Phil Goff asked if Trump "understands history" as he contrasted him with Sir Winston Churchill.

At AGU’s Annual Meeting 2024, activist Sharon Lavigne spoke about living in Louisiana, in what is commonly known as “Cancer Alley.” The 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River is home to more than 200 industrial facilities, including the Denka Performance Elastomer plant, which uses chloroprene to manufacture synthetic rubber for products such as automotive parts, adhesives, and construction materials.

The U.S. EPA and the Justice Department sued Denka in 2023, requiring that the company “immediately reduce its chloroprene emissions to levels that no longer cause or contribute to unacceptably high cancer risks within the communities surrounding the Facility.”

As reported in the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Trump administration now plans to drop the lawsuit.

The EPA classifies chloroprene as a “likely carcinogen,” which indicates there is strong evidence it causes cancer in humans. Exposure to the chemical is also known to affect the nervous, cardiac, respiratory, and gastrointestinal systems.

Lavigne, the founder of the environmental justice grassroots organization RISE St. James, spoke about friends and family members with cancer and community members facing a range of other health problems.

“Women become pregnant, they have miscarriages,” she said. “Children [who] go outside to play, will come back in the house with rashes. They have a lot of respiratory problems.”

According to the EPA lawsuit, air quality monitors near the Denka facility measured average chloroprene concentrations up to 14 times higher than the limit for what a person may safely breathe over the course of a 70-year lifetime.

Most communities in the area are predominately Black. A 2019 ProPublica analysis found that the air quality problems were especially acute in predominantly Black and low-income communities. A 2022 complaint filed by the EPA to Louisiana state regulators also alleged that Black communitas faced disproportionate impacts.

“This is a massive injustice,” Lavigne said in her AGU24 keynote. “How would you like it if your community was called ‘Cancer Alley?’”

—Emily Dieckman (@emfurd.bsky.social) , Associate Editor

This news article is included in Eos’s collection of Research and Development updates.

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The initiative helped pressure the Chinese government to clean up the air in Beijing and was later expanded to dozens of cities around the world. Now, it’s been abruptly halted.

Trump named five cryptocurrencies he wanted in a potential national reserve so the US could become "the Crypto Capital of the World".

Just days after anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the country's top health official, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already pulled back some of its efforts to protect Americans with safe, lifesaving vaccines. The agency has indefinitely postponed a public meeting of its vaccine advisory committee and killed a campaign promoting seasonal flu shots.

Last weekend, a Washington Post columnist noted on Bluesky that the CDC's effective "Wild to Mild" seasonal flu shot campaign had vanished. The campaign highlighted how the seasonal vaccines can prevent influenza infections from becoming severe or life-threatening. It used animals as an analogy for the diminished threat of the flu virus after vaccination, juxtaposing a lion and a domestic kitten in one ad while showing an elephant and a mouse in another. The CDC page no longer leads to a "not found" landing page, but it wasn't restored either. It now redirects to a 2023 article announcing the campaign, which does not contain the shareable resources found on the original page. The removal is startling given that the US is currently battling one of the worst flu seasons in 15 years.

NPR first reported that CDC staff were told in a meeting Wednesday, February 19, the campaign was halted. In a story Thursday, Stat News added more context to the decision. According to the outlet's sources, the Department of Health and Human Services’ assistant secretary for public affairs informed the CDC that Kennedy wanted vaccine advertisements to emphasize "informed consent" instead.

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Trump confidant and tech billionaire Elon Musk openly supports the German far-right AfD party and continues to spread false and misleading claims about elections on his platform X.