February 2022 Public Policy News

Photo by Mihály Köles

Here’s the best of what we’ve read over the last two months.

“The effects on research, too, have been dramatic, with scientists at numerous academic medical centers working to understand what long COVID is, how to measure it and how best to treat or manage it.”
— COVID Long Haulers Are Calling Attention to Chronic Illnesses (Scientific American)

“The ship channel’s transformation into a true hellscape, he said, is yet to come. ‘Throw a real hurricane at this and it’ll be the largest environmental disaster in US history,’ he said. Blackburn, who teaches at Rice University, has been prophesying this calamity for more than a decade. What might have seemed a grim fantasy a few years ago looks increasingly likely with each storm that rakes across the industrial corridors of Texas and Louisiana.”
— Gathering Storm: The Industrial Infrastructure Catastrophe Looming Over America’s Gulf Coast (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

“We now have the opportunity with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law last November, to redesign urban landscapes across the country just as Moses did in New York, but this time moving away from facilitating privately owned vehicles and toward hyperdense mixed-use, mixed-income, transit-accessible communities.”
— The Opportunity to Create the Hyperdense Cities We Need (Governing)

“The clean-energy public relations campaign is the newest threat to the Nez Perce, who for generations have watched fish populations decline and pollution rise. Mining interests drove them out of their homelands and fouled their rivers and ancestral hunting grounds. For a community trying to preserve its culture and kinship with the territory, an effort that has involved millions of dollars invested in restoring fish stocks, the proposed mine represents another existential threat.”
— As Miners Chase Clean-Energy Minerals, Tribes Fear a Repeat of the Past (The New York Times)

“Without getting cities right, we cannot solve the climate crisis. Contributing to 75% of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, it is impossible to overstate their central role. Cities’ choices influence and can drive change in every system that needs to be decarbonized and made resilient, from transport to food to energy. As the 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted, cities — with their concentration of people, economic activity and infrastructure — are among the most powerful levers we have to drive decarbonization and build resilience fast enough to meet the Paris goals.”
— 5 Priorities for Cities After COP26 (World Resources Institute)

“Ford’s F-series trucks make up the best-selling vehicle line in the U.S. Can its new F-150 Lightning compete with Tesla in the E.V. market?”
— America’s Favorite Pickup Truck Goes Electric (The New Yorker)