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Trump Floats Nonsense Idea of Privatizing Airports and Dams

by JaimeLockett Posted on April 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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Philip Howard attended Tuesday’s infrastructure confab with President Trump. The Guardian reports on what he told them:

Donald Trump is considering privatising America’s airports and dams as part of an infrastructure building programme that could exceed past estimates of a trillion dollars….“America can do much more than it has, and can do what other countries in Europe and Australia have done, by harnessing private capital,” Howard said. “So it could privatise a number of assets such as airports and dams, and get a lot of capital from that, as well as increase the tax base.”

Hundreds of airports around the world have been privatised or partly privatised but, Howard noted, virtually none in America….Last year the Cato Institute, a conservative thinktank, published a paper that endorsed privatising the nation’s more than 500 commercial airports, which are currently owned by state and local governments and rely on the federal government for capital improvements.

Is Trump really thinking about this? Who knows. But I’m a little mystified. The federal government can’t privatize airports that are owned by states and cities. And even if it could, states and cities would get the money. So what’s the point?

I’d say Trump had four big domestic priorities when he took office:

Repeal Obamacare.
Cut taxes for the rich.
Spend $1 trillion fixing roads and bridges.
Build a wall.

The Obamacare effort has already crashed and burned. His tax plan apparently won’t work with Obamacare in place, so now he’s delaying that to take another run at health care. He doesn’t have anywhere near enough support for his infrastructure plan, which is why he’s desperately scanning the horizon for weird ideas to fund it. And the wall hasn’t gone anywhere yet. It may yet make progress, but even Trump admits it won’t cover anything close to the whole border.

On foreign policy, he’s crashed and burned on his immigration plan; reversed himself on Russia; launched a strike on Syria with no apparent follow-up plan; still has no proposal for defeating ISIS; caved in to China on Taiwan; and has gone soft on trade.

So what has he done? He’s signed a few bills reversing some Obama executive orders, but that’s about over since the easy stuff has an early May deadline. He produced a kinda-sorta budget, which was even deader on arrival than most presidential budgets. He managed to pick a name off a list and nominate him to the Supreme Court, something he apparently considers a helluva hard day’s work. Beyond that, he’s tweeted, convened some “listening sessions,” held a couple of rallies, watched uncounted hours of TV, played lots of golf, and generally developed a reputation as the laziest president in anyone’s memory. Is there anything important I’m missing here?

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Trump Floats Nonsense Idea of Privatizing Airports and Dams

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Trump’s New Executive Order Will Worsen Hunger in Africa

by MinnaCasner9792 Posted on March 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on National Geographic Voices.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump took his most concrete step thus far to unravel his predecessor’s legacy on climate change, with a wide-ranging executive order that dismantles several Obama-era policies to restrict greenhouse gas pollution. The order outraged environmentalists—Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called it “a declaration of war on American leadership on climate change”—but it wasn’t very surprising: It simply followed through on a threat contained in the budget Trump proposed two weeks ago.

“We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget said then, in response to a question about climate change during a press conference. “We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”

That stance could be a big problem for the dozens of farmers I’ve met across sub-Saharan Africa as a journalist reporting on climate change impacts to food security.

Christine Wasike is a maize farmer in Bungoma, an agricultural haven in western Kenya. She works half an acre by hand to produce food for her husband and several young children; if she’s lucky, there is enough left over to sell for cash to pay for school fees, clothes, healthcare, farm equipment, and other necessities.

Like all but a handful of wealthy farmers in Kenya who can afford irrigation systems, she relies exclusively on rainfall to water her crops, and last year, which scientists recently confirmed was the hottest ever recorded, the rains came late and light. As a result, Wasike’s harvest was disappointing, and her income for the season was less than $50, a net loss after covering the cost of seeds and other farm expenses.

“When there is drought farmers suffer a lot,” she says. “There is a lot of hunger, especially with children at home.”

Stories like Wasike’s are increasingly commonplace in sub-Saharan Africa. A majority of people on the continent depend directly on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods, and because they rely almost exclusively on rainfall for water and often can’t afford adaptive technologies, they are among the world’s most vulnerable people to climate change. As a result, they are among those with the most to lose from if Trump reverses Obama’s climate change policies.

As America walks away from its commitment to help slow the global warming that it holds the primary responsibility for creating in the first place, Wasike, her children, and millions of her peers will be much more likely to face a future defined by hunger and poverty.

The main target of Trump’s executive order is the Clean Power Plan, a regulation hammered out during Obama’s second term that imposes limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The regulation, which was Obama’s signature achievement on climate change, aims to slash the carbon footprint of the nation’s power sector by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. But to Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, it was never more than a plot to “kill jobs throughout the country,” as he told ABC News on Sunday. As directed by Tuesday’s order, the EPA will now review all policies that “serve as obstacles or impediments to energy production”—including the Clean Power Plan. At the same time, the Justice Department will back down from defending the Plan against legal attacks.

These policy changes will reverberate far beyond the coal-fired power plants they are meant to protect. That’s because the Clean Power Plan is the domestic regulation underpinning the US commitment to the Paris Agreement, the groundbreaking global climate accord reached in December 2015. Although the agreement, signed by Obama shortly before he left office, contains language that would make it difficult for Trump to formally withdraw within the next few years, his order effectively accomplishes the same thing. Without the Clean Power Plan, America’s participation in the agreement becomes meaningless. And without America, the world’s second-biggest climate polluter after China, the whole agreement goes up in smoke.

As a result, the chance that global temperature rise will stay “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the limit agreed to in Paris, will vanish. That kind of warming will produce a variety of life-threatening effects in the US which, contrary to Mulvaney’s assertion, would cost taxpayers far more—in the form of damage to coastal property, lost agricultural production, increased electrical bills, public health threats, and other costs, according to a recent economic analysis lead by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg—than what they will save by slashing climate programs.

Still, the impact to developing countries—where livelihoods are more often linked directly to the land and where the money is scarce to, for example, build a storm surge barrier or develop a drought-resistant seed—will likely be even more severe. Millions of the world’s most vulnerable people will suffer the consequences of industrial pollution they did not produce. In other words, they will be left to clean up America’s mess.

In Africa, the most severe impacts will be to agriculture and food security. Sub-Saharan Africa already has the world’s least-productive farms: Average yields of staple grains per hectare are only one-quarter of those in the US and Europe, according to the World Bank, due mainly to poor soil quality and lack of access to financing and the latest farming techniques and equipment. Low productivity not only leads to hunger—23 percent of Africans, 220 million people, are chronically undernourished, the world’s highest rate—but also impedes economic growth, since agriculture is the main income source for a majority of people.

Rising temperatures (Africa has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last 50 years, and is expected to continue warming faster than the global average rate) and increasingly erratic rainfall are making the situation worse. An analysis for the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found that prolonged dry spells and high temperatures could reduce yield of staple grains across the continent up to 35 percent by 2050, even as the continent sees its population double.

The consequences will be wide-reaching. Market prices will climb, calorie availability will drop, and national economies will suffer: A recent analysis by the OECD found that reduced agricultural productivity because of climate change could sap up to 4 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP by 2060, the world’s highest rate of loss. Some areas may become unusable for farming or grazing, forcing people to look for new land, which in turn can lead to territorial ethnic conflicts and deforestation. Food and water scarcity can prompt mass migrations, like the one currently underway in the Sahel, and humanitarian crises, like the 20 million people currently in need of emergency food assistance in southern Africa. It can contribute to radicalization and the empowerment of terrorist groups like Boko Haram, which has benefited from destitution caused by the desiccation of Lake Chad.

These impacts will be borne in particular by the rural poor, who often have no “plan B” when the harvest fails, and in particular by women, who typically are responsible for growing crops for food and cash (in addition to other household duties).

Fortunately, in most cases, the solutions needed to make Africa’s farmers and pastoralists more resilient to climate change are nothing very fancy, expensive, or high-tech. People need training on basic techniques to conserve water and improve soil quality; they need access to microloans to afford better seeds, tools, fertilizer, and irrigation; they need secure land rights; they need better roads to take their produce to markets. The fate of programs to promote these solutions now in place at the the US Agency for International Development, now under the purview of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, remains unclear.

What farmers don’t need are unchecked greenhouse gas emissions from the US The specific numbers on projections of crop yields, hunger, poverty, and other factors differ slightly depending on which analysis you read, but one trend is consistent: The hotter the world gets, the worse off Africa’s rural poor will be. And if that doesn’t bother this administration, it should, since economic depression and political instability are ultimately harmful to US business, military, and diplomatic interests in Africa.

Deleting climate change from the EPA’s rulebook and the federal budget won’t make it go away—and it won’t settle our environmental debt to the rest of the world.

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Trump’s New Executive Order Will Worsen Hunger in Africa

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These Elegant Short Stories Are the Perfect Rebuke to Nationalism

by hector1479 Posted on March 25, 2017

Mother Jones

In an era when insular politics have taken hold across the US and parts of Europe, Kanishk Tharoor’s debut short story collection Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is refreshing for its lack of attachment to national borders. Blending together the futuristic and folkloric with contemporary social and political concerns, Tharoor leads readers from a circus-like ethnography of a single woman speaking an endangered language to an eerie Skype call between a coal mine worker and the foreign photojournalist who splashes his image on a magazine.

Much of the collection’s charm probably owes to Tharoor’s own peripatetic adolescence, spent shuttling between Geneva, New York, and Calcutta as the son of Indian statesman Shashi Tharoor. “Even though I’m Indian and I grew up in America, the lineages which my fiction aspires to aren’t just Indian or American,” Tharoor says. “I can find as much pleasure and value reading a Finnish epic.” The result is a style of writing that lifts its references liberally across time and space rather than wrestling with the split of a hyphenated identity: “I was able to grow up in New York City with a sense of myself as an Indian who happened to be living in New York.”

Tharoor is perhaps best known as the presenter of last year’s BBC radio series on the Museum of Lost Objects, which looked at the plunder and destruction of antiquities during the wars in Syria and Iraq. “The past has always felt contemporary and relevant to me,” Tharoor says. His own upbringing sparked a “wider interest in recovering the kinds of connections and moments in history” that are buried. I talked to Tharoor about his upbringing and fiction’s role in the age of nationalist fervor.

Mother Jones: Given the surge of nationalism sweeping through the US and parts of Europe recently, what role do you see for authors in societies seemingly retreating from globalization?

Kanishk Tharoor: I do think it is incumbent upon writers to open their fiction to a wider frame of reference. Americans have always had this luxury of being a “continent of a nation.” A lot of people elsewhere in the world have to be a lot more open to the literature of other places because they’re smaller. America is so big—in every sense—so Americans have always been able to satisfy their cultural needs within the bounds of their own nation. I think what we consider American literature can often be a little bit insular. It would be great if people read more translation, or if American writers took a wider interest in the world beyond the immediate world of their own country’s fiction. At a minimum, we should all be reading more literature from other places: That’s one of the best ways that the walls around us can be knocked down.

MJ: What unites the stories in Swimmer Among the Stars, in your view? Why did you feel they belonged together?

KT: I’m always interested in recovering lost moments that often get suppressed in the larger, dominant narrative. A lot of these stories are about recovering lost objects. Even if one story is set in an apocryphal village in central Asia, and another is set in outer space, there is a thematic interest that links them.

MJ: The “Fall of an Eyelash” looks at refugees. Was the genesis of that story directly linked to the news cycle?

KT: Part of it is actually based on a family friend’s story who fled Iran. When I wrote this story, it was before waves of Syrian refugees entered Europe, and seeing that crisis metastasizing. We live in the greatest era of displacement because of conflict and this short story is certainly interested in the experience of that problem.

MJ: What about the story “Portrait with Coal Fire”?

KT: I was looking at this photo of an Indian miner in deplorable conditions doing horrific work. There’s a great deal of sympathy on the part of the photographer and indeed the readers of the magazine itself. At the same time, it made me think about: Has the man seen this photograph, and what does he think about seeing himself in a magazine like this, if that was even possible? It was almost a thought experiment—to imagine what would it be like to be photographed and try to be represented in a way that you thought was more appropriate.

MJ: With your father Shashi Tharoor publishing more than a dozen books, mostly on the history and politics of India, how much of your own literary journey started at home?

My dad is a writer, but my mom is a professor of English literature as well, so I grew up in a household flooded with books. I’m also a broadcast journalist, which I do alongside my fiction work. Readers of the collection will see there is pretty strong historical interest present. For a while, I considered becoming a historian, but I decided the kind of writing I wanted to do was not academic writing.

MJ: One of your characters is the last speaker of an unnamed language. Are you interested the preservation of rare languages? How many languages do you speak?

KT: I speak maybe six or seven languages imperfectly. I don’t really consider myself much of a polyglot.

The issue of language extinction has always interested me. We live in crazy times in human history in terms of the death of languages. A friend of mine runs the Endangered Language Alliance, Ross Perlin, and he studies languages and endangered languages. He turned me on to the fact that in New York City, where I live, over 800 languages are spoken in the city. There are many languages here, whether they’re from East Africa or southeast Asia or wherever else, which are no longer spoken in the places where they came from, but survive here in dying form amongst immigrant communities. As people who read, write, think, and dream in English, it is incumbent upon us to be aware of the damages or the losses incurred by these languages.

MJ: One of your short stories hints at the danger of climate change. How do you see an author’s duty, if there is one, to engage with political or environmental struggles?

KT: Fiction, I think, can make people think about issues, can spark imaginations, can open doors, can take people out of their own frame of reference. All those things are good. That’s what I would like to do with my fiction. I don’t know how much I would like to serve an advocacy function. If there is a story that touches on climate change, I think the message is embedded in the conceit of the story.

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These Elegant Short Stories Are the Perfect Rebuke to Nationalism

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The FDA Has Revolutionized Drug Approvals Over the Past Decade

by roslynblanchard Posted on March 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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I was reading something yesterday about President Trump’s desire to speed up FDA approvals for new drugs, so I decided to check: how long does FDA approval take these days? Here are the numbers over the past decade:

I’ve used a 3-year rolling average to smooth out the spikes, but the trend is pretty obvious. In the past ten years, the time to approve new drugs has been cut in half and the approval rate has tripled. Note that this is only for “standard” drugs, not “priority” drugs, so it’s not contaminated by special treatment given for certain lifesaving compounds.

I’m sympathetic to arguments that our narrow escape from the thalidomide disaster traumatized FDA scientists, and they overreacted by making approvals too hard. The problem is that the lesson of thalidomide approval in Europe isn’t that approvals were done too quickly, it’s that approvals shouldn’t be based on handwaving from pharmaceutical companies. As long as the testing regimen is rigorous enough, there’s no reason that approvals shouldn’t be done in a timely way.

That said, how much faster does Trump want approvals to go? A recent study suggests that the average FDA approval time is now considerably faster than Europe’s, and that “the vast majority” of new drugs were first approved for use in the United States:

If anything, the FDA may have become too aggressive. They’ve made some far-reaching reforms in only a decade. Ten years from now, the chart to look at will be a comparison of drug catastrophes before and after this change.1

1I don’t mean this in a snarky way. There’s no cosmic “right answer” for how fast new drugs should be approved. It’s all a matter of how much risk we’re willing to take vs. how long we’re willing to delay potentially effective therapies. A decade from now, we’ll need to look back and see just how much extra risk, if any, the FDA has introduced into the system.

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The FDA Has Revolutionized Drug Approvals Over the Past Decade

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This young girl just wants to know if Congressman Jason Chaffetz believes in science.

by MargartHanran0 Posted on February 10, 2017

The industry is growing so fast it could become the largest source of renewable energy on both sides of the Atlantic.

In America, wind power won the top spot for installed generating capacity (putting it ahead of hydroelectric power), according to a new industry report. And in the E.U., wind capacity grew by 8 percent last year, surpassing coal. That puts wind second only to natural gas across the pond.

In the next three years, wind could account for 10 percent of American electricity, Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said in a press release. The industry already employs over 100,000 Americans.

In Europe, wind has hit the 10.4 percent mark, and employs more than 300,000 people, according to an association for wind energy in Europe. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, and Lithuania lead the way for European wind growth. In the U.S., Texas is the windy frontier.

“Low-cost, homegrown wind energy,” Kiernan added in the release, “is something we can all agree on.”

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This young girl just wants to know if Congressman Jason Chaffetz believes in science.

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Wind power is beating the pants off of other renewables.

by GladisAtkins1 Posted on February 9, 2017

The industry is growing so fast it could become the largest source of renewable energy on both sides of the Atlantic.

In America, wind power won the top spot for installed generating capacity (putting it ahead of hydroelectric power), according to a new industry report. And in the E.U., wind capacity grew by 8 percent last year, surpassing coal. That puts wind second only to natural gas across the pond.

In the next three years, wind could account for 10 percent of American electricity, Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said in a press release. The industry already employs over 100,000 Americans.

In Europe, wind has hit the 10.4 percent mark, and employs more than 300,000 people, according to an association for wind energy in Europe. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, and Lithuania lead the way for European wind growth. In the U.S., Texas is the windy frontier.

“Low-cost, homegrown wind energy,” Kiernan added in the release, “is something we can all agree on.”

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Wind power is beating the pants off of other renewables.

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Will Bill Nye’s Netflix show actually save the world? I mean, we’ll take anything right now.

by FionaCosta Posted on February 9, 2017

The industry is growing so fast it could become the largest source of renewable energy on both sides of the Atlantic.

In America, wind power won the top spot for installed generating capacity (putting it ahead of hydroelectric power), according to a new industry report. And in the E.U., wind capacity grew by 8 percent last year, surpassing coal. That puts wind second only to natural gas across the pond.

In the next three years, wind could account for 10 percent of American electricity, Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said in a press release. The industry already employs over 100,000 Americans.

In Europe, wind has hit the 10.4 percent mark, and employs more than 300,000 people, according to an association for wind energy in Europe. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, and Lithuania lead the way for European wind growth. In the U.S., Texas is the windy frontier.

“Low-cost, homegrown wind energy,” Kiernan added in the release, “is something we can all agree on.”

Excerpt from: 

Will Bill Nye’s Netflix show actually save the world? I mean, we’ll take anything right now.

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The Trump administration just hinted at approving controversial pipelines.

by FerminEverard Posted on January 23, 2017

That’s according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You’re probably used to hearing about how denser cities cut transportation emissions, thanks to reduced driving. This study looks at a different impact: how density affects greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.

The researchers projected emissions from buildings under different potential urban densities between now and 2050. They found that denser development patterns lead to lower emissions because people live and work in smaller units that consume less energy. Attached buildings are also more efficient for heating and cooling.

So the PNAS study finds that greater density has the potential to substantially reduce building emissions, more so than other efforts to improve energy efficiency like better weather-proofing.

Unfortunately, global trends are moving in the wrong direction. Cities around the world are growing, but at the same time, urban density is decreasing, as cars enable cities and their suburbs to sprawl outwards.

Governments can adopt policies to make their cities and towns denser, and they’ll need to — not just in the relatively sprawling cities of North America and Europe, but in the fast-growing cities of Asia and the rest of the developing world.

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The Trump administration just hinted at approving controversial pipelines.

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It’s happening: Climate change starts disappearing from government websites.

by KelleePulido Posted on January 20, 2017

That’s according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You’re probably used to hearing about how denser cities cut transportation emissions, thanks to reduced driving. This study looks at a different impact: how density affects greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.

The researchers projected emissions from buildings under different potential urban densities between now and 2050. They found that denser development patterns lead to lower emissions because people live and work in smaller units that consume less energy. Attached buildings are also more efficient for heating and cooling.

So the PNAS study finds that greater density has the potential to substantially reduce building emissions, more so than other efforts to improve energy efficiency like better weather-proofing.

Unfortunately, global trends are moving in the wrong direction. Cities around the world are growing, but at the same time, urban density is decreasing, as cars enable cities and their suburbs to sprawl outwards.

Governments can adopt policies to make their cities and towns denser, and they’ll need to — not just in the relatively sprawling cities of North America and Europe, but in the fast-growing cities of Asia and the rest of the developing world.

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It’s happening: Climate change starts disappearing from government websites.

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A Terrifying Superbug Just Showed Up on a US Farm for the First Time

by SharylDellinger Posted on December 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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More than 70 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the United States go to livestock farms, one of the main triggers driving a rising crisis of antibiotic resistance in human medicine.

On Tuesday, researchers from Ohio State University published an alarming finding in a peer-reviewed journal: On a US hog farm, they found bacteria that can withstand a crucial family of antibiotics. Carbapenems, as they are known, are a “last line of defense” against bacterial pathogens that can resist other antibiotics, the paper notes. Worse still, the gene that allowed the bacteria to resist carbapenems turned up in a plasmid—small chunks of DNA found in bacterial cells. Plasmid-carried genes bounce easily from one bacterial strain to another, meaning that carbapenem resistance is highly mobile—making it more likely to find its way into bacterial pathogens that infect people.

If this news sounds depressingly familiar, it’s because something very similar happened with another last-ditch antibiotic, colostin. About a year ago, Chinese researchers alarmed global public health authorities when they found a “plasmid-mediated” strain of colistin-resistant E. coli on a Chinese hog farm. As predicted, it quickly went global, and it turned up in the United States in a patient in May, as well as in a pig intestine identified by US Department of Agriculture researchers. In September, Rutgers and Columbia University researchers found a strain of E. coli with plasmid-carried resistance to colostin and carbapenems. The new Ohio State study marks the first time plasmid-borne carbapenem resistance has been found on a US farm, though it has turned up in livestock operations in Asia and Europe, the researchers write.

To see whether carbapenem resistance is taking hold on US hog farms, the researchers settled on a 1,500-sow confined operation that follows “typical US production practices,” which include giving newborn pigs a dose of an antibiotic called ceftiofur at birth, with the males getting a second dose when they’re castrated at six days. Interestingly, carbapenems are banned from use in US farms. But ceftiofur is a member of the cephalosporin family of antibiotics, which kills bacteria in a similar way to carbapenems, and the authors speculate that those ceftiofur doses “may provide significant selection pressure” for the emergence of carbapenem resistance. They found it in swabs taken from the the surfaces of the farrowing and nursery pens.

Interestingly, the pigs don’t get ceftiofur after those initial doses at birth, except to treat sickness. And at later stages of the pig-raising process, such as the finishing barns where pigs are fattened to slaughter weight, no carbapenem-resistant bacteria turned up. That’s likely because the absence of ceftiofur “likely removed antimicrobial selection pressure” for the resistant gene, causing it to lose its niche. That absence of carbapenem-resistant bacteria in the late-stage pigs is good news—it means the superbug is “unlikely to have entered the food supply through contamination of fresh pork products.”

But given how quickly the gene can jump from one bacterial strain to another, the study identified a ticking time bomb. Cephalosporins, the class of antibiotics that may have triggered the carbapenem-resistant bacteria on this particular farm, aren’t administered nearly as much as other antibiotics on US farms, but alarmingly their use jumped 57 percent between 2009 and 2014, according to the latest Food and Drug Administration numbers. And the Ohio State study settled on one typical US hog operation. Who knows what’s going on with the 21,000-plus others.

Over on the Natural Resources Defense Council blog, antibiotic-resistance expert David Wallinga notes that the bacteria that turned up in the Ohio State study is carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, “one of the nastier superbugs.” He continues:

Infections with these germs are very difficult to treat, and can be deadly—the death rate from patients with CRE bloodstream infections is up to 50 percent. The CDC says these bacteria already cause 9,300 infections, and 600 deaths each year. To date, CRE infections occur mostly among patients in hospitals and nursing homes; people on breathing machines, or with tubing inserted into their veins or bladders are at higher risk, as are people taking long courses of certain antibiotics. But newer, more resistant kinds of CRE seem to be causing more problems outside hospitals, in communities and among healthier people.

Way back in 2012, the Obama administration introduced a new set of guidelines—that will finally go into full effect on January 1—designed to preserve antibiotics as a bulwark against dangerous infections by curbing their use on farms. As I show here, meat farms use about three times as much of these vital drugs as does human medicine. Yet the Obama guidelines are both voluntary and contain a huge loophole, which I tease out here. And now, even as terrifying superbugs continue appearing in the United States, we have a new president whose agriculture advisers have expressed nothing but hostility toward regulating food production.

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A Terrifying Superbug Just Showed Up on a US Farm for the First Time

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