squabbles and unseemly jockeying for position go all the way to the top. Chaos erupted this week after Vanity Fair published an explosive article featuring quotes from White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who has, for reasons even she can’t seem to explain, been speaking to reporter Chris Whipple for eleven sit-down interviews. In those chats, which she fit in while managing various crises created by her boss, she called Vice President JD Vance “a conspiracy theorist,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the handling of the Epstein files controversy, and said Trump himself has “an alcoholic’s personality,” an analysis the president, who famously doesn’t drink, told the New York Post he agreed with. 

Wiles has responded by calling the article “a hit piece”—without exactly disputing any of its contents—and the White House has made a show of supporting her in public, even as the Washington Post reports they were taken by surprise by the splashy story. According to some reporting, Wiles may have thought she was speaking to Whipple for a book. Meanwhile, top administration officials cannot clearly explain why they posed for a photo to accompany the article, nor what they thought Vanity Fair was going to publish.

The president’s most relentless loyalty enforcer, Laura Loomer has ended her extremely busy year of ferreting out perceived dissenters and getting people fired whom she deemed insufficiently loyal to the MAGA cause by tattling on them to the president and tweeting angrily about their ostensible betrayals. In Washington, the term “Loomered” has come to mean not just fired, but thoroughly exiled from both the government and the movement. (“Another LOOMERED SCALP!” she exulted on Twitter/X last week, celebrating the fact that the White House has withdrawn their selection for deputy NSA director.)

Loomering is the most targeted of MAGA infighting, as opposed to the more chaotic, impulsive set of feuds and implosions that are more commonly on display. In the ultimate conflict between giants that you’ve probably already forgotten about, Donald Trump and Elon Musk declared their friendship to be null and void earlier this year, and the current status of their bromance remains uncertain. Although Musk did recently reappear at a formal White House dinner to celebrate Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (No one in the U.S. government is feuding with bin Salman, despite his reported approval of the brutal execution of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018; some things apparently aren’t serious enough to merit a squabble.)

Meanwhile, one of Donald Trump’s strongest foot-soldiers, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced that she’ll be stepping down in January, after Trump dubbed her a “traitor” and a “lunatic.” Her unforgiveable transgression was that she objected to the administration’s handling of the Epstein files. “Loyalty should be a two-way street,” Greene declared in her resignation announcement. And elsewhere in the Trump administration, the FBI’s deputy director Dan Bongino is also stepping down, having made it clear that he hopes to return to a far more comfortable job as a right-wing talking head attacking the Deep State instead of working for it. Bongino spent much of his tenure feuding with Bondi over the handling of the Epstein files, when he wasn’t complaining about how hard it is to be required to go to an office. 

Bongino and his boss, Kash Patel also found time to feud with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who accused them of trying to ferret out and punish a whistleblower at the FBI. Massie—who has been unusually independent for a GOP member of Congress (which is not saying much, and should not be interpreted as praise, but still)—has said that the whistleblower has been trying to make a disclosure regarding the bureau’s ongoing investigation into pipe bombs that were placed at the Republican and Democratic national headquarters on January 5, 2021. A suspect in the case was arrested on December 4; Massie has made it clear that he believes the FBI arrested the wrong person, tweeting that his FBI source has no confidence that the suspect is “capable or motivated” of having committed the crime. Massie is one of several House Republicans who have baselessly suggested the pipe bombings were an inside job. As evidence, Massie shared a now-retracted story by The Blaze accusing a Capitol Police officer of being the bomber. 

Outside the Trump administration and in the wilds of right-wing influencers, Charlie Kirk’s death has been the catalyst for a brushfire of altercations, far beyond the confines of the one between his widow and Owens. His absence has opened up a power vacuum that other far-right figures have been unsubtly jockeying to fill. Longtime Kirk nemesis Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and vile weirdo, is attempting to expand his own influence, sitting down for a friendly interview in October with Tucker Carlson that immediately incited a broad and ongoing MAGA civil war. After the Heritage Foundation’s President Kevin Roberts defended the interview, the staff and board of the organization revolted; two more board members quit this week. As evidenced in the Shapiro-Carlson smackdown at AmericaFest, the hard feelings over Fuentes’ presence in the movement have not abated.

Needless to say, that’s not all.

In September, Owen Shroyer, one of the top hosts on the conspiracy network Infowars, left the company due to disagreements with founder Alex Jones. Shroyer, who previously served two months in prison on misdemeanor trespassing charges after being on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, said he argued with Jones about whether Shroyer was “too anti-Trump” and “too negative.” But despite the acrimony, Shroyer said he will always respect the Infowars founder.

Jones did not agree, and has been posting wounded tweets for months, accusing Shroyer of just “mailing it in” when he’s not calling him an “evil agent.” Similarly, multiple staff members working for MAGA gossip blogger Jessica Reed Kraus, a.k.a. Houseinhabit, quit earlier this year and have been trading social media barbs with her ever since. (The drama that has frankly been both too boring and convoluted even for me to consider covering, but according to one former staffer named Emilie Hagen, it allegedly involves disagreements over how Kraus covered and befriended disgraced former New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi, who was involved inher own extremely serious public feud recently.)  

The names, allegations, fights, and feuds pile up; alliances shift, re-form, and then immediately collapse. And yet, somehow, MAGA staggers on, laying waste to the American political structure and doing horrifying real-world harm: children have died of cholera in South Sudan after devastating USAID cuts. Whooping cough and measles cases have surged in the United States amidst RFK Jr.’s continued campaign to install his friends and ideological fellow-travelers in positions of power at HHS. The siege on immigrants and Americans of color continues, with ICE and DHS presiding over a viciously, gleefully cruel set of mass deportations and various forms of broad-scale discrimination and psychological torture, with an assist from the Supreme Court. MAGA’s constant infighting is as hilarious as it is pointless—and yet, unlike their friendships, the true and lasting damage this exhausting group of people have wrought shows no signs of ending.