This morning, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders—Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, and Ismail Haniyeh—for alleged war crimes. 

If a panel of three ICC judges approve the warrants, Netanyhau and Gallant could face charges for crimes against humanity, including the starvation of civilians. The Hamas leaders could face charges including murder, taking hostages, and torture, related to actions during and following the October 7th attacks that resulted in the deaths of approximately 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of more than 250 hostages, including some Americans. 

Israel, Hamas, and the United States all condemned the news. President Biden called the announcement “outrageous.” Netanyahu said that in seeking the warrants, Khan had created a “twisted and false moral equivalence between the leaders of Israel and the henchmen of Hamas” and that the ICC was denying Israel’s right to self-defense. Hamas said in a statement the ICC announcement “equates the victim with the executioner.” 

Khan refuted the idea that anyone was being unfairly targeted, telling CNN in an exclusive interview announcing the news that “this is not a witch hunt.” 

“Nobody is above the law,” Khan added. “No people…have a get out of jail free card, have a free pass to say, ‘well the law doesn’t apply to us.’”

“This is not a witch hunt”: International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor @KarimKhanQC appointed an independent panel of international legal experts to review the arrest warrant process. pic.twitter.com/ch2bZ5qa5U

— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) May 20, 2024

This afternoon, I called up David Bosco, executive associate dean and professor in the Department of International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, to better understand the significance and ramifications of the news from the ICC. Bosco is the author of Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics, and he has written about the relationship of the ICC to Israel and Palestine. We spoke about the meaning, and limits, of today’s announcement. 

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited. 

I think when most people hear “arrest warrant,” they assume imminent prosecution. But that’s not quite the case here—can you explain what is actually happening right now? 

The first important point is that all that’s happened right now is that the prosecutor has requested there be arrest warrants. Those have to be approved by a three-judge panel at the ICC. There’s no arrest warrant issued until those judges decide. And that’s a process that could take anywhere from a couple of weeks, to maybe even a couple of months.

And then if we do get arrest warrants—the ICC has no police force, no SWAT team that can go in and arrest people. So long as [the] people [prosecuted] are in Palestine or in Israel, it’s very unlikely that they would appear at the Hague. 

Can you say more about the significance of this decision and what might have motivated the ICC prosecutor to make this announcement?

I think the prosecutor really realizes how controversial charges—particularly the charges against Israeli leaders—are going to be, and is trying to provide as much support, and indicate that it’s kind of not just his decision. So at the same time that he released his statement, there was almost an amicus brief from a group of international law experts supporting the prosecutor’s decision. That’s also something unusual; the prosecutor doesn’t usually have an expert panel backing him up on his decisions. 

So what tangible impacts, if any, will these warrants have on the leaders’ daily lives?

I think it’s going to vary. For the leaders of Hamas, I don’t think there will be much impact, because either these people are in Gaza or some of them are traveling to other parts of the region, but not to countries that are ICC members.

Now for Netanyahu and Minister Gallant, it would be a different situation, because these are people who would hope to travel widely in representing Israel. If an arrest warrant ultimately is issued, that means that Netanyahu and Gallant would have to be very careful about where they travel, and traveling to an ICC member state will put them in significant risk, because ICC member states have a legal obligation to detain somebody who’s been charged by the court.

I saw the Israeli Foreign Minister has said he’s going to urge other foreign ministers not to comply with the warrants if they are issued. Is it likely that Israel could successfully exert pressure on ICC member states not to enforce this, or do you think the pressure of being a member state would compel relevant countries to comply? 

We’ve already seen the United Kingdom—and I expect we’ll see more ICC member states—expressing opposition to this move. But there’s a big difference between saying, “we think the prosecutor got it wrong here,” and saying, “if an arrest warrant comes out, we’re not going to obey it.” That would be a much bigger step, and it would be very hard for many of these countries to take that step, because then you are really kind of breaching your obligations to the ICC. And many of the European countries were among the most supportive of creating the ICC, so I think that would be a very hard step for them. 

Can you also provide a little background context on how it is that both the US and Israel are not member states of the ICC? Historically, why did that happen?

US policy is actually quite responsible for the creation of the ICC in a lot of ways. The US was the biggest supporter of the Nuremberg trials, it was the biggest supporter of the Yugoslav war trials, and the Rwanda Tribunal. And those things were ultimately what led to the creation of the ICC. So I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you wouldn’t have the ICC in historical terms if it hadn’t been for US policy and US advocacy of international justice. 

But the US has always had this kind of dual personality, where it really likes international law in some respects, but gets very nervous about accepting the jurisdiction of an international court. So the US balked back in the 1990s, when the ICC was being negotiated, and decided they did not want to ultimately be a part of the court once it became clear they weren’t going to have control of the court’s docket. 

The US is just not comfortable with the court exercising jurisdiction over Americans, and Israel has felt very much the same way. 

Both sides have alleged that it’s unfair for their leaders to be the subject of possible arrest warrants. From a symbolic perspective, is the ICC equating the leaders of Israel with the leaders of Hamas? What kind of signal is the ICC trying to send here? 

I think what the ICC would say is, “we’re not in the business of setting up equivalencies.” There are moral and historical questions that weigh on how you see Hamas compared to how you see the government of Israel. And I think what the ICC would say is: That’s not our job; our job is to simply assess whether there are individuals who have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity—saying that Netanyahu may have committed war crimes is not the same thing as saying that Netanyahu is the same as the leader of Hamas. But inevitably, in the public discourse, people tend to say: “Whoa, the ICC is treating them all the same.”

If you think about World War II, for example, the Nuremberg trials, of course, focused on the crimes of Nazi Germany. But there were undoubtedly war crimes committed by the US and by the British during World War II. It so happened that the Nuremberg trials were set up so they could only consider the crimes of the Axis powers, but it’s probably not inaccurate to say that Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman committed war crimes. That doesn’t mean that they’re equivalent to Nazi leaders. So I think the ICC would say: That’s a judgment for historians, and ethicists and things—that’s not our job. Our job is to simply decide if there were crimes committed and investigate and prosecute those.

Israeli officials have continually tried to justify the strength of their response and the conditions in Gaza by saying they’re acting in self-defense. Do the charges that the Israeli leaders could face if these warrants are issued negate that argument? 

No. Because basically in international law, there’s a divide between what’s referred to as jus ad bellum—that’s Latin for the right to use force. And how you use force, jus in bello. And those two are considered to be separate. So you can say that Israel was justified in using force in Gaza as a matter of self-defense. And that might be right from a legal perspective, when it comes to the right to use force. But that is a totally separate question from the question of what you do during the conduct of hostilities. And the same standards are supposed to apply to countries whether they are the aggressor or whether they’re the one defending. So whether they are just in their war or unjust they’re going to be subject to the same rules about how you use force.

You can’t just say: We’re acting in self-defense and therefore the rules don’t apply to us. 

You can’t just say: We’re acting in self-defense and therefore the rules don’t apply to us. 

Now, there are a bunch of really hard questions that prosecutors—if this ever reaches trial—are going to have to show, like, for example, “how much humanitarian aid are you obliged to let in during a conflict?” These are complicated questions where you’re balancing the military necessity versus the humanitarian impact.

But the short answer is: no, the fact that Israel might be acting in self-defense doesn’t absolve it from legal scrutiny. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that this could jeopardize ongoing efforts to reach a ceasefire deal. What’s your response to that, do you agree?

He’s pointing to a dilemma that has often been identified around international criminal justice, which is that there may be simultaneously the need to try to develop a pathway out of the conflict at a diplomatic level while there is a need to try to pursue justice and investigate crimes. 

It’s hard to judge how accurate that is. There is a mechanism for trying to get out of that dilemma, if you really think it is a dilemma. The UN Security Council actually has the power to freeze an ICC investigation, because I think that people drafting the ICC statute didn’t realize that there might be a situation where we need to prioritize diplomacy over an investigation.

Just so I understand, is the thought that Israeli leaders would be unwilling to travel to neutral ground because they’re worried about the threat of arrest? How would the arrest warrant practically impact their decision about whether or not to engage in diplomacy?

That’s a very good question, and I don’t think it’s very clear. I think if there were to be negotiations, it would be in a place like Egypt or, you know, somewhere that’s not an ICC member state. So it really wouldn’t be an issue in terms of exposure to arrests—so I don’t think that’s the issue. 

I think it’s more that the kind of outrage, honestly, that Israeli officials might feel, having been targeted in this way, that would make them less willing to engage in a diplomatic [manner]. But I don’t know that that’s right. I’m skeptical that that argument is necessarily the case here, that the justice process is necessarily getting in the way of diplomacy. And Israel, certainly, and the US, have an incentive to kind of exaggerate, I would say, that possibility. 

How do you think this—the issuing of the warrants for Israeli leaders, and the US’s strong condemnations of it—impacts the perception of the US, considering that one of this country’s closest allies is being pursued by the ICC alongside the group responsible for carrying out the Oct. 7 attacks and Vladimir Putin, who was charged by the ICC for his role in the war in Ukraine? 

I think the perception of the US on these issues is that the US engages in double standards when it comes to international justice. I think that perception is pretty baked into the view of the US, particularly on these issues, so I don’t think the fact that some US officials were very positive about the charges against Putin are now outraged by the charges against Israeli officials [is surprising]. I think that’ll just kind of reinforce and confirm that sense that ultimately, it all comes down to politics.

At this point, the ICC news is largely symbolic—there won’t be any imminent arrests or prosecutions—and the International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa alleging Israel is committing genocide in Gaza will take years to play out. So what purpose would you say these international institutions have when they can’t take any imminent action to address the humanitarian crisis that’s unfolding as we speak? Is there any reason for people who are concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to actually put faith in these institutions? 

The short answer is I don’t think people should have a lot of faith in the ability of international judicial institutions to deal with a situation like this, or to really meaningfully impact a situation like this. Just like when we saw the arrest warrants against Putin and other Russian officials—within a few weeks, those were pretty much forgotten, and the war has continued, and there’s no sign it’s made any difference. So that is the reality: often times international law and international judicial institutions are going to have very little impact on these ongoing crises. 

That’s not the same as saying they’re irrelevant. Because we have to also think about the very long-term, gradual impact on norms of behavior in the international system. And you have to think about what incentives are being created for other national leaders down the road. And that is hard to judge, but international law may not be as meaningless as it sometimes seems in the midst of a crisis like this. 

The ICC is a very new creation. The idea that in the midst of an ongoing conflict, you’re having charges brought against officials for that conflict—this is a very new experiment. So that’s why, I think, we have to be careful about saying, “well, it’s not having an immediate impact, and therefore it’s irrelevant.” The international legal system is in a very gradual development toward what we hope, ultimately, will be a well-functioning system, that is really now a kind of embryonic system.  

The way to be somewhat optimistic about it is the question is not: “Are these moves by the ICC going to change the Gaza conflict?” It is: “Are we making one step in the process that 20, 25 years down the road is really going to be impacting the way that leaders think?”

Do you have an answer to that question at this point? 

I think it’s really kind of up in the air. I don’t think we know how this experiment is going to play out. 

One reason Donald Trump’s trial this month is so notable is that it is actually happening. As recently as last summer, it appeared that Trump would face four criminal trials ahead of the 2024 elections: two in state court and two in federal court. Today, it looks like the New York state hush money case will be the only one to reach a jury before November, and possibly ever. There is plenty of blame to go around for the delays. But one person who deserves a lot of that blame—or credit—is Trump himself. 

As the press and voters debate whether Trump’s authoritarian tendencies could be checked in a prospective second term, it’s important to recognize that Trump is already escaping accountability thanks to the judges he installed during his first term, who have pushed off both federal cases against him.

During his presidency, courts acted as a major check on Trump—most importantly when he and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits across the country to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election. When those legal efforts failed, Trump turned to extralegal means to stay in power, culminating in a violent attack on the US Capitol.

Now, the judges Trump put in place are helping him evade responsibility for these and other actions. At the Supreme Court, they are even contemplating granting new levels of immunity to presidents that Trump could enjoy if he returns to power. It’s not only a gauge of how much damage Trump has already done, but a warning sign of the lengths the people he surrounds himself with are willing to go and how it will be nearly impossible to contain his strongman ambitions if he wins again.

Last summer, Special Counsel Jack Smith secured two indictments against Trump. The first targeted his willful retention of top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago after his presidency. Trump refused to give back all the records, then engaged in an attempted cover-up, first to hinder their return and ultimately to thwart prosecution.

The facts of the case are shocking, including classified documents left in a bathroom and an order to delete security camera footage sought by a grand jury. Legally, the case is “absolutely airtight,” Georgia State University constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kries told the BBC. As NYU professor Melissa Murray and former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman write in their book, The Trump Indictments, in the documents case against Trump, “the evidence of guilt seems abundantly clear.”

And yet Trump has evaded trial in the strongest case against him due exclusively to the judge overseeing the case. For two years now, federal Judge Aileen Cannon has repeatedly shocked the legal community with unprecedented orders that have flouted the law, delayed proceedings, and protected Trump. The ex-president was lucky that Cannon got assigned this case—but he also helped make his own luck by putting her on the bench. When Trump nominated Cannon in 2020, her signature qualifications were her youth (she was 39) and membership in the conservative Federalist Society. After Trump lost the election, she was confirmed in a vote that garnered support from 12 Democrats.

Cannon first came to Trump’s rescue in 2022, when his lawyers went to federal court to try to halt the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s handling of purloined classified documents. Cannon obliged in spectacular fashion by blocking part of the probe. It was, according to Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, the first time in US history that a judge had intervened to stop a criminal investigation before an indictment. Her actions were so lawless that they were soon rolled back by two separate panels of the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that Cannon had pushed “a radical reordering of our caselaw” that violated “bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”

Some judges might have been chastened by this humiliation—but not Cannon. After the investigation, when Trump was charged and the documents case formally assigned to Cannon, it was clear prosecutors had drawn the short straw—and that Trump would never face trial, or at least a fair one, under her watch. Over the past year, Cannon has continued to issue bizarre orders, held hearings on inane questions, and engaged in every manner of delay. And she shows no signs of stopping. This month, she pushed the trial off indefinitely while scheduling hearings on motions filed by Trump’s legal team that, according to experts, should be dispatched with quickly. Cannon has turned her federal courtroom into a kangaroo court.

In August of 2022, Smith filed his second indictment against Trump, this one over attempting to overturn his election loss. The case was assigned to federal Judge Tanya Chutkan in DC, an Obama appointee. By limiting the charges to Trump, Murray and Weissman write, “the indictment was built for speed—to get a trial date so that the American public could see the evidence and hear the jury’s conclusions.” Chutkan recognized, with the election looming, it was important to move expeditiously. But in his attempts to delay, Trump found even more powerful allies than a district court judge—several justices of the US Supreme Court.

Were it not for the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Trump, the ex-president would almost certainly be standing trial for his attempt to overturn American democracy and stay in power. Instead, the federal election subversion case has been turned on its head. Rather than usher along efforts to hold Trump accountable, the US Supreme Court is likely to use the case to grant Trump and future presidents some level of immunity. That would not only make Trump’s lawless power grab harder to prosecute, but future presidents’ illegal actions as well.

Even if the GOP-appointed majority doesn’t declare a new level of immunity for Trump and other former presidents as expected, their delays will spare Trump from trial until after the election: the justices have three times come to Trump’s aid by pushing back the case. The delay aids Trump’s campaign. If he wins, he will never face federal trial, either because he pardons himself, or simply directs his appointees at the DOJ to drop the charges.

Trump sought to delay and even derail the prosecution by claiming that ex-presidents enjoy absolute immunity for official acts made while in office—a bold assertion with no basis in the Constitution or precedent in the law. Chutkan smacked it down. When Trump sought review in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to immediately take the case and leap-frog the appellate court. In their first move delaying the trial, the justices declined to step in.

After the appeals court rebuked Trump’s theory of immunity, Smith again asked the justices for help, as he urged the court to let the appellate ruling stand, or, failing that, to hear the case expeditiously. Instead, the justices took the case without any sense of urgency. Chutkan’s original March 4 trial date came and went. The justices heard the case on the last day of their term. After oral arguments, it appeared likely that the justices would wait until June to issue a ruling. When it comes, it will likely give some level of immunity to Trump, a complication that will mean the case cannot immediately proceed to trial.

There’s no way to know for sure which justices voted against taking the case when Smith first asked, which declined to let the DC Circuit decision stand, or which dragged their feet and kept the case moving slowly. But judging from oral arguments, it seems clear that the Trump-appointed justices, as well as those appointed by other Republican presidents, played a critical role.

The hearing offered evidence of the Trump appointees’ willingness to not only delay Trump’s trial, but also to make prosecuting a former president much harder. Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch both expressed interest in limiting the possibility to varying degrees. While Amy Coney Barrett was much more skeptical of Trump’s immunity claims, she displayed interest in a compromise that would create new immunities nonetheless. By the end, the GOP-appointed justices had defended Trump’s immunity claims so robustly that Trump’s own lawyer declined to use his rebuttal time. “I have nothing further,” he triumphantly told the court when it was his turn to speak. 

There are plenty of people responsible for the fact that Trump will face voters again without having gone under trial for attempting to overturn the last election. You could include Attorney General Merrick Garland, who let the DOJ’s investigations drag on before appointing Smith, and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose sprawling Georgia-based conspiracy case took years to put together and now may be permanently derailed over her affair with one of the prosecutors. 

But the person most responsible for escaping criminal prosecution is Trump himself, who, in four years as president, left his mark on the nation’s courts. Rather than a fluke, it might be a preview of how he can escape accountability if he becomes president again.

This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and Mother Jones.

In early April, Sarah Moore got the news she was dreading: Her husband, Dennis Jackson Moore, had been denied parole again. It was his fourth rejection in as many years. 

Dennis, who goes by Vega, is 45. He has spent more than half his life in prison in Virginia for a murder and armed robbery he committed as a teenager. At the time, his defense argued that he did not fully understand the charges against him and had been misled by a detective when he gave a recorded confession. Vega was tried in adult court. Prosecutors called him a “cunning seventeen and three-quarters-year-old who committed a violent and senseless act.” At age 18, the jury found Vega guilty and a judge sentenced him to 53 years in prison. 

Up until four years ago, Vega, like most people in Virginia prisons, was not eligible for parole. But in 2020 state lawmakers extended the possibility of early release to Vega and hundreds of others who carried out crimes as juveniles and have served at least 20 years of their sentence. “We are a nation of second chances,” Senator David W. Marsden, a Democrat who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said at the time, “and those who are incarcerated for long periods of time when they are juveniles are especially deserving of that look.”

Vega’s 38-page application packet to the parole board makes the case that he is no longer a “misguided seventeen-year-old who made extremely reckless and thoughtless decisions.” He says he has spent more than two decades behind bars working to better himself—getting his GED, teaching himself multiple languages, studying real estate, marrying Sarah, and learning to care for her two daughters and son from afar. Vega says he’s become a rehabilitated and remorseful man worthy of an opportunity to rejoin society. If he ever gets out, he wants to help at-risk youth avoid incarceration. “I’ve grown up in prison,” he writes, “but I will not make prison my life.”  

After repeated denials from the parole board, Sarah says any second chance for her husband only seems good on paper. Like in previous decisions, the parole board’s most recent denial delivered in late March stated that releasing Vega would diminish the seriousness of his crime and he should serve more time. “We’re just so frustrated,” Sarah said after his latest rejection. She’s left wondering: “What more does he have to do?” 

For Vega and others eligible for parole in Virginia, the odds of being released have gone from slim to nearly impossible in recent years under new GOP leadership, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis of monthly parole board decisions. 

Under past Democratic administrations, Virginia already had one of the harshest parole systems in the nation, with single-digit annual approval rates. But parole grants have declined even further since Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin began to overhaul the parole board in 2022, dipping to an approval rate of just 1.6 percent in 2023. So far this year, Youngkin’s parole board has approved only eight of the 628 applications it considered, a grant rate of 1.3 percent, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis. 

In March, the month Vega was denied for a fourth time, the board approved only 2 out of the 117 cases it considered. 

As chances for parole decline across the country, experts say the Commonwealth stands out. “Virginia is paroling basically nobody,” says Wanda Bertram with the Prison Policy Initiative. The blanket denial of conditional release to deserving candidates, supporters of parole argue, ultimately advances blind punishment and undermines incentives toward rehabilitation and positive change.

Vega says he now understands the devastation caused by his actions. “I took a life and I don’t condone that,” he says. “I don’t even understand my thoughts at that time, but I feel for the victim’s family.” (In a 1997 victim impact statement, the mother of Vance Horne, the man he killed, wrote that the loss of her son felt “as though a part of my body, a part of my very being has been taken away without warning or reason.”) In the years since, Vega says he’s become a different person. “I’m not the same guy anymore,” he explains. “Who of us is the same person they were at that age?” 

He also sees how the crime hurt his own family; Darlene Smith, Vega’s mother, says his arrest for the murder felt like “someone reached in my chest and pulled my heart out and just set it on fire.”

With every “no” from the parole board, Vega and his supporters feel like the system is dangling a possibility for release that will never materialize: “What’s the point of having a second chance available,” he wonders, “when you’re not willing to give it?” 

Almost two decades ago, during the height of a nationwide wave of tough-on-crime policies, Virginia effectively abolished parole by adopting a “truth-in-sentencing” law. The new rules mandated people serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. Only elderly prisoners, or those convicted before the law was enacted in 1995, were eligible for parole. 

Before parole was gutted, 46 percent of eligible candidates in Virginia were granted early release. By 1998, that figure had dropped to 5 percent. Although the number of people up for parole has grown in recent years as a result of criminal justice reforms expanding eligibility and an aging adult population, their chances of actually getting out have remained low. Only about 6 percent of parole applicants were approved under Terry McAuliffe, the state’s Democratic governor from 2014 to 2018.

Recognizing a problem, McAuliffe created a state commission to study reinstating parole, questioning whether Virginia kept too many people in prison for too long. In 2019, Democrats seized control of the rest of the state government. Soon after, Virginia extended parole eligibility to juvenile offenders like Vega, as well as to people convicted by juries between 1995 and 2000 because of constitutional issues with how trials were conducted at the time. 

But even with those expansions, parole releases were still a drop in the bucket compared to a state prison population of roughly 24,000. This contributed to Virginia’s crowded prisons and aging incarcerated population—at a high cost to taxpayers. 

“The expectation pre-1995 was that you had a very good chance of receiving parole once you were eligible to be reviewed,” says Allison Weiss, a professor of prison litigation at Washington and Lee University School of Law who teaches a course where students assist parole applicants. “Over time, there’s just been a narrowing of the view of what parole is or should be in the state.” 

By the time McAuliffe ran for governor again in 2021, Youngkin had folded attacks on Virginia’s already-restrictive parole system into a broader GOP campaign that painted Democrats as soft on crime. “Terry McAuliffe’s hand-picked parole board had one mission—cut them loose,” Youngkin posted on X during the race, adding that Virginia wouldn’t be safe under his opponent. 

After taking office the following year, Youngkin swiftly fired his predecessor Ralph Northam’s five-member parole board and installed his own appointees, some of whom had openly opposed releasing people on parole—triggering a political standoff with Democrats who still control the state Senate and must confirm the governor’s nominees. The Senate blocked most of Youngkin’s initial selections, except for Chadwick Dotson, a former judge and prosecutor who was chosen to chair the parole board. 

Even before this battle to reshape it, the agency was already in disarray. In 2010, prisoners who were eligible for parole but denied multiple times sued the parole board, claiming it refused to properly consider their cases; the reason for denial provided in most instances was the seriousness of the original crime. A 2021 report from Washington and Lee University found deficiencies in the board’s decision-making process, including the fact that members don’t meet in person to discuss cases and instead vote electronically. 

Virginia Republicans have also criticized the parole board for failing to give legally required notices to victims and prosecutors when considering releases and for proceeding with some releases without receiving recommendations from local parole officers. As chair, Dotson issued a report to the governor last year calling for “drastic changes” to the board, like opening the hearings to the public and expanding the number of board members. 

Under Youngkin, the board has consistently been missing a fifth member, working at times with as few as three members, which experts say further diminishes chances for parole applicants.

Several advocates for people seeking parole say Dotson seemed to make improvements to the board’s practices. During his tenure, Dotson made visits to parole candidates, sometimes accompanied by other board members. Members also began gathering on a weekly basis to debate cases where there was “reasonable chance” of granting release. 

“I think he did give people a fair chance,” says Lisa Spees, who has advocated on behalf of more than 30 parole candidates in Virginia over the years. “He implemented a lot of changes into the parole system that were much needed.” Having the opportunity to meet with a parole board member, Spees added, “gave the individual a sense of being a part of that decision-making process.” She and others fear that Dotson’s departure last year brought that momentum to a halt. 

Even with those improvements, when Dotson chaired the board, between January 2022 and September 2023, the grant rate was only about 2 percent. 

Last September, Youngkin replaced Dotson as board chair by appointing Patricia West. A one-time judge and former chief deputy attorney general, West also once acted as state director of juvenile justice; decades ago she served on Republican Governor George Allen’s commission that pushed for minors as young as 14 to be automatically tried in adult court when charged with some violent offenses. 

Shawn Weneta, who was until recently a policy strategist with the ACLU of Virginia, calls West “the architect of parole abolition in Virginia.” He points to her role during the Allen administration, which led the charge to eliminate parole. In 1996, Allen picked West as secretary of public safety overseeing Virginia’s prisons and parole. “We have serious concerns with her being in that role [of parole board chair],” Weneta says. 

At first, Senate Democrats tried to remove West from a list of gubernatorial appointments pending confirmation. But, with little explanation, they voted a few days later to confirm her. Between her appointment last September and late March, West has voted on fewer than 50 cases to consider parole, according to state records showing individual board members’ voting history. She approved just three people for release, all of whom were eligible under geriatric release—available for applicants 65 or older after serving at least five years of their sentence and those 60 or more who served a minimum of 10 years. 

Julie McConnell, a law professor at the University of Richmond and director of a defense clinic that works on juvenile parole law cases, says Virginia’s current parole board only seems to be approving such geriatric cases. In past years, McConnell says her legal clinic won parole for seven candidates who committed crimes as juveniles. 

So far in 2024, she says none of the applicants represented by her clinic have been granted parole. 

“I don’t know that there is a silver bullet with this board where you can present the perfect package to them that gets their attention,” McConnell says. She suspects the board focuses more on aspects outside of the applicant’s control like the crime itself or input from the prosecutor and victim’s families. 

“The Parole Board deals with some of the most heinous and violent offenders within the Department of Corrections who are eligible for parole,” Youngkin’s press secretary Christian Martinez said in an email. “Judge West and the Parole Board assess each case with a comprehensive approach, guided by policies that prioritize the voices of victims before any decision is made to release violent offenders back on the street. Parole is not a right, it’s a privilege extended only to those inmates who are eligible for consideration.” West declined to answer questions for this story. 

Advocates for people seeking parole now worry that a recently announced policy change will even further decrease their chances of release. Starting in July, victims of people applying for parole will still be entitled to annual appointments with the board, while meetings with families and advocates for the parole applicants will instead now happen every two years.

“We’ve just become so acculturated to extreme punishment that we don’t even recognize when we’re going too far,” McConnell says. “We could give people an opportunity for a fresh start.” 

In late February, Leroy Gilliam III became one of the lucky few to be granted parole in Virginia. 

Gilliam, 51, had already served almost 28 years for first-degree murder by the time he went before the parole board last June. The board had denied him twice in recent years due to the serious nature of his crime. But this time, the board decided Gilliam had shown “excellent institutional adjustment” and didn’t present a threat to public safety. 

Gilliam was both thrilled and perplexed by the decision: “I don’t know what actually changed their minds this time.” 

Parole board decisions could soon at least become less opaque in Virginia. Last year, Youngkin signed a bipartisan transparency bill into law that the ACLU touted as “the biggest reform of Virginia’s parole system since 1994.” Under the new law, which takes effect in July, the board will have to publish more regular detailed reports with individualized reasons on grants and denials, and parole review hearings will be required to include interviews with candidates themselves. The bill also gives parole applicants and their attorneys access to all of the information being considered by the board. 

“We don’t know that it will increase grant rates at all,” Weneta says. “We certainly hope that it helps. But it’s a piece of the puzzle.” He believes insulating the parole board from the influence of any individual politician is the only way to ensure an equitable system. “As long as we continue to have partisan actors setting the mandate and making the appointments, they’re going to achieve the outcomes that they want,” he says, adding that the ultimate goal is to reinstate parole for everyone.  

When Vega’s stepdaughter, Shaelyce, first spoke to Virginia’s parole board two years ago, she told them how he had become the first male role model in her life. Before Vega came into the picture, Shaelyce says her mother had been in a 13-year-long abusive relationship and they were living out of a hotel. Shaelyce, 22, is now studying to become a child psychologist to work with children who have experienced trauma. 

Shaelyce remembers pouring her heart out to the board, but says it didn’t seem to make a difference. “It’s like there’s a tablecloth that we place on the table,” she recalls with tears in her eyes, “and every time we get ready for him to come home, they sweep it right from underneath us.” Her sister Carol, 24, has also come to see Moore as a father figure. “We got all these plans,” she says. “We talk about what it’s going to be like and then to get denied it’s heartbreaking.” 

Darlene Smith, Vega’s mother, says she goes through bouts of depression and shuts down after each denial from the parole board. “He picks me up and he tells me, ‘Mom, I didn’t have this chance when I first went to prison,’” she says. “‘At least now I have a chance.’” But in Virginia, that chance is increasingly unlikely.

Sarah says each denial feels personal, like the support she and her family have given him is insufficient. “You’re telling us, ‘you’re not good enough to get him home,’” she says.

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

What is the value of a tree? It can provide a cool place to rest in the shade, a snack in the form of fruit, lumber to build a home, and cleaner air. But trees are increasingly being prized for one thing: their ability to capture carbon and counteract climate change. 

Billions of dollars are flowing into projects to plant and protect trees so that governments and businesses can claim they’ve canceled out their emissions. Saving forests and planting trees are often portrayed as a “triple win” for the environment, economy, and people. According to a major report being presented on Friday at the United Nations Forum on Forests, however, that goal is proving more complicated than expected.

The conversation about how to manage forests “has been overtaken by the climate discussion,” said Daniela Kleinschmit, an author of the report and the vice president of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, the network behind the research. The result? Indigenous peoples are getting pushed out of their lands because of carbon offset projects. Native grasslands are getting turned into forests, even though grasslands themselves are huge, overlooked reservoirs of carbon. And offset projects in forests, more often than not, fail to achieve all of the emissions benefits their backers had promised. 

The new report, the first comprehensive assessment of how the world is governing its forests in 14 years, offers some good news—global deforestation rates have slowed down slightly, from 32 million acres a year in 2010 to 25 million in 2020. But what the report calls the “climatization” of forests has led to the rise of carbon sequestration markets that prioritize short-term profits over long-term sustainability, it found.

Experts say that it’s possible to pursue the global goal of sequestering carbon in forests while also keeping locals happy—it would just take a more thoughtful approach that considers the tradeoffs and involves the people most affected.

Daniel Miller, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Notre Dame, said that a narrow focus on forests’ environmental benefits misses “a huge part of the story.” Miller’s research has shown that forests can help fight poverty, since the edible goods found in them are often available during times of the year when people might go hungry. Having forests nearby can make land more productive, increasing crop yields by more than 50 percent in some cases. That’s because forests can enrich the soil, increase rainfall, and help with pollination. More than 3 billion people live within 1 kilometer (a little over half a mile) of forests and depend on them for jobs, like harvesting timber, and for food like nuts and mushrooms. 

Forests can also help people adapt to a warming world. They regulate floods and landslides and sustain livelihoods that are jeopardized by climate change, said Ida Djenontin, a professor of geography at Penn State.

But what looks like a promising carbon sequestration effort can have unexpected consequences that undermine those benefits. For example, Finland’s ministry of agriculture is trying to fertilize its forests to make them grow faster, in the hope that they will suck up carbon quickly and help the country meet its goal of going carbon-neutral by 2035. But according to the new report, the government didn’t account for the energy-intensive process of producing and transporting fertilizer, a large source of carbon emissions. The report also points out that fertilizing forests can end up hurting reindeer herding, since it stifles the growth of lichen that reindeer eat; one study found that it could also reduce berry production in forests by 70 percent. “It seems that the ongoing climate crisis has, to some extent, legitimized excessive forest management techniques, such as fertilization,” the report concludes. 

Many forest offset projects don’t work as intended. An investigation last year found that only eight out of 29 rainforest offset projects approved by Verra, the world’s biggest certifier, had meaningfully reduced deforestation. The rest of the projects “had no climate benefit,” according to The Guardian, partially because the threat of those forests getting cut down had been vastly overstated.

The narrative that forests can save the world from climate change is a tempting one for businesses and politicians—they can seemingly take care of their climate pledges if they’re willing to fork over the money, without having to do the hard work of reducing emissions. It also allows people to skip the hard conversations about cutting down on consumption, Kleinschmit said. The market for voluntary carbon offsets—the ones companies choose to buy—is predicted to grow from around $2 billion in 2021 to $250 billion by 2030. 

Another problem is that “carbon cowboys”—a term for those seeking to profit off carbon offset schemes—can end up evicting Indigenous peoples from their homes. In 2015, Cambodian officials set aside more than 1,900 square miles of rainforest in the country’s Cardamom Mountains for a carbon offset project without consulting the Chong people that had lived there for centuries. Villagers were forced from their lands, and some were even arrested for collecting resin from trees, since carbon offset areas were monitored to stop locals from using the forest’s resources.

In the United Arab Emirates, the company Blue Carbon has negotiated deals for millions of acres so it can launch offset projects aimed at protecting forests across Liberia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Much of that land has been held by Indigenous peoples. Since 1990, an estimated quarter-million people around the world have been pushed out of their homes in the name of conservation. 

Global climate goals, of course, don’t have to come into conflict with local needs. Experts say it’s possible to balance the two effectively. Prakash Kashwan, an environmental studies professor at Brandeis University, said that locals can use resources from trees, at least on a smaller scale, without hurting a forest’s ability to sequester carbon, according to his research. Studies have demonstrated that involving Indigenous peoples and local residents in the process of decision-making is key to better social and environmental outcomes—including carbon sequestration. 

“Allowing communities a say in how forests are managed is absolutely vital to more effective, lasting, and just forest governance, and for tackling these big global challenges that we face,” Miller said.

By now, it looks like appearing on national television and refusing to commit to certifying the 2024 general election results is a requirement for Trump vice-presidential hopefuls.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.)—all of whom are among the possible candidates, NBC News reported last week—have all failed to answer “yes” when television hosts have asked them if they will commit to accepting the results no matter who wins. Their responses have ranged from simply insisting Trump will be the next president, to spreading election misinformation, to falsely claiming that Democrats are trying to sabotage free and fair elections.

Today, one more lawmaker joined their ranks. When Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, put that question to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)—who is also reportedly on the shortlist—he replied: “No matter what happens? No. If it’s an unfair election, I think it’s going to be contested by either side.”

In his approach to undermining a lynchpin of US democracy, Rubio opted to take the Stefanik approach and attack Democrats. He noted, “I think you’re asking the wrong person. The Democrats are the ones that have opposed every Republican victory since 2000, every single one. Hillary Clinton said the election was stolen from her and that Trump was illegitimate.” 

“But she conceded,” Welker replied. 

“She said that Trump was illegitimate. She said that the election had been stolen,” Rubio went on. “Kamala Harris agreed. By the way, there are Democrats serving in Congress today who, in 2004, voted not to certify the Ohio electors because they said those machines had been tampered with.”

To be clear: Those Democrats said they were not aiming to change the outcome of the election but to draw attention to voter disenfranchisement, CNN reported at the time. A report released by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee the following year concluded that there were “numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters,” particularly minority and Democrat voters.

But Rubio was on a roll and undeterred by facts. “And you have Democrats now saying they won’t certify 2024 because Trump is an insurrectionist and ineligible to hold office,” he went on. “So you need to ask them.”

WATCH: Will you accept the results of the 2024 no matter who wins? @kwelkernbc asks.@SenMarcoRubio (R-Fla): "No matter what happens? No, if it's an unfair election."

Welker: "Senator, no matter who wins."

Rubio: "I think you're asking the wrong person." pic.twitter.com/COUL2MvPm9

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) May 19, 2024

Welker reminded Rubio that he voted to certify the 2020 election results. She then reminded him of his own apparently long-forgotten position on the matter four years ago, when he said, “Democracy is held together by people’s confidence in the election and their willingness to abide by its results.”

Trump, meanwhile, continues to deny the legitimacy of his loss and has sowed doubt about whether he’ll accept the result of a free and fair election. Earlier this month, he took a preemptive attack and zeroed in on a single state, suggesting that he may not accept the 2024 presidential results from Wisconsin when asked in an interview with a local newspaper.

“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in a state where he recently appeared at a rally. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

Referring to Trump’s continued questioning of the election results, Welker asked Rubio, “By your own definition, are Donald Trump’s claims undermining Americans’ confidence in democracy?” Rubio refused to respond directly. Instead, he parroted unfounded claims about election fraud and falsely claimed NBC News did not cover controversies surrounding Hunter Biden. 

“I’m telling you that if it’s unfair, we are going to do the same thing Democrats do,” Rubio asserted. “We’re going to use lawyers to go to court and point out the fact that states are not following their own election laws.”

His desperate defense of Trump’s election denial—despite his own certification of the 2020 election results—comes as a major shift for Rubio, who Trump used to deride as “Little Marco” during the 2016 GOP primary when they both vied for the nomination. As my colleague Pema Levy reported then, during that contest Rubio called Trump a “con artist,” a “lunatic,” not to mention, “rude and obnoxious and offensive.” He also questioned Trump’s ability to spell and…the size of his hands. Yet, when it came time to cast his ballot, he still voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. 

While Rubio spewed a lot of lies today, there’s one thing he’s said about Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 that is worth remembering, given that Trump is currently ensnared in his first criminal trial. “Friends do not let friends vote for con artists,” Rubio told his supporters. 

For weeks preceding President Biden’s commencement speech on Sunday at Morehouse College—a historically Black men’s college in Atlanta—students and faculty opposed his appearance, alleging that the president should not be the guest of honor given his ongoing support for Israel’s war in Gaza. 

As student protests swept through other colleges and universities, even forcing the cancellation or readjustment of commencement ceremonies, Morehouse students spoke to the press about their discomfort with Biden’s appearance. They confronted the school’s President, David Thomas, about his invitation to the president, and some members of the Morehouse faculty and others from Spelman and Clark Atlanta—two other historically Black colleges—demanded in an open, unsigned letter that administrators cancel his appearance, alleging that the school was “endorsing genocide” by having him speak.

I reported this week that the Biden administration has moved to send another $1 billion in weapons to Israel—even after the President told CNN that he would stop shipping certain weapons to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proceeded with a major ground invasion of Rafah. Despite this warning, Israeli forces have already begun the incursion, forcing an estimated 800,000 Palestinians to flee the area, according to the UN. Thomas told the Washington Post that administrators initially reached out to the White House in September about the possibility of Biden speaking, a month before the start of the Israel-Hamas war. 

But commencement ceremonies and Biden’s appearance largely came and went without disruptive protests—though a couple of speakers did find ways to acknowledge the plight of Palestinians. In his opening evocation, Rev. Claybon Lea Jr. called for leaders to value “human life…whether they live in Israel or Palestine,” and said that Jesus Christ was a “Palestinian Jew.” (Biden is a devout Catholic.)

The valedictorian, DeAngelo Fletcher, used part of his address to call for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip,” prompting applause from the audience—and Biden himself. Fletcher told NPR this week, “Biden has been on a tirade in the Middle East, giving billions and billions of dollars to foreign countries.”

#Morehouse valedictorian, Deangelo Fletcher, calls for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip” — met with applause from crowd and @POTUS behind him. pic.twitter.com/jlckIGES8C

— Garrison Hayes (@garrison_hayes) May 19, 2024

Signals of opposition to Biden’s appearance were peaceful and relatively unobtrusive; the most unified one was when the entire graduating class remained seated when he took the podium. Several students in the audience appeared to wear keffiyehs, some sat with their backs turned to Biden, and another student appeared to be holding up a Palestinian flag. 

During his remarks, Biden acknowledged what he described as the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza and called for an “immediate ceasefire,” to “stop the fighting and bring the hostages home.” He also addressed the scale of protests against the war on college campuses, saying, “I support peaceful nonviolent protest. Your voices should be heard. And I promise you I hear them.” Noting that he is working towards “two-state solution…the only solution,” Biden said, “I know [the war] angers and frustrates many of you, including my family. But most of all, I know it breaks your heart. It breaks mine as well.” He was likely referring to reports that First Lady Jill Biden has urged him to “stop it now.”

The President spoke vehemently against racism and showcased his track record supporting the interests of Black voters, with whom his support has recently eroded. While Biden retains an advantage over Trump with Black voters overall, a Washington Post/Ipsos poll published last month found that 55 percent of Black Americans under 30 years old disapprove of his job performance; in contrast, a year ago, 56 percent of that group approved of Biden. 

“You started college just as George Floyd was murdered, and there was a reckoning on race,” Biden told the graduates, before later condemning “the poison of white supremacy.” 

“Instead of forcing you to prove you’re ten times better, we’re breaking down doors so you have 100 times more opportunities,” he added, touting the more than $16 billion his administration has allocated to HBCUs. He noted his history of supporting Black leadership, and said many Morehouse graduates now worked in his administration. He reminded his audience of his role as vice president to the first Black president; his naming of a Black woman as his vice president; and his appointment of the first Black woman to be a Supreme Court Justice. 

But whether these statistics—and Biden’s long history of supporting Black leaders—will be enough to swing the hotly contested election in his favor remains to be seen. A Carnegie poll released last month found that 59 percent of Black Americans believe US should restrict military aid to Israel to ensure that American weapons are being used in alignment with international human rights law, and that the number of Black Americans who reported feeling connected with the plight of Palestinians grew from 32 percent in October 2023 to 45 percent in March. 

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

While the Gulf of Mexico is a region known for oil, it’s also home to something far less expected. Nestled among offshore oil platforms, about 150 miles from Houston, is one of the healthiest coral reefs in the world: the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.

Marine researchers who have visited the Flower Garden Banks describe it with awe in their voices. “When you look out, it can be almost disorienting because there’s so much coral,” said Michelle Johnston, superintendent of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. 

As reefs around the world bleach at alarming rates, scientists are racing to study and preserve this remarkable coral reef in the unlikeliest of places. “We have these magical underwater places, [and yet they are] completely surrounded by the oil and gas industry,” Johnston said.

To understand how both can exist in such close proximity, it helps to understand the history of the region. Roughly 190 million years ago, the ocean here was drying up, leaving behind a massive plain of salt. Over the ages, that dried-up layer of salt was buried deep in the earth.  

And eventually, a new body of water—the Gulf of Mexico—formed high above it. Because salt is less dense than the surrounding rock, the layer slowly rose toward the surface, pushing the earth above it, while pulling up massive oil deposits from below. Slowly, this shift created enormous underwater mountains known as “salt domes.” Looking at a map of the Gulf of Mexico today, you can see that many of its oil drilling sites are on those same underwater mountains.

A few of these mountains rose so high that sunlight was just able to filter down through the water to reach them. And roughly 10,000 years ago, coral polyps latched onto the peaks and started to grow. Those underwater mountaintops are now the Flower Garden Banks.

Because the reef is so far from the shore, it’s been protected from many threats like overfishing and coastal pollution. And because of its depth and northern latitude, the water here is about as cold as corals can tolerate, essentially protecting the Flower Garden Banks from global warming. In the summer of 2023, for example, while other reefs throughout the Caribbean were being ravaged by heat stress and bleaching, the unique geology of Flower Gardens allowed it to fare better than the rest. 

But this same unique geology has also turned the region into a massive hub for offshore oil drilling.

“When you’re offshore diving at the Flower Gardens, you look around from the dive boat and you can see oil and gas platforms in every direction,” Johnston said. “So there’s all of this industry happening around this beautiful place.”

For now, the reef has thankfully avoided any catastrophic oil spills, but that doesn’t mean that oil hasn’t left its mark. In fact, the legacy of oil extraction, carbon emissions, and climate change are quite literally etched into the hard skeletons of the corals themselves.

“I think of that skeletal material as a little time capsule,” said Amy Wagner, a scientist who studies corals to find clues about Earth’s past.

Back when she was a graduate student in 2005, Wagner and a team of scientists came to Flower Garden Banks in search of one very specific type of coral, Siderastrea siderea. “They just look like a bunch of rocks on the bottom,” she said.

The team dove down 78 feet, to the peaks of these ancient mountaintops, and drilled a nearly 6-foot-long core of this slow-growing species of coral—a 250-year record of pollution, climate change, and even world events. “You start to drill in and, especially in that initial drilling, you’re getting the tissue layer of the coral,” Wagner said. “And you end up having a lot of fish come in, because it’s free food, right?”

After hours of drilling, they patched up the hole and swam the 6-foot-long core to the surface. Back at the lab, they split open the core samples and x-rayed them. “They’re like trees,” Wagner said. “You can count the tree rings and go back in time. Corals produce these annual bands.”

Every year, the living coral organism lays down a new growth band, using the nutrients and minerals it pulls out of the seawater. Essentially, whatever’s in the seawater makes it into that year’s layer of coral skeleton. “So we have this long record of these little, tiny time capsules that are sort of locking in the ocean chemistry,” Wagner said.

Using a high-tech version of a dentist’s drill, Wagner and her colleague Kristine DeLong, a professor at Louisiana State University, collected a tiny bit of dust from each growth band. Then, like detectives, they analyzed different elements in the dust for clues, looking at the variations in the coral core over time.

Just like humans, corals build their skeletons out of calcium. But sometimes they make mistakes, accidentally grabbing look-alike elements from the seawater. One of those elements is barium, which is often used as a lubricant in offshore oil wells. During the 1970s energy crisis, oil drilling boomed in the Gulf of Mexico. And Wagner and DeLong could see that spike reflected in the barium levels in the coral: When oil prices crashed, production went down, and so did the barium.

There are many other histories scientists can see etched in this coral core. By looking at nitrogen, they can see the rise of fertilizer pollution from the Mississippi River. By looking at radioactive carbon, they can see the rise of nuclear weapons tests during the Cold War.

And the corals even tell the story of how fossil fuels are changing the climate—in the words of one scientist, “recording their own demise.” To see how, it’s important to know that carbon atoms aren’t all exactly the same. They actually come in a few different weights, depending on the number of neutrons in each carbon atom.  A carbon atom with seven neutrons is called “heavy carbon,” while an atom with six neutrons is called “light carbon.” Plants prefer to use the light carbon for photosynthesis. So, inside of a plant, the carbon atoms tend to be a little bit lighter than those, say, inside of a volcano. 

Fossil fuels come from ancient plants, which are full of light carbon. As fossil fuel emissions rise, the carbon atoms in our atmosphere are slowly getting lighter. 

You can see this same trend playing out inside of the corals: The carbon in the coral slowly gets lighter in the band samples as the world burns more fossil fuels. As those fossil fuel emissions warm the climate, they put reefs around the world in danger. 

Today, the Flower Garden Banks are still holding on, but they won’t be safe forever. As early as 2040, the Flower Garden Banks could start to see major bleaching events every summer. If we can reduce our emissions at a more reasonable pace, climate models say we might be able to buy an extra 15 to 20 years for the Flower Garden Banks—essentially doubling its window of time. That window would be critical for the sanctuary staff and independent scientists who are working hard to study and protect what might become one of the last coral reefs.

“Going to a place like Flower Gardens, it’s like—these corals, they’re still pretty darn healthy,” said  DeLong. “Being able to manage those reefs and take care of them is important, because they may be the last ones we have.”

Recently, scientists at the Flower Garden Banks have started collecting corals from the reef and storing them in an onshore coral lab. The hope is to eventually bank enough coral here in case the worst happens.

“It is a grim prospect,” Johnston said. “It’s better to be proactive and have some things banked versus getting into the situation where all the corals have bleached and died and we have nothing left. It’s my hope that nature can figure things out and things can adapt. I think the problem is that the climate is changing quickly enough that there might not be time.”

The Flower Garden Banks are a product of 10,000 years of slow, steady growth, capturing annual snapshots of our world, in small millimeter-sized chapters. The next few decades will be critical in determining just how much longer this reef will be able to continue its ancient undersea story.

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

In 2020, the Wisconsin city of Appleton brought No Mow May to the United States. Each spring, by temporarily forgoing mowing and letting residential lawns grow with flowers, residents could support bees and other insect pollinators, proponents claimed. Indeed, they even said the practice was backed by their own published scientific study.

But a little more than two years later, critics turned up severe flaws in the work conducted in Appleton, and the study was formally retracted.

To Sara Stricker, a plant pathologist, it was another sign of anti-grass zealotry gone awry. In spring 2023, she launched a campaign criticizing No Mow May, saying the movement was misguided and delivered little on its intended value. But, she said, people don’t typically want to digest the science behind such a thing: “They just want the quick hashtag and a little sign with a cute little icon in it that makes them feel good.”

Before long, Stricker’s inbox filled with hate mail. For instance, she said she was accused of being in the pocket of industry. Stricker works as a communications and outreach coordinator for the Guelph Turfgrass Institute, outside of Toronto, which has outdoor research fields for the express purposes of studying the green stuff that covers lawns and sports fields and golf fairways. She maintains that she was just trying to start a conversation and acknowledges that her institution draws support from chemical manufactures and the lawn care industry—which is not uncommon in agricultural and horticultural research. But, she said, “None of us are walking around with devil horns saying, ‘Woohaha, I want to kill something today.’ We’re all in it because we like being outside, we like doing sports, we like nature.”

Stricker had not exactly called for a Blitzkrieg on biodiversity. In fact, she encouraged people to plant a wider range of species if they wanted to help support wildlife. (Other experts have proposed similar measures.) In an experiment described in GreenMaster, a trade publication for Canadian golf course managers, her institute found that No Mow May was unlikely to make much of a difference: Over the course of the one-month study, unmowed plots of Kentucky bluegrass did not substantially support more flowers compared to plots mowed at two-and-a-half inches.

But why had experts on grass, at a premier grass-growing institute in North America, come out swinging against something as seemingly innocuous as No Mow May? If something as simple as not mowing for a month doesn’t do much for biodiversity, then what lawn-care practices—from tearing up sod entirely to planting lush wildflower meadows—are supported by data and research?

Lawns represent one of the largest, fastest growing landscapes in the US. These ecosystems—water-hungry, energy-intensive monocultures—extend far beyond the picket fence, including highway medians, cul-de-sacs, and corporate office parks. De facto lawns also exist under solar arrays, on soccer fields, and in city parks. In the US, it’s a landmass that, by some estimates, covers an area about the size of Iowa.

The concept of well-manicured, tightly shorn spaces originated as a status symbol in Europe. Colonizers introduced grasses in an effort to replicate the places they left. By the 18th century, wealthy Americans began tending formal lawns, and much later, particularly in the wake of post-war industrialization and suburban development, the masses followed suit.

But by the 1980s, the lawn began to lose its luster as nonprofit organizations and individuals increasingly called for its eradication. In 1989, the writer Michael Pollan published a landmark essay “Why Mow?” which indelibly described lawns as “nature purged of sex and death.” In some circles, lawns have come to exemplify a consumptive sensibility. “Over the past 50 years, we’ve slowly fallen out of love with lawns,” The Washington Post reported in 2022. “They began to signal waste, disregard, disharmony, homogeneity, gentrification, zombie Boomerism.”

The imperatives to remove lawns span a range of concerns: managing scarce water, building climate resiliency, boosting biodiversity, and even supporting mental health. As J. Leighton Reid, a restoration ecologist at Virginia Tech, put it, any change is probably better than the status quo. “It almost goes without needing evidence to say that a lawn has lower biodiversity than a native ecosystem,” he said. “I mean, that’s just inevitably going to be the case.”

But what actually works? Quick-fix lawn-conversion solutions encounter several problems in practice. For one, contemporary agricultural and horticultural research often focuses on commercial production on a large scale. (Private firms, such as those marketing chemical fertilizers and herbicides, overwhelmingly bankroll R&D in the US.) In contrast, ornamental lawn maintenance falls to practitioners—DIYers and hired professionals alike—who learn from experience and tend to focus on what looks best. Advocates also take matters into their own hands, although no single foolproof method for replacing the lawn and transforming it into a more functional ecosystem exists.

Perhaps the most obvious and most enduring problem rests with grass itself. Grasses generally have a number of reproductive methods and survival mechanisms that make them hard to wipe out. As Laura Jackson, director of the University of Northern Iowa’s Tallgrass Prairie Center, which conducts large-scale prairie restoration, put it: “You can drive a stake through its heart, you can put on the garlic, you can get out the silver cross or whatever, and you’re still going to have that stuff.”

Old habits die hard, too. When it comes to lawns—to walk barefoot on a soft carpet of grass, the sensibility, the institution of lawn care, the whole way of thinking—the practice seems indestructible. And so, some people fire up gas-powered mowers while their neighbors stake No Mow May signs in their lawns gone “wild.” Surely, there has to be a middle ground.

In ecological circles, there is a consensus for why the traditional lawn is perhaps long overdue for disruption, as monoculture grasses do not support much life. Simply put, lawns are deceptively lush: They look green, but are not figuratively “green” in terms of supporting a functional ecosystem.

One study on 159 residential yards in the Washington, DC, area found that, even in the leafy suburbs, an area rich with flowering plants, the landscape filled with nonnative vegetation lacked resources for birds. These nonnative plant species supported fewer insects regularly eaten by one beloved native bird species, the Carolina chickadee. In essence, the suburban landscape doubled as a food desert for the birds.

Hence, the impetus to convert. The best way to do so, however, is unclear. Looking at grasslands in Virginia, for instance, one master’s thesis study suggests that native wildflowers established more consistently when herbicide killed the existing grass completely (rather than seeding the wildflowers with no grass removal). Another PhD student found evidence that the resulting level of native plant diversity in restored grasslands represents a pale facsimile compared to grassland that remained relatively undisturbed.

Reid, the Virginia Tech restoration ecologist who oversaw these studies, said he’s not sure how well the results translate since the studies focused on large-scale post-agricultural production systems. But one takeaway, given that native species fare better with less competition from grasses, is that it’s a case for clearly delineated strips that spatially separate grass from native plantings.

So, it’s not that there is disagreement over the why. Lawns could stand to benefit from greater biodiversity. But it’s the how that should happen—from grass-smothering mulches to sod-busting mechanical tools to chemical herbicides.

The lack of one-size-fits-all prescriptive advice isn’t just a matter of the heterogeneity of the landscape—the average rainfall and climate in Virginia is not the same as, say, southern California—but also of favoritism on an institutional scale. Financial incentives focus on research related to the commercial production of food; Reid, meanwhile says there should be no less imperative to study lawn conversion with an eye towards biodiversity.

That’s unlikely, though. His research, in part, grew out of an effort to create pastures that helped prevent cows from getting sick from eating nonnative grasses in the summer. “If we pitched that as a lawn transformation study,” he said, “I don’t think they would have received it as well as pitching it as a cattle production study.”

Out in the Corn Belt, Jackson, at the Tallgrass Prairie Center, which provides seeds and technical assistance for plantings along public roadsides in Iowa, contends that urban lawns probably amount to a rounding error in terms of, say, providing sustenance for migratory butterflies. “It’s absolutely of no significance whatsoever from the point of view of monarch populations,” she said. “From a political point of view, from the point of view of people caring about monarchs, if that were to translate into political action, that’d be great, that would be significant. But from the point of view of water quality or number of stems of milkweed, it doesn’t move a needle at all.”

Still, the institute’s research has some potentially useful findings. Jackson’s research on seeding milkweed (the host plant for monarch caterpillars) in road ditches with existing vegetation showed abysmal results without applying herbicides, such as Roundup, prior to planting. “You get precisely no plants,” Jackson said. “You use Roundup once, you get a few more, and, if you round it up a couple of times, you get a few more.”

While Jackson added that she personally prefers not to use chemical controls—which are mired in controversy because of their deleterious effects on soil, insect, and human health—the amounts of herbicides used annually in wildflower restoration amount to little when compared against the high volumes sprayed on crops like corn and soybeans. The reality is there’s little prairie left, and it isn’t regenerating on its own. “We’ve done a lot of damage and it’s not going to be easy to undo that damage,” she said.

Jackson championed restoration, and her blanket advice for others was simply to underscore the uncertainty: “A great deal of humility is called for in this business.”

Meanwhile, Linda Chalker-Scott, a professor and extension urban horticulturist at Washington State University, suggested grass-killing herbicides only be used as a last resort. Chalker-Scott has something of a reputation for debunking “horticultural myths.” Her initial skepticism piqued when she was reading a textbook on landscaping and came across some fishy citations: “So that’s when I started thinking, ‘Well, where is this information coming from?’ And then tracing it back and saying, ‘Well, this isn’t science. This is just someone’s anecdotal experience or some guru, self-proclaimed expert telling people what to do.’”

She generally cautions against digging up grass (it removes organic matter and disturbs the soil), and has co-authored one study that found flaws with covering a yard with cardboard and other sheet mulches in order to smother and kill off existing vegetation. In terms of reducing the movement of gasses from the soil into the atmosphere and vice versa, she said that black plastic (which kills unwanted plants by solarization and is used by organic practitioners) is worse than using 12 inches of coarse wood chips. Mulching grasses when dormant, she said, “is the single best way to prepare soil for planting, to get rid of weeds, and to pretty much improve and retain soil tilth.”

Chalker-Scott also made it clear she wasn’t calling for the wholesale removal of lawns. “I don’t hate lawns. I like functional lawns. And sod lawns,” she said, describing those planted with a roll of turf, “are not functional.”

Perhaps there is no one true path carved out of the grass. About 10 years ago, Nancy Shackelford, an ecologist at the University of Victoria, co-authored a paper outlining nine principles for restoration. “We talked a lot in that 2013 paper about resilience and self-sustaining ecosystems, as in, like, ‘Take the humans out of it.’ And I don’t really aspire to that anymore.”

Today, she said, the best laid plans involve restored ecosystems that people want to maintain. “Restoration is always about values. Always,” she said. “So, you can’t take that human piece out of restoration as much as you may try. You can’t pretend it’s just for nature.”

Ecology fundamentally lacks grand unifying theories, and her view reflects a larger shift. When the main restoration group, the Society for Ecological Restoration, updated its primer, for instance, the international conservation organization described restoration taking many shapes. Any step seemed like a good first step, Shackelford said, and, even what might appear like mere symbolic restoration of lawns can be beneficial. Still, she said, the international community sometimes implied that a restored ecosystem could and should take care of itself.

But she was less and less sure: “I actually think humans have a role to play in taking care of all ecosystems. It’s kind of our job at this point.”

This story was produced in partnership with The Trace and CBS News and Stations.

Candace Leslie was leaving church when she got the call she will never forget.

“All I heard was his girlfriend yelling in the phone, and she was like, ‘Cameron! Cameron! … He won’t get up. He won’t get up!’ ”

Someone shot Leslie’s son four times that Sunday evening in September 2021 outside his new apartment on Indianapolis’ northeast side.

Cameron Brown was 19. He was working at FedEx. He loved fishing with his grandfather and was trying to follow his footsteps into the U.S. Army.

Brown died at the scene.

“I just felt numb. I felt kind of disoriented,” Leslie said, remembering the chaos, the yellow police tape and officers scouring the scene.

Police recovered at least one gun. It was a Glock pistol. Unbeknownst to investigators at the time, the gun once served as a law enforcement duty weapon, carried by a sheriff’s deputy more than 2,000 miles away in California.

According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Glock was one of at least 52,529 police guns that have turned up at crime scenes since 2006, the earliest year provided. While that tally includes guns lost by or stolen from police, many of the firearms were released back into the market by the very law enforcement agencies sworn to protect the public.

Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting, in partnership with The Trace and CBS News, reviewed records from hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the United States and found that many had routinely resold or traded in their used duty weapons – a practice that has sent thousands of guns into the hands of criminals. 

Law enforcement resold guns to firearms dealers for discounts on new equipment and, in some cases, directly to their own officers, records show. Some of the guns were later involved in shootings, domestic violence incidents and other violent crimes.

A Kentucky State Police pistol sold to a retiring detective ended up in Buffalo, New York, where federal agents executing a search warrant on a suspect in a murder investigation in 2019 found the gun in a backpack alongside heroin and a bulletproof vest. In another case in Indianapolis in 2021, police seized a former Iowa State Patrol pistol from a man while arresting him for allegedly choking a woman. The gun was fully loaded with a round in the chamber.

Reporters surveyed state and local law enforcement agencies and found that at least 145 of them had resold guns on at least one occasion between 2006 and 2024. That’s about 90% of the more than 160 agencies that responded. 

Records from 67 agencies showed they had collectively resold more than 87,000 firearms over the past two decades. That figure is likely a significant undercount, however, because many agencies’ records were incomplete or heavily redacted. 

Scot Thomasson, a former ATF division chief who is now a consultant for SafeGunLock, a Washington, D.C.-based company, believes police departments that resell weapons are violating their obligation to protect the public. “Taxpayers are buying firearms that are then resold for pennies on the dollar and ultimately ending up in criminals’ hands,” Thomasson said. “It is absolutely ridiculous.” 

Many police departments resold their weapons while holding buyback events, which they say are important to pull guns off the street. 

The Philadelphia City Council boasts on its website of having collected 825 guns in buybacks since 2021. But records show that Philadelphia police resold at least 886 guns over the past two decades, including 85 firearms between 2021 and 2022. 

In some cases, departments added more guns to the marketplace than they removed. 

The Newark Police Department in New Jersey staged a buyback in 2021, offering the public up to $250 for each firearm turned over. The event netted 146 guns. “Without question, 146 fewer firearms on our streets means less gun violence, fewer gun violence victims, and less risk of suicide or death,” the city’s public safety director said in a YouTube post celebrating the haul. 

But five years earlier, Newark police resold more than five times that number of guns – nearly 1,000. One of those weapons surfaced in Pittsburgh, where police seized it from a convicted felon after he allegedly squeezed off more than a dozen shots in a neighborhood and then led officers on a foot chase.

A Newark police spokesperson said that the guns had been traded in as a cost-saving measure under a previous administration and that the department currently “has no plans to upgrade its service weapons.”

The Glock pistol involved in the killing of Cameron Brown in Indianapolis was one of more than 600 guns resold by the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office in Modesto, California, between March 2019 and August 2023, records show. Another weapon from the same agency found its way to Texas, where San Antonio police recovered it in connection with the shooting of a 15-year-old in 2020. 

In an interview with CBS News, Stanislaus County Sheriff Jeff Dirkse defended the practice of reselling weapons as necessary to reduce the cost of new equipment. “You’re talking several hundred thousand dollars every few years, and that’s all taxpayer money,” he said. “It’s just a cost benefit to the department.”

Dirkse expressed sympathy to Brown’s family but said his agency was not responsible for the teenager’s killing. “Whoever did this, if he didn’t acquire that gun, he’s probably going to go acquire another one,” Dirkse said. “My organization had nothing to do with it.”

When a reporter told Brown’s family members that the gun involved in his death once belonged to a sheriff’s office, they were at first in disbelief and then angry.

“One more gun on the street actually changed our lives forever,” said Brown’s grandmother, Maria Leslie, a pastor. “We’re missing a piece of our puzzle.”

Now the family wants police to stop selling their weapons.

“I’m losing trust in the people who’re supposed to protect and serve us,” said Leslie, Brown’s mother. “There’s no reason for police firearms to be in the hands of young teenagers.”

Indianapolis Police Chief Christopher Bailey told CBS News that his agency has historically traded in its weapons, but he would consider changing that policy in light of Brown’s death. “I don’t want any weapon that we owned to end up being used violently against another person,” he said.

Brown’s killing remains unsolved.

A Rift in Law Enforcement

For decades, the ATF has worked on behalf of state and local law enforcement to trace recovered crime guns to their original owners, providing fresh leads to investigators and insights into firearms trafficking. 

ATF data obtained by Reveal shows that between 2006 and 2021, the number of crime guns traced to law enforcement agencies each year more than doubled, from about 2,200 to more than 4,500. On average, more than 3,200 duty weapons were recovered at crime scenes annually over that 16-year period.

Records detailing some of the traces conducted between 2013 and 2017 indicate that the guns previously belonged to more than 800 different agencies, ranging from rural sheriff’s offices to police departments in the country’s largest cities.

Even more granular trace information used to be publicly available, making it easier for reporters to hold police accountable for their resale practices. The Washington Post in 1999 analyzed ATF data and identified 107 crimes linked to former District of Columbia police guns. That same year, a similar investigation by CBS News revealed more than 3,000 police guns had been connected to crimes – including nearly 300 homicides – since 1990. 

The Tiahrt Amendment, passed by Congress in 2003 and named after the lawmaker who introduced it, now bars the ATF from disclosing most trace information to the public. In 2017, Reveal sued the ATF for refusing to respond to a public records request for statistical data on recovered police guns. The agency pushed back, citing Tiahrt. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided in favor of Reveal in 2020, ruling that the request fit within an exception to Tiahrt that allows the ATF to release statistical information.

Federal law enforcement agencies are legally required to destroy their used guns, but there’s no similar mandate for state and local agencies. As a result, decisions about what to do with old guns are left up to state and local leaders and police chiefs, who’ve taken a variety of stances. 

Public safety concerns prompted Seattle police to stop trading in handguns around 2016. “If we’re selling them out, we just don’t know where those guns could end up,” said Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz. “We don’t want to contribute to the problem.”

When CBS News Minnesota showed our findings to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, he said his agency would stop reselling its guns.

“I don’t want us to be in a position where a weapon that was once in service for the police department here is then winding up used in a crime, or in an act of violence against a person, or even to shoot a police officer,” O’Hara said. “So going forward, we’re not going to be selling any weapons at all.”

Law enforcement agencies often trade their used weapons to a gun dealer for credit toward their next purchase, similar to how cellphone companies offer discounts on new phones in exchange for previous models. 

William Brooks, a board member for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said resales are essential for many departments to afford weapons upgrades. “Decisions about trading in old police service weapons should be left to individual communities and their police chiefs,” he said. “We believe that, should a community decide to destroy old weapons when new ones are purchased, they should commit just as fervently to fully funding new firearm purchases when their police chiefs call for them.”

Once sold by a department, weapons enter a secondary market where they can be resold to members of the public or other dealers. By the time they turn up at crime scenes, the guns may have been stolen, traded or resold multiple times with little documentation. They sometimes still have the department’s name stamped on the side. 

Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing,” said trade-ins allow police to avoid public scrutiny, as they can purchase new guns without having to obtain budgetary approval from city leaders. 

“There are certainly other mechanisms to acquire weapons. You can get a line item in the budget with the city, but that could come with all kinds of political hurdles to jump through,” Sierra-Arévalo said. “So I’m not surprised that when someone shows up and says they can help the police skip all of that, the police go with that.” 

The Baltimore Police Department weathered public criticism in 2008 after one of its traded-in service weapons was used to kill two children as they walked home from a slumber party in Oklahoma. 

At a news conference in April, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said officers are given the opportunity to purchase their duty weapons for personal use before the guns are traded in for credit. If an officer buys a gun and wants to resell it later on, they must first offer it back to the department. 

“We know that there are some issues around the country,” Scott said. “For BPD, we’re extremely diligent about what happens when we have weapons retire.”

The police department for Baltimore County – which is separate from the Baltimore city police department – takes a different approach. In 2013, it traded in its old guns to a firearms dealer, but under the terms of the agreement, key parts of the guns were destroyed, a spokesperson said.

“I felt throughout my entire career that police departments should not be in the business of putting more guns back out into our society,” said James Johnson, who served as Baltimore County police chief from 2007 to 2017. 

In 2023, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a requirement that the Sheriff’s Department destroy firearms it no longer needed. Board Supervisor Janice Hahn said she hopes the decision can serve as a model for the rest of the country. “Those of us at the local level should do what we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals,” she said. “We all can wait all day long for Congress to pass common-sense gun violence prevention laws.” 

Some police departments argued that because they were reselling to gun stores and other federally licensed gun dealers, they were not technically purveying firearms directly to members of the public. 

In an email, a spokesperson for the Fort Worth Police Department, Buddy Calzada, said it would be “inaccurate” to report that the agency resells guns to the public. 

He then went on to explain how the department resells guns: “In rare cases, the department has traded small quantities of firearms back to the dealer the department purchased them from and received credit for newer weapons,” Calazada wrote. “It is important to note, any guns sold by a dealer are sold only to qualified buyers who have passed the Federal background checks.” 

Internal records show that the department resold more than 1,000 guns to two dealers in the past 10 years. The department declined an interview request. 

Appealing to Gun Buyers

Using sales records obtained by CBS News from dozens of police departments, reporters identified nearly 50 gun dealers whose business includes buying and reselling retired police weapons. Many are self-styled police-supply companies that also sell flashlights, handcuffs and other tools of the law enforcement trade. 

Police-supply companies that buy and sell firearms have to hold a federal gun dealer’s license, which allows them to sell guns to members of the public. The license opens them up to inspections by the ATF, but internal records show that the agency has long been toothless and conciliatory, mostly issuing warnings instead of serious punishment when its inspectors find dealers breaking the law.

To encourage better practices among suppliers competing for lucrative public contracts, some California cities have passed measures to prevent local law enforcement from doing business with gun dealers that have been cited for serious violations during inspections. But in most of the country, there is no requirement for law enforcement to consider a dealer’s compliance history when awarding contracts.  

Lindsay Nichols, policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said police have a moral and ethical responsibility to do business only with gun dealers that follow best practices. “There are plenty of conditions that an agency could put on a gun store as a condition of receiving their weapons,” she said. “There are lots of gun stores out there. You don’t have to sell to any one particular business.”  

ATF inspection records show that one of the most prolific buyers of used police guns has a long history of violating federal regulations.

LC Action Police Supply, based in San Jose, California, bought more than 3,000 guns from 11 different law enforcement agencies between 2005 and 2023, including the gun involved in Cameron Brown’s homicide, according to records obtained by CBS News.

Over that same period, the ATF cited LC Action for 30 violations of federal firearms laws, including failing to conduct background checks and report suspicious gun sales, records show. One ATF inspector pushed for revoking LC Action’s license to sell guns after the company was cited for six violations in 2005, but the recommendation was overruled by agency higher-ups.  

The ATF inspected LC Action four more times between 2009 and 2019, uncovering many of the same violations. The agency allowed the company to keep its license to sell firearms.  

LC Action did not respond to multiple requests for comment via phone and email. When a reporter and a photographer from CBS News Los Angeles visited the company’s retail store and asked to speak with a representative, they were told to leave. 

An ATF spokesperson said the agency does not comment on specific cases, but as a general matter, the outcome of any licensing action involving a gun dealer is dependent on the underlying facts and circumstances. The spokesperson added that the ATF’s policies and procedures were designed to maximize public safety by ensuring federal law is fairly and consistently administered.

In 2021, the Biden administration ordered the ATF to implement a zero-tolerance policy on lawbreaking gun dealers, a step that has led to an increase in license revocations. 

Used police guns are popular among gun buyers because they’re relatively inexpensive and often in good condition. They also typically have high ammunition capacities and are designed to hold large- to medium-caliber rounds. 

Larry Brown Jr., a firearms instructor and president of the Bass Reeves Gun Club in Atlanta, said he bought a used police gun because it was already equipped with glow-in-the-dark sights and a special trigger that made it easier to shoot, saving him money on upgrades. 

“The price is on point,” Brown said. “Police trade-ins are typically better equipped and better souped-up than what I would buy new. That’s what made me buy the one I have.”

The demand for decommissioned police weapons has created a thriving market, with gun dealers snapping them up en masse.

“Every now and then, I’ll get a call from my reps saying, ‘Hey, we got a bunch of police Glock 22 trade-ins for a great price. They’re all in good shape if you’re interested,’ ” said Mark Major, the owner of 2-Swords Tactical & Defense, a gun dealer in Lithonia, Georgia. “Usually, police trade-ins are kept up by the armorer in the department. They do have some scratches and rubs on them from being in a holster, but they work.” 

Online forums and blogs promoting the benefits of used police guns are common, and there are dozens of YouTube videos featuring gun dealers and enthusiasts showing off large shipments of the weapons to entice potential buyers. 

In a video posted last month by AimSurplus, a gun dealer in Monroe, Ohio, one of the store’s employees shows off a rolling cart piled high with assault weapons, as well as several boxes of pistols and shotguns – all former police guns to be resold on its website. 

“You guys love our police trade-ins,” the employee says. “And why shouldn’t you? They’re awesome. We just got a whole truckload in.” 

This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and Mother Jones.

In early April, Sarah Moore got the news she was dreading: Her husband, Dennis Jackson Moore, had been denied parole again. It was his fourth rejection in as many years. 

Dennis, who goes by Vega, is 45. He has spent more than half his life in prison in Virginia for a murder and armed robbery he committed as a teenager. At the time, his defense argued that he did not fully understand the charges against him and had been misled by a detective when he gave a recorded confession. Vega was tried in adult court. Prosecutors called him a “cunning seventeen and three-quarters-year-old who committed a violent and senseless act.” At age 18, the jury found Vega guilty and a judge sentenced him to 53 years in prison. 

Up until four years ago, Vega, like most people in Virginia prisons, was not eligible for parole. But in 2020 state lawmakers extended the possibility of early release to Vega and hundreds of others who carried out crimes as juveniles and have served at least 20 years of their sentence. “We are a nation of second chances,” Senator David W. Marsden, a Democrat who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said at the time, “and those who are incarcerated for long periods of time when they are juveniles are especially deserving of that look.”

Vega’s 38-page application packet to the parole board makes the case that he is no longer a “misguided seventeen-year-old who made extremely reckless and thoughtless decisions.” He says he has spent more than two decades behind bars working to better himself—getting his GED, teaching himself multiple languages, studying real estate, marrying Sarah, and learning to care for her two daughters and son from afar. Vega says he’s become a rehabilitated and remorseful man worthy of an opportunity to rejoin society. If he ever gets out, he wants to help at-risk youth avoid incarceration. “I’ve grown up in prison,” he writes, “but I will not make prison my life.”  

After repeated denials from the parole board, Sarah says any second chance for her husband only seems good on paper. Like in previous decisions, the parole board’s most recent denial delivered in late March stated that releasing Vega would diminish the seriousness of his crime and he should serve more time. “We’re just so frustrated,” Sarah said after his latest rejection. She’s left wondering: “What more does he have to do?” 

For Vega and others eligible for parole in Virginia, the odds of being released have gone from slim to nearly impossible in recent years under new GOP leadership, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis of monthly parole board decisions. 

Under past Democratic administrations, Virginia already had one of the harshest parole systems in the nation, with single-digit annual approval rates. But parole grants have declined even further since Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin began to overhaul the parole board in 2022, dipping to an approval rate of just 1.6 percent in 2023. So far this year, Youngkin’s parole board has approved only eight of the 628 applications it considered, a grant rate of 1.3 percent, according to Mother Jones’ and Bolts’ analysis. 

In March, the month Vega was denied for a fourth time, the board approved only 2 out of the 117 cases it considered. 

As chances for parole decline across the country, experts say the Commonwealth stands out. “Virginia is paroling basically nobody,” says Wanda Bertram with the Prison Policy Initiative. The blanket denial of conditional release to deserving candidates, supporters of parole argue, ultimately advances blind punishment and undermines incentives toward rehabilitation and positive change.

Vega says he now understands the devastation caused by his actions. “I took a life and I don’t condone that,” he says. “I don’t even understand my thoughts at that time, but I feel for the victim’s family.” (In a 1997 victim impact statement, the mother of Vance Horne, the man he killed, wrote that the loss of her son felt “as though a part of my body, a part of my very being has been taken away without warning or reason.”) In the years since, Vega says he’s become a different person. “I’m not the same guy anymore,” he explains. “Who of us is the same person they were at that age?” 

He also sees how the crime hurt his own family; Darlene Smith, Vega’s mother, says his arrest for the murder felt like “someone reached in my chest and pulled my heart out and just set it on fire.”

With every “no” from the parole board, Vega and his supporters feel like the system is dangling a possibility for release that will never materialize: “What’s the point of having a second chance available,” he wonders, “when you’re not willing to give it?” 

Almost two decades ago, during the height of a nationwide wave of tough-on-crime policies, Virginia effectively abolished parole by adopting a “truth-in-sentencing” law. The new rules mandated people serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. Only elderly prisoners, or those convicted before the law was enacted in 1995, were eligible for parole. 

Before parole was gutted, 46 percent of eligible candidates in Virginia were granted early release. By 1998, that figure had dropped to 5 percent. Although the number of people up for parole has grown in recent years as a result of criminal justice reforms expanding eligibility and an aging adult population, their chances of actually getting out have remained low. Only about 6 percent of parole applicants were approved under Terry McAuliffe, the state’s Democratic governor from 2014 to 2018.

Recognizing a problem, McAuliffe created a state commission to study reinstating parole, questioning whether Virginia kept too many people in prison for too long. In 2019, Democrats seized control of the rest of the state government. Soon after, Virginia extended parole eligibility to juvenile offenders like Vega, as well as to people convicted by juries between 1995 and 2000 because of constitutional issues with how trials were conducted at the time. 

But even with those expansions, parole releases were still a drop in the bucket compared to a state prison population of roughly 24,000. This contributed to Virginia’s crowded prisons and aging incarcerated population—at a high cost to taxpayers. 

“The expectation pre-1995 was that you had a very good chance of receiving parole once you were eligible to be reviewed,” says Allison Weiss, a professor of prison litigation at Washington and Lee University School of Law who teaches a course where students assist parole applicants. “Over time, there’s just been a narrowing of the view of what parole is or should be in the state.” 

By the time McAuliffe ran for governor again in 2021, Youngkin had folded attacks on Virginia’s already-restrictive parole system into a broader GOP campaign that painted Democrats as soft on crime. “Terry McAuliffe’s hand-picked parole board had one mission—cut them loose,” Youngkin posted on X during the race, adding that Virginia wouldn’t be safe under his opponent. 

After taking office the following year, Youngkin swiftly fired his predecessor Ralph Northam’s five-member parole board and installed his own appointees, some of whom had openly opposed releasing people on parole—triggering a political standoff with Democrats who still control the state Senate and must confirm the governor’s nominees. The Senate blocked most of Youngkin’s initial selections, except for Chadwick Dotson, a former judge and prosecutor who was chosen to chair the parole board. 

Even before this battle to reshape it, the agency was already in disarray. In 2010, prisoners who were eligible for parole but denied multiple times sued the parole board, claiming it refused to properly consider their cases; the reason for denial provided in most instances was the seriousness of the original crime. A 2021 report from Washington and Lee University found deficiencies in the board’s decision-making process, including the fact that members don’t meet in person to discuss cases and instead vote electronically. 

Virginia Republicans have also criticized the parole board for failing to give legally required notices to victims and prosecutors when considering releases and for proceeding with some releases without receiving recommendations from local parole officers. As chair, Dotson issued a report to the governor last year calling for “drastic changes” to the board, like opening the hearings to the public and expanding the number of board members. 

Under Youngkin, the board has consistently been missing a fifth member, working at times with as few as three members, which experts say further diminishes chances for parole applicants.

Several advocates for people seeking parole say Dotson seemed to make improvements to the board’s practices. During his tenure, Dotson made visits to parole candidates, sometimes accompanied by other board members. Members also began gathering on a weekly basis to debate cases where there was “reasonable chance” of granting release. 

“I think he did give people a fair chance,” says Lisa Spees, who has advocated on behalf of more than 30 parole candidates in Virginia over the years. “He implemented a lot of changes into the parole system that were much needed.” Having the opportunity to meet with a parole board member, Spees added, “gave the individual a sense of being a part of that decision-making process.” She and others fear that Dotson’s departure last year brought that momentum to a halt. 

Even with those improvements, when Dotson chaired the board, between January 2022 and September 2023, the grant rate was only about 2 percent. 

Last September, Youngkin replaced Dotson as board chair by appointing Patricia West. A one-time judge and former chief deputy attorney general, West also once acted as state director of juvenile justice; decades ago she served on Republican Governor George Allen’s commission that pushed for minors as young as 14 to be automatically tried in adult court when charged with some violent offenses. 

Shawn Weneta, who was until recently a policy strategist with the ACLU of Virginia, calls West “the architect of parole abolition in Virginia.” He points to her role during the Allen administration, which led the charge to eliminate parole. In 1996, Allen picked West as secretary of public safety overseeing Virginia’s prisons and parole. “We have serious concerns with her being in that role [of parole board chair],” Weneta says. 

At first, Senate Democrats tried to remove West from a list of gubernatorial appointments pending confirmation. But, with little explanation, they voted a few days later to confirm her. Between her appointment last September and late March, West has voted on fewer than 50 cases to consider parole, according to state records showing individual board members’ voting history. She approved just three people for release, all of whom were eligible under geriatric release—available for applicants 65 or older after serving at least five years of their sentence and those 60 or more who served a minimum of 10 years. 

Julie McConnell, a law professor at the University of Richmond and director of a defense clinic that works on juvenile parole law cases, says Virginia’s current parole board only seems to be approving such geriatric cases. In past years, McConnell says her legal clinic won parole for seven candidates who committed crimes as juveniles. 

So far in 2024, she says none of the applicants represented by her clinic have been granted parole. 

“I don’t know that there is a silver bullet with this board where you can present the perfect package to them that gets their attention,” McConnell says. She suspects the board focuses more on aspects outside of the applicant’s control like the crime itself or input from the prosecutor and victim’s families. 

“The Parole Board deals with some of the most heinous and violent offenders within the Department of Corrections who are eligible for parole,” Youngkin’s press secretary Christian Martinez said in an email. “Judge West and the Parole Board assess each case with a comprehensive approach, guided by policies that prioritize the voices of victims before any decision is made to release violent offenders back on the street. Parole is not a right, it’s a privilege extended only to those inmates who are eligible for consideration.” West declined to answer questions for this story. 

Advocates for people seeking parole now worry that a recently announced policy change will even further decrease their chances of release. Starting in July, victims of people applying for parole will still be entitled to annual appointments with the board, while meetings with families and advocates for the parole applicants will instead now happen every two years.

“We’ve just become so acculturated to extreme punishment that we don’t even recognize when we’re going too far,” McConnell says. “We could give people an opportunity for a fresh start.” 

In late February, Leroy Gilliam III became one of the lucky few to be granted parole in Virginia. 

Gilliam, 51, had already served almost 28 years for first-degree murder by the time he went before the parole board last June. The board had denied him twice in recent years due to the serious nature of his crime. But this time, the board decided Gilliam had shown “excellent institutional adjustment” and didn’t present a threat to public safety. 

Gilliam was both thrilled and perplexed by the decision: “I don’t know what actually changed their minds this time.” 

Parole board decisions could soon at least become less opaque in Virginia. Last year, Youngkin signed a bipartisan transparency bill into law that the ACLU touted as “the biggest reform of Virginia’s parole system since 1994.” Under the new law, which takes effect in July, the board will have to publish more regular detailed reports with individualized reasons on grants and denials, and parole review hearings will be required to include interviews with candidates themselves. The bill also gives parole applicants and their attorneys access to all of the information being considered by the board. 

“We don’t know that it will increase grant rates at all,” Weneta says. “We certainly hope that it helps. But it’s a piece of the puzzle.” He believes insulating the parole board from the influence of any individual politician is the only way to ensure an equitable system. “As long as we continue to have partisan actors setting the mandate and making the appointments, they’re going to achieve the outcomes that they want,” he says, adding that the ultimate goal is to reinstate parole for everyone.  

When Vega’s stepdaughter, Shaelyce, first spoke to Virginia’s parole board two years ago, she told them how he had become the first male role model in her life. Before Vega came into the picture, Shaelyce says her mother had been in a 13-year-long abusive relationship and they were living out of a hotel. Shaelyce, 22, is now studying to become a child psychologist to work with children who have experienced trauma. 

Shaelyce remembers pouring her heart out to the board, but says it didn’t seem to make a difference. “It’s like there’s a tablecloth that we place on the table,” she recalls with tears in her eyes, “and every time we get ready for him to come home, they sweep it right from underneath us.” Her sister Carol, 24, has also come to see Moore as a father figure. “We got all these plans,” she says. “We talk about what it’s going to be like and then to get denied it’s heartbreaking.” 

Darlene Smith, Vega’ mother, says she goes through bouts of depression and shuts down after each denial from the parole board. “He picks me up and he tells me, ‘Mom, I didn’t have this chance when I first went to prison,’” she says. “‘At least now I have a chance.’” But in Virginia, that chance is increasingly unlikely.

Sarah says each denial feels personal, like the support she and her family have given him is insufficient. “You’re telling us, ‘you’re not good enough to get him home,’” she says.

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

What is the value of a tree? It can provide a cool place to rest in the shade, a snack in the form of fruit, lumber to build a home, and cleaner air. But trees are increasingly being prized for one thing: their ability to capture carbon and counteract climate change. 

Billions of dollars are flowing into projects to plant and protect trees so that governments and businesses can claim they’ve canceled out their emissions. Saving forests and planting trees are often portrayed as a “triple win” for the environment, economy, and people. According to a major report being presented on Friday at the United Nations Forum on Forests, however, that goal is proving more complicated than expected.

The conversation about how to manage forests “has been overtaken by the climate discussion,” said Daniela Kleinschmit, an author of the report and the vice president of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, the network behind the research. The result? Indigenous peoples are getting pushed out of their lands because of carbon offset projects. Native grasslands are getting turned into forests, even though grasslands themselves are huge, overlooked reservoirs of carbon. And offset projects in forests, more often than not, fail to achieve all of the emissions benefits their backers had promised. 

The new report, the first comprehensive assessment of how the world is governing its forests in 14 years, offers some good news—global deforestation rates have slowed down slightly, from 32 million acres a year in 2010 to 25 million in 2020. But what the report calls the “climatization” of forests has led to the rise of carbon sequestration markets that prioritize short-term profits over long-term sustainability, it found.

Experts say that it’s possible to pursue the global goal of sequestering carbon in forests while also keeping locals happy—it would just take a more thoughtful approach that considers the tradeoffs and involves the people most affected.

Daniel Miller, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Notre Dame, said that a narrow focus on forests’ environmental benefits misses “a huge part of the story.” Miller’s research has shown that forests can help fight poverty, since the edible goods found in them are often available during times of the year when people might go hungry. Having forests nearby can make land more productive, increasing crop yields by more than 50 percent in some cases. That’s because forests can enrich the soil, increase rainfall, and help with pollination. More than 3 billion people live within 1 kilometer (a little over half a mile) of forests and depend on them for jobs, like harvesting timber, and for food like nuts and mushrooms. 

Forests can also help people adapt to a warming world. They regulate floods and landslides and sustain livelihoods that are jeopardized by climate change, said Ida Djenontin, a professor of geography at Penn State.

But what looks like a promising carbon sequestration effort can have unexpected consequences that undermine those benefits. For example, Finland’s ministry of agriculture is trying to fertilize its forests to make them grow faster, in the hope that they will suck up carbon quickly and help the country meet its goal of going carbon-neutral by 2035. But according to the new report, the government didn’t account for the energy-intensive process of producing and transporting fertilizer, a large source of carbon emissions. The report also points out that fertilizing forests can end up hurting reindeer herding, since it stifles the growth of lichen that reindeer eat; one study found that it could also reduce berry production in forests by 70 percent. “It seems that the ongoing climate crisis has, to some extent, legitimized excessive forest management techniques, such as fertilization,” the report concludes. 

Many forest offset projects don’t work as intended. An investigation last year found that only eight out of 29 rainforest offset projects approved by Verra, the world’s biggest certifier, had meaningfully reduced deforestation. The rest of the projects “had no climate benefit,” according to The Guardian, partially because the threat of those forests getting cut down had been vastly overstated.

The narrative that forests can save the world from climate change is a tempting one for businesses and politicians—they can seemingly take care of their climate pledges if they’re willing to fork over the money, without having to do the hard work of reducing emissions. It also allows people to skip the hard conversations about cutting down on consumption, Kleinschmit said. The market for voluntary carbon offsets—the ones companies choose to buy—is predicted to grow from around $2 billion in 2021 to $250 billion by 2030. 

Another problem is that “carbon cowboys”—a term for those seeking to profit off carbon offset schemes—can end up evicting Indigenous peoples from their homes. In 2015, Cambodian officials set aside more than 1,900 square miles of rainforest in the country’s Cardamom Mountains for a carbon offset project without consulting the Chong people that had lived there for centuries. Villagers were forced from their lands, and some were even arrested for collecting resin from trees, since carbon offset areas were monitored to stop locals from using the forest’s resources.

In the United Arab Emirates, the company Blue Carbon has negotiated deals for millions of acres so it can launch offset projects aimed at protecting forests across Liberia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Much of that land has been held by Indigenous peoples. Since 1990, an estimated quarter-million people around the world have been pushed out of their homes in the name of conservation. 

Global climate goals, of course, don’t have to come into conflict with local needs. Experts say it’s possible to balance the two effectively. Prakash Kashwan, an environmental studies professor at Brandeis University, said that locals can use resources from trees, at least on a smaller scale, without hurting a forest’s ability to sequester carbon, according to his research. Studies have demonstrated that involving Indigenous peoples and local residents in the process of decision-making is key to better social and environmental outcomes—including carbon sequestration. 

“Allowing communities a say in how forests are managed is absolutely vital to more effective, lasting, and just forest governance, and for tackling these big global challenges that we face,” Miller said.

By now, it looks like appearing on national television and refusing to commit to certifying the 2024 general election results is a requirement for Trump vice-presidential hopefuls.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.)—all of whom are among the possible candidates, NBC News reported last week—have all failed to answer “yes” when television hosts have asked them if they will commit to accepting the results no matter who wins. Their responses have ranged from simply insisting Trump will be the next president, to spreading election misinformation, to falsely claiming that Democrats are trying to sabotage free and fair elections.

Today, one more lawmaker joined their ranks. When Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, put that question to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)—who is also reportedly on the shortlist—he replied: “No matter what happens? No. If it’s an unfair election, I think it’s going to be contested by either side.”

In his approach to undermining a lynchpin of US democracy, Rubio opted to take the Stefanik approach and attack Democrats. He noted, “I think you’re asking the wrong person. The Democrats are the ones that have opposed every Republican victory since 2000, every single one. Hillary Clinton said the election was stolen from her and that Trump was illegitimate.” 

“But she conceded,” Welker replied. 

“She said that Trump was illegitimate. She said that the election had been stolen,” Rubio went on. “Kamala Harris agreed. By the way, there are Democrats serving in Congress today who, in 2004, voted not to certify the Ohio electors because they said those machines had been tampered with.”

To be clear: Those Democrats said they were not aiming to change the outcome of the election but to draw attention to voter disenfranchisement, CNN reported at the time. A report released by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee the following year concluded that there were “numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters,” particularly minority and Democrat voters.

But Rubio was on a roll and undeterred by facts. “And you have Democrats now saying they won’t certify 2024 because Trump is an insurrectionist and ineligible to hold office,” he went on. “So you need to ask them.”

WATCH: Will you accept the results of the 2024 no matter who wins? @kwelkernbc asks.@SenMarcoRubio (R-Fla): "No matter what happens? No, if it's an unfair election."

Welker: "Senator, no matter who wins."

Rubio: "I think you're asking the wrong person." pic.twitter.com/COUL2MvPm9

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) May 19, 2024

Welker reminded Rubio that he voted to certify the 2020 election results. She then reminded him of his own apparently long-forgotten position on the matter four years ago, when he said, “Democracy is held together by people’s confidence in the election and their willingness to abide by its results.”

Trump, meanwhile, continues to deny the legitimacy of his loss and has sowed doubt about whether he’ll accept the result of a free and fair election. Earlier this month, he took a preemptive attack and zeroed in on a single state, suggesting that he may not accept the 2024 presidential results from Wisconsin when asked in an interview with a local newspaper.

“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in a state where he recently appeared at a rally. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

Referring to Trump’s continued questioning of the election results, Welker asked Rubio, “By your own definition, are Donald Trump’s claims undermining Americans’ confidence in democracy?” Rubio refused to respond directly. Instead, he parroted unfounded claims about election fraud and falsely claimed NBC News did not cover controversies surrounding Hunter Biden. 

“I’m telling you that if it’s unfair, we are going to do the same thing Democrats do,” Rubio asserted. “We’re going to use lawyers to go to court and point out the fact that states are not following their own election laws.”

His desperate defense of Trump’s election denial—despite his own certification of the 2020 election results—comes as a major shift for Rubio, who Trump used to deride as “Little Marco” during the 2016 GOP primary when they both vied for the nomination. As my colleague Pema Levy reported then, during that contest Rubio called Trump a “con artist,” a “lunatic,” not to mention, “rude and obnoxious and offensive.” He also questioned Trump’s ability to spell and…the size of his hands. Yet, when it came time to cast his ballot, he still voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. 

While Rubio spewed a lot of lies today, there’s one thing he’s said about Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 that is worth remembering, given that Trump is currently ensnared in his first criminal trial. “Friends do not let friends vote for con artists,” Rubio told his supporters. 

For weeks preceding President Biden’s commencement speech on Sunday at Morehouse College—a historically Black men’s college in Atlanta—students and faculty opposed his appearance, alleging that the president should not be the guest of honor given his ongoing support for Israel’s war in Gaza. 

As student protests swept through other colleges and universities, even forcing the cancellation or readjustment of commencement ceremonies, Morehouse students spoke to the press about their discomfort with Biden’s appearance. They confronted the school’s President, David Thomas, about his invitation to the president, and some members of the Morehouse faculty and others from Spelman and Clark Atlanta—two other historically Black colleges—demanded in an open, unsigned letter that administrators cancel his appearance, alleging that the school was “endorsing genocide” by having him speak.

I reported this week that the Biden administration has moved to send another $1 billion in weapons to Israel—even after the President told CNN that he would stop shipping certain weapons to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proceeded with a major ground invasion of Rafah. Despite this warning, Israeli forces have already begun the incursion, forcing an estimated 800,000 Palestinians to flee the area, according to the UN. Thomas told the Washington Post that administrators initially reached out to the White House in September about the possibility of Biden speaking, a month before the start of the Israel-Hamas war. 

But commencement ceremonies and Biden’s appearance largely came and went without disruptive protests—though a couple of speakers did find ways to acknowledge the plight of Palestinians. In his opening evocation, Rev. Claybon Lea Jr. called for leaders to value “human life…whether they live in Israel or Palestine,” and said that Jesus Christ was a “Palestinian Jew.” (Biden is a devout Catholic.)

The valedictorian, DeAngelo Fletcher, used part of his address to call for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip,” prompting applause from the audience—and Biden himself. Fletcher told NPR this week, “Biden has been on a tirade in the Middle East, giving billions and billions of dollars to foreign countries.”

#Morehouse valedictorian, Deangelo Fletcher, calls for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip” — met with applause from crowd and @POTUS behind him. pic.twitter.com/jlckIGES8C

— Garrison Hayes (@garrison_hayes) May 19, 2024

Signals of opposition to Biden’s appearance were peaceful and relatively unobtrusive; the most unified one was when the entire graduating class remained seated when he took the podium. Several students in the audience appeared to wear keffiyehs, some sat with their backs turned to Biden, and another student appeared to be holding up a Palestinian flag. 

During his remarks, Biden acknowledged what he described as the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza and called for an “immediate ceasefire,” to “stop the fighting and bring the hostages home.” He also addressed the scale of protests against the war on college campuses, saying, “I support peaceful nonviolent protest. Your voices should be heard. And I promise you I hear them.” Noting that he is working towards “two-state solution…the only solution,” Biden said, “I know [the war] angers and frustrates many of you, including my family. But most of all, I know it breaks your heart. It breaks mine as well.” He was likely referring to reports that First Lady Jill Biden has urged him to “stop it now.”

The President spoke vehemently against racism and showcased his track record supporting the interests of Black voters, with whom his support has recently eroded. While Biden retains an advantage over Trump with Black voters overall, a Washington Post/Ipsos poll published last month found that 55 percent of Black Americans under 30 years old disapprove of his job performance; in contrast, a year ago, 56 percent of that group approved of Biden. 

“You started college just as George Floyd was murdered, and there was a reckoning on race,” Biden told the graduates, before later condemning “the poison of white supremacy.” 

“Instead of forcing you to prove you’re ten times better, we’re breaking down doors so you have 100 times more opportunities,” he added, touting the more than $16 billion his administration has allocated to HBCUs. He noted his history of supporting Black leadership, and said many Morehouse graduates now worked in his administration. He reminded his audience of his role as vice president to the first Black president; his naming of a Black woman as his vice president; and his appointment of the first Black woman to be a Supreme Court Justice. 

But whether these statistics—and Biden’s long history of supporting Black leaders—will be enough to swing the hotly contested election in his favor remains to be seen. A Carnegie poll released last month found that 59 percent of Black Americans believe US should restrict military aid to Israel to ensure that American weapons are being used in alignment with international human rights law, and that the number of Black Americans who reported feeling connected with the plight of Palestinians grew from 32 percent in October 2023 to 45 percent in March. 

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

While the Gulf of Mexico is a region known for oil, it’s also home to something far less expected. Nestled among offshore oil platforms, about 150 miles from Houston, is one of the healthiest coral reefs in the world: the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.

Marine researchers who have visited the Flower Garden Banks describe it with awe in their voices. “When you look out, it can be almost disorienting because there’s so much coral,” said Michelle Johnston, superintendent of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. 

As reefs around the world bleach at alarming rates, scientists are racing to study and preserve this remarkable coral reef in the unlikeliest of places. “We have these magical underwater places, [and yet they are] completely surrounded by the oil and gas industry,” Johnston said.

To understand how both can exist in such close proximity, it helps to understand the history of the region. Roughly 190 million years ago, the ocean here was drying up, leaving behind a massive plain of salt. Over the ages, that dried-up layer of salt was buried deep in the earth.  

And eventually, a new body of water—the Gulf of Mexico—formed high above it. Because salt is less dense than the surrounding rock, the layer slowly rose toward the surface, pushing the earth above it, while pulling up massive oil deposits from below. Slowly, this shift created enormous underwater mountains known as “salt domes.” Looking at a map of the Gulf of Mexico today, you can see that many of its oil drilling sites are on those same underwater mountains.

A few of these mountains rose so high that sunlight was just able to filter down through the water to reach them. And roughly 10,000 years ago, coral polyps latched onto the peaks and started to grow. Those underwater mountaintops are now the Flower Garden Banks.

Because the reef is so far from the shore, it’s been protected from many threats like overfishing and coastal pollution. And because of its depth and northern latitude, the water here is about as cold as corals can tolerate, essentially protecting the Flower Garden Banks from global warming. In the summer of 2023, for example, while other reefs throughout the Caribbean were being ravaged by heat stress and bleaching, the unique geology of Flower Gardens allowed it to fare better than the rest. 

But this same unique geology has also turned the region into a massive hub for offshore oil drilling.

“When you’re offshore diving at the Flower Gardens, you look around from the dive boat and you can see oil and gas platforms in every direction,” Johnston said. “So there’s all of this industry happening around this beautiful place.”

For now, the reef has thankfully avoided any catastrophic oil spills, but that doesn’t mean that oil hasn’t left its mark. In fact, the legacy of oil extraction, carbon emissions, and climate change are quite literally etched into the hard skeletons of the corals themselves.

“I think of that skeletal material as a little time capsule,” said Amy Wagner, a scientist who studies corals to find clues about Earth’s past.

Back when she was a graduate student in 2005, Wagner and a team of scientists came to Flower Garden Banks in search of one very specific type of coral, Siderastrea siderea. “They just look like a bunch of rocks on the bottom,” she said.

The team dove down 78 feet, to the peaks of these ancient mountaintops, and drilled a nearly 6-foot-long core of this slow-growing species of coral—a 250-year record of pollution, climate change, and even world events. “You start to drill in and, especially in that initial drilling, you’re getting the tissue layer of the coral,” Wagner said. “And you end up having a lot of fish come in, because it’s free food, right?”

After hours of drilling, they patched up the hole and swam the 6-foot-long core to the surface. Back at the lab, they split open the core samples and x-rayed them. “They’re like trees,” Wagner said. “You can count the tree rings and go back in time. Corals produce these annual bands.”

Every year, the living coral organism lays down a new growth band, using the nutrients and minerals it pulls out of the seawater. Essentially, whatever’s in the seawater makes it into that year’s layer of coral skeleton. “So we have this long record of these little, tiny time capsules that are sort of locking in the ocean chemistry,” Wagner said.

Using a high-tech version of a dentist’s drill, Wagner and her colleague Kristine DeLong, a professor at Louisiana State University, collected a tiny bit of dust from each growth band. Then, like detectives, they analyzed different elements in the dust for clues, looking at the variations in the coral core over time.

Just like humans, corals build their skeletons out of calcium. But sometimes they make mistakes, accidentally grabbing look-alike elements from the seawater. One of those elements is barium, which is often used as a lubricant in offshore oil wells. During the 1970s energy crisis, oil drilling boomed in the Gulf of Mexico. And Wagner and DeLong could see that spike reflected in the barium levels in the coral: When oil prices crashed, production went down, and so did the barium.

There are many other histories scientists can see etched in this coral core. By looking at nitrogen, they can see the rise of fertilizer pollution from the Mississippi River. By looking at radioactive carbon, they can see the rise of nuclear weapons tests during the Cold War.

And the corals even tell the story of how fossil fuels are changing the climate—in the words of one scientist, “recording their own demise.” To see how, it’s important to know that carbon atoms aren’t all exactly the same. They actually come in a few different weights, depending on the number of neutrons in each carbon atom.  A carbon atom with seven neutrons is called “heavy carbon,” while an atom with six neutrons is called “light carbon.” Plants prefer to use the light carbon for photosynthesis. So, inside of a plant, the carbon atoms tend to be a little bit lighter than those, say, inside of a volcano. 

Fossil fuels come from ancient plants, which are full of light carbon. As fossil fuel emissions rise, the carbon atoms in our atmosphere are slowly getting lighter. 

You can see this same trend playing out inside of the corals: The carbon in the coral slowly gets lighter in the band samples as the world burns more fossil fuels. As those fossil fuel emissions warm the climate, they put reefs around the world in danger. 

Today, the Flower Garden Banks are still holding on, but they won’t be safe forever. As early as 2040, the Flower Garden Banks could start to see major bleaching events every summer. If we can reduce our emissions at a more reasonable pace, climate models say we might be able to buy an extra 15 to 20 years for the Flower Garden Banks—essentially doubling its window of time. That window would be critical for the sanctuary staff and independent scientists who are working hard to study and protect what might become one of the last coral reefs.

“Going to a place like Flower Gardens, it’s like—these corals, they’re still pretty darn healthy,” said  DeLong. “Being able to manage those reefs and take care of them is important, because they may be the last ones we have.”

Recently, scientists at the Flower Garden Banks have started collecting corals from the reef and storing them in an onshore coral lab. The hope is to eventually bank enough coral here in case the worst happens.

“It is a grim prospect,” Johnston said. “It’s better to be proactive and have some things banked versus getting into the situation where all the corals have bleached and died and we have nothing left. It’s my hope that nature can figure things out and things can adapt. I think the problem is that the climate is changing quickly enough that there might not be time.”

The Flower Garden Banks are a product of 10,000 years of slow, steady growth, capturing annual snapshots of our world, in small millimeter-sized chapters. The next few decades will be critical in determining just how much longer this reef will be able to continue its ancient undersea story.

“I just want to share what I have discovered about my son’s circumstances that led him to this horrific, indescribable crime. I hope that my hindsight will be your foresight.”

I’ve been thinking about Chin Rodger’s words a lot lately. Chin is the subject of Mark Follman’s wrenching Mother Jones cover story about the massacre that her son, Elliot, perpetrated in the California college town of Isla Vista in 2014. Chin opened up to Mark about the depths of her grief and sorrow after the mass shooting and the almost unimaginable strength she’s shown in the aftermath. As Mark writes, Chin made the “grueling choice” to reconstruct her son’s path to horrific violence and suicide, so that she can help threat assessment experts understand what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies.

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. 

I had the privilege of editing Mark’s magazine story, so I’ve read Chin’s words over and over these past few months. They are haunting and deeply moving every time. But actually hearing Chin say them is something else entirely. The pain, the resilience, the determination to make a real difference for other children and parents—it all comes through so powerfully in a new audio investigation from our colleagues at ReveaI.

Please give it a listen. You can hear Chin speaking out publicly for the first time about the shooting and about her determination to help prevent future violence. You can hear about the trove of new evidence Mark found, shedding light on what drove Elliot to do what he did. And you can hear Mark’s interviews with the threat assessment practitioners who are using Chin’s insights in their efforts to reach troubled people before they harm themselves or others.

“The nightmare that I’m living, that the victims and the families are living, these nightmares are real, and these nightmares could be your reality any day,” Chin warns. “So we must work harder in coming together and try and prevent these horrific acts from happening again and again.”

---

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of harming yourself or others, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

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

In 2020, the Wisconsin city of Appleton brought No Mow May to the United States. Each spring, by temporarily forgoing mowing and letting residential lawns grow with flowers, residents could support bees and other insect pollinators, proponents claimed. Indeed, they even said the practice was backed by their own published scientific study.

But a little more than two years later, critics turned up severe flaws in the work conducted in Appleton, and the study was formally retracted.

To Sara Stricker, a plant pathologist, it was another sign of anti-grass zealotry gone awry. In spring 2023, she launched a campaign criticizing No Mow May, saying the movement was misguided and delivered little on its intended value. But, she said, people don’t typically want to digest the science behind such a thing: “They just want the quick hashtag and a little sign with a cute little icon in it that makes them feel good.”

Before long, Stricker’s inbox filled with hate mail. For instance, she said she was accused of being in the pocket of industry. Stricker works as a communications and outreach coordinator for the Guelph Turfgrass Institute, outside of Toronto, which has outdoor research fields for the express purposes of studying the green stuff that covers lawns and sports fields and golf fairways. She maintains that she was just trying to start a conversation and acknowledges that her institution draws support from chemical manufactures and the lawn care industry—which is not uncommon in agricultural and horticultural research. But, she said, “None of us are walking around with devil horns saying, ‘Woohaha, I want to kill something today.’ We’re all in it because we like being outside, we like doing sports, we like nature.”

Stricker had not exactly called for a Blitzkrieg on biodiversity. In fact, she encouraged people to plant a wider range of species if they wanted to help support wildlife. (Other experts have proposed similar measures.) In an experiment described in GreenMaster, a trade publication for Canadian golf course managers, her institute found that No Mow May was unlikely to make much of a difference: Over the course of the one-month study, unmowed plots of Kentucky bluegrass did not substantially support more flowers compared to plots mowed at two-and-a-half inches.

But why had experts on grass, at a premier grass-growing institute in North America, come out swinging against something as seemingly innocuous as No Mow May? If something as simple as not mowing for a month doesn’t do much for biodiversity, then what lawn-care practices—from tearing up sod entirely to planting lush wildflower meadows—are supported by data and research?

Lawns represent one of the largest, fastest growing landscapes in the US. These ecosystems—water-hungry, energy-intensive monocultures—extend far beyond the picket fence, including highway medians, cul-de-sacs, and corporate office parks. De facto lawns also exist under solar arrays, on soccer fields, and in city parks. In the US, it’s a landmass that, by some estimates, covers an area about the size of Iowa.

The concept of well-manicured, tightly shorn spaces originated as a status symbol in Europe. Colonizers introduced grasses in an effort to replicate the places they left. By the 18th century, wealthy Americans began tending formal lawns, and much later, particularly in the wake of post-war industrialization and suburban development, the masses followed suit.

But by the 1980s, the lawn began to lose its luster as nonprofit organizations and individuals increasingly called for its eradication. In 1989, the writer Michael Pollan published a landmark essay “Why Mow?” which indelibly described lawns as “nature purged of sex and death.” In some circles, lawns have come to exemplify a consumptive sensibility. “Over the past 50 years, we’ve slowly fallen out of love with lawns,” The Washington Post reported in 2022. “They began to signal waste, disregard, disharmony, homogeneity, gentrification, zombie Boomerism.”

The imperatives to remove lawns span a range of concerns: managing scarce water, building climate resiliency, boosting biodiversity, and even supporting mental health. As J. Leighton Reid, a restoration ecologist at Virginia Tech, put it, any change is probably better than the status quo. “It almost goes without needing evidence to say that a lawn has lower biodiversity than a native ecosystem,” he said. “I mean, that’s just inevitably going to be the case.”

But what actually works? Quick-fix lawn-conversion solutions encounter several problems in practice. For one, contemporary agricultural and horticultural research often focuses on commercial production on a large scale. (Private firms, such as those marketing chemical fertilizers and herbicides, overwhelmingly bankroll R&D in the US.) In contrast, ornamental lawn maintenance falls to practitioners—DIYers and hired professionals alike—who learn from experience and tend to focus on what looks best. Advocates also take matters into their own hands, although no single foolproof method for replacing the lawn and transforming it into a more functional ecosystem exists.

Perhaps the most obvious and most enduring problem rests with grass itself. Grasses generally have a number of reproductive methods and survival mechanisms that make them hard to wipe out. As Laura Jackson, director of the University of Northern Iowa’s Tallgrass Prairie Center, which conducts large-scale prairie restoration, put it: “You can drive a stake through its heart, you can put on the garlic, you can get out the silver cross or whatever, and you’re still going to have that stuff.”

Old habits die hard, too. When it comes to lawns—to walk barefoot on a soft carpet of grass, the sensibility, the institution of lawn care, the whole way of thinking—the practice seems indestructible. And so, some people fire up gas-powered mowers while their neighbors stake No Mow May signs in their lawns gone “wild.” Surely, there has to be a middle ground.

In ecological circles, there is a consensus for why the traditional lawn is perhaps long overdue for disruption, as monoculture grasses do not support much life. Simply put, lawns are deceptively lush: They look green, but are not figuratively “green” in terms of supporting a functional ecosystem.

One study on 159 residential yards in the Washington, DC, area found that, even in the leafy suburbs, an area rich with flowering plants, the landscape filled with nonnative vegetation lacked resources for birds. These nonnative plant species supported fewer insects regularly eaten by one beloved native bird species, the Carolina chickadee. In essence, the suburban landscape doubled as a food desert for the birds.

Hence, the impetus to convert. The best way to do so, however, is unclear. Looking at grasslands in Virginia, for instance, one master’s thesis study suggests that native wildflowers established more consistently when herbicide killed the existing grass completely (rather than seeding the wildflowers with no grass removal). Another PhD student found evidence that the resulting level of native plant diversity in restored grasslands represents a pale facsimile compared to grassland that remained relatively undisturbed.

Reid, the Virginia Tech restoration ecologist who oversaw these studies, said he’s not sure how well the results translate since the studies focused on large-scale post-agricultural production systems. But one takeaway, given that native species fare better with less competition from grasses, is that it’s a case for clearly delineated strips that spatially separate grass from native plantings.

So, it’s not that there is disagreement over the why. Lawns could stand to benefit from greater biodiversity. But it’s the how that should happen—from grass-smothering mulches to sod-busting mechanical tools to chemical herbicides.

The lack of one-size-fits-all prescriptive advice isn’t just a matter of the heterogeneity of the landscape—the average rainfall and climate in Virginia is not the same as, say, southern California—but also of favoritism on an institutional scale. Financial incentives focus on research related to the commercial production of food; Reid, meanwhile says there should be no less imperative to study lawn conversion with an eye towards biodiversity.

That’s unlikely, though. His research, in part, grew out of an effort to create pastures that helped prevent cows from getting sick from eating nonnative grasses in the summer. “If we pitched that as a lawn transformation study,” he said, “I don’t think they would have received it as well as pitching it as a cattle production study.”

Out in the Corn Belt, Jackson, at the Tallgrass Prairie Center, which provides seeds and technical assistance for plantings along public roadsides in Iowa, contends that urban lawns probably amount to a rounding error in terms of, say, providing sustenance for migratory butterflies. “It’s absolutely of no significance whatsoever from the point of view of monarch populations,” she said. “From a political point of view, from the point of view of people caring about monarchs, if that were to translate into political action, that’d be great, that would be significant. But from the point of view of water quality or number of stems of milkweed, it doesn’t move a needle at all.”

Still, the institute’s research has some potentially useful findings. Jackson’s research on seeding milkweed (the host plant for monarch caterpillars) in road ditches with existing vegetation showed abysmal results without applying herbicides, such as Roundup, prior to planting. “You get precisely no plants,” Jackson said. “You use Roundup once, you get a few more, and, if you round it up a couple of times, you get a few more.”

While Jackson added that she personally prefers not to use chemical controls—which are mired in controversy because of their deleterious effects on soil, insect, and human health—the amounts of herbicides used annually in wildflower restoration amount to little when compared against the high volumes sprayed on crops like corn and soybeans. The reality is there’s little prairie left, and it isn’t regenerating on its own. “We’ve done a lot of damage and it’s not going to be easy to undo that damage,” she said.

Jackson championed restoration, and her blanket advice for others was simply to underscore the uncertainty: “A great deal of humility is called for in this business.”

Meanwhile, Linda Chalker-Scott, a professor and extension urban horticulturist at Washington State University, suggested grass-killing herbicides only be used as a last resort. Chalker-Scott has something of a reputation for debunking “horticultural myths.” Her initial skepticism piqued when she was reading a textbook on landscaping and came across some fishy citations: “So that’s when I started thinking, ‘Well, where is this information coming from?’ And then tracing it back and saying, ‘Well, this isn’t science. This is just someone’s anecdotal experience or some guru, self-proclaimed expert telling people what to do.’”

She generally cautions against digging up grass (it removes organic matter and disturbs the soil), and has co-authored one study that found flaws with covering a yard with cardboard and other sheet mulches in order to smother and kill off existing vegetation. In terms of reducing the movement of gasses from the soil into the atmosphere and vice versa, she said that black plastic (which kills unwanted plants by solarization and is used by organic practitioners) is worse than using 12 inches of coarse wood chips. Mulching grasses when dormant, she said, “is the single best way to prepare soil for planting, to get rid of weeds, and to pretty much improve and retain soil tilth.”

Chalker-Scott also made it clear she wasn’t calling for the wholesale removal of lawns. “I don’t hate lawns. I like functional lawns. And sod lawns,” she said, describing those planted with a roll of turf, “are not functional.”

Perhaps there is no one true path carved out of the grass. About 10 years ago, Nancy Shackelford, an ecologist at the University of Victoria, co-authored a paper outlining nine principles for restoration. “We talked a lot in that 2013 paper about resilience and self-sustaining ecosystems, as in, like, ‘Take the humans out of it.’ And I don’t really aspire to that anymore.”

Today, she said, the best laid plans involve restored ecosystems that people want to maintain. “Restoration is always about values. Always,” she said. “So, you can’t take that human piece out of restoration as much as you may try. You can’t pretend it’s just for nature.”

Ecology fundamentally lacks grand unifying theories, and her view reflects a larger shift. When the main restoration group, the Society for Ecological Restoration, updated its primer, for instance, the international conservation organization described restoration taking many shapes. Any step seemed like a good first step, Shackelford said, and, even what might appear like mere symbolic restoration of lawns can be beneficial. Still, she said, the international community sometimes implied that a restored ecosystem could and should take care of itself.

But she was less and less sure: “I actually think humans have a role to play in taking care of all ecosystems. It’s kind of our job at this point.”

Something curious has happened since the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision in June 2022: More people have obtained abortions, despite increasing barriers to access.

That’s one of the central findings of a new report released Tuesday, which found that there were nearly 86,000 average abortions per month in 2023, compared to about 82,000 a month in 2022. The rise is due, in part, to the increasing popularity of telehealth abortions, in which providers in blue states virtually prescribe and mail abortion pills—including to patients in red states—thanks to so-called shield laws that protect them from prosecution. According to the report, telehealth abortions accounted for nearly 1 in 5 abortions nationwide—about 19 percent—from October to December of last year.

The new report is part of a recurring study sponsored by the Society of Family Planning and known as #WeCount, which is aimed at providing quarterly updates on abortion access post-Dobbs. Earlier #WeCount reports found telehealth abortions accounted for 15 to 16 percent of all abortions conducted between July and September of last year, or about 14,000 abortions each month. This is a marked increase from April 2022, when telehealth abortions only accounted for about 4 percent of abortions nationwide, or about 3,600 a month, or December 2022, when they accounted for about 8,500 abortions every month, or 11 percent of the total. 

Medication abortions have long been a target of the anti-abortion movement, which has perpetrated myths about the so-called dangers of abortion pills. The recent case before the Supreme Court—FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—seeks to drastically restrict access to mifepristone, the first pill in the two-drug regimen, even as more than 100 studies have affirmed its safety and effectiveness. And recent research—including a paper published just this week in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine—has confirmed that the pills are just as safe when they’re prescribed virtually as in person.

Ushma Upadhyay, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-author of the #WeCount report, says, “As the word gets out, as more people talk about it—on Reddit, online—and feel more comfort with this model, I expect that the numbers will increase.” 

A decision in the Supreme Court case on mifepristone—including the attempt to restrict telehealth access—is expected at the end of June. As my colleague Pema Levy has written, during the oral arguments in March, the justices appeared to be unlikely to roll back access to mifepristone. Upadhyay agrees but notes that even if the justices do place some restrictions on the drug, it’s “very possible” providers would continue mailing the pills from states that have enacted shield laws.

The latest #WeCount data also sheds light on the importance of shield laws during the post-Dobbs era. From July to December of last year, about 40,000 people—most of whom were in states with abortion bans—were able to access reproductive healthcare thanks to shield laws. Data from five states that had shield laws in effect last year—Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, New York, and Vermont—are included in the latest #WeCount report. California only enacted a shield law for telehealth abortion providers in January.

These laws, Upadhyay says, seek to “minimize legal risks for those providing abortion care,” but do not “reduce the risk of criminalization, of being prosecuted because of perceived laws against self-managed abortion.” While only Nevada has a law that explicitly criminalizes self-managed abortions, Upadhyay said that people may assume that a state abortion ban may also criminalize receiving medication abortion in their state. There have not been any prosecutions of providers who have sent abortion pills to red states under shield laws, though court challenges to the laws are expected. Still, as restrictions mount—Florida, for instance, which was a haven for abortion access in the South, just imposed a 6-week ban on May 1—Upadhyay says “more people may turn to abortions provided under shield laws.” 

Other reasons for the overall increase in abortions post-Dobb include new clinics in blue states, increased funding for abortion care—from some blue state governments, private foundations, and individual people giving to abortion funds—and the destigmatization of abortion in states with fewer restrictions. But the new data should not be interpreted to suggest Dobbs hasn’t had a disastrous impact. As #WeCount co-author Alison Norris, a researcher at the Ohio State University, pointed out to reporters on Tuesday, the report found that nearly 180,000 fewer abortions were provided in-person in states that had total or 6-week abortion bans. In other words, telehealth abortion and shield laws are not adequate replacements for brick-and-mortar clinics. 

“People need trusted, in-person care locally,” Norris said. “They shouldn’t have to drive hours.”

Clinics are essential options for people who only learn about their pregnancy at, or after, 10 to 12 weeks at which point they are no longer eligible for medication abortions. Telemedicine is also not an option for those who learn something about their pregnancy after the first trimester that makes them need or want to terminate it. Teens and low-income people, in particular, also face major barriers to traveling for in-person care if they reside in states that no longer have operating clinics. 

“Our biggest concern is that with the rising numbers, people will interpret this as, ‘everybody’s getting their abortion,'” Upadhyay says. “It’s so important to highlight that there’s a lot of unmet need…there are people who are just not getting the abortions and continue to be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.”

On Thursday, purportedly on the advice of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott formally pardoned Daniel Perry for his 2020 murder of Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin. I say “purportedly” because Abbott never waited for the board before passing judgment in the case; he announced a little over a year ago that he was “working as swiftly as the law allows” to get Perry out of prison.

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,” Abbott explained on X at the time. He used that same line verbatim in his statement declaring Perry a free man. This is the twisted nature of what law-and-order means in Texas: It is soft-on-crime to convict someone of murder now.

Perry was driving his vehicle near the state Capitol when he encountered the BLM protesters that night in Austin. He drove into a crowd of demonstrators after honking at them first. He then shot Foster five times through his car window.

Perry claimed self-defense as his justification for killing Foster, who was also armed, and his attorneys argued that Foster had pointed a rifle at him. Witnesses stated that Foster had not raised his gun, however. And the prosecution produced disturbing messages from Perry in which he talked repeatedly about shooting and killing protesters. “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters,” he wrote in one text.  In another message, per the Texas Tribune, he mentioned seeing “blacks … gathering up in a group.” and wrote that “I wonder if they will let my cut the ears off of people who’s decided to commit suicide by me.” He told a friend that “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex.”

After being charged, Perry became a right-wing cause célèbre. Abbott made his initial promise to look into a pardon almost immediately after then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran a segment criticizing him for inaction in April of 2023. Members of Perry’s defense team did make hay of the fact that one member of the jury had apparently improperly consulted information that was not introduced in court. But conservatives were attracted to the trial for bigger reasons. Like Kyle Rittenhouse, Perry was exalted as a persecuted martyr standing up to progressive “anarcho-tyranny.” In his own statement on the pardon, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton placed the shooting in the context of the “BLM riots [that] terrorized the nation in 2020.”

It’s worth reckoning with the ramifications of the self-defense argument here: The right to bear arms is so inviolable that you can carry a gun almost anywhere—but, also, if you see someone carrying a gun at a protest, you can shoot them justifiably. It’s hard to have a First Amendment when the Second Amendment looks like that. It doesn’t make for much of a Second Amendment either.

But this is not just about Daniel Perry. Abbott’s pardon and its accompanying rhetoric fits into a pattern of sanctioned violence or threatened violence against undesirables. In this case, it was an Air Force veteran protesting police brutality—there is not even a cursory mention in Abbott’s statement of Foster, the victim. In January, it was migrants. “The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border,” Abbott told former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, “because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

The question of how to deal with people—and particularly people who are inside cars—who inflict harm on protesters is very much a live issue. Drivers deliberately hitting groups of people with their vehicles is an extremely common thing in the United States; a Boston Globe analysis found that “Between Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2021, vehicles drove into protests at least 139 times.” There were charges in just 65 of those incidents. At least 16 states have recently considered laws to grant immunity to drivers in such circumstances. Last month, ater critics of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza shut down streets in New York City, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) implored drivers to “take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.” In another text message ahead of an earlier trip to Dallas, Perry wrote to a friend, “no protestors go near me or my car.” The message from Abbott and people like him is ominous. Daniel Perry was not the first. Do you really think he’ll be the last?

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

A “deal” allegedly offered by Donald Trump to Big Oil executives as he sought $1 billion in campaign donations could save the industry $110 billion in tax breaks if he returns to the White House, an analysis suggests.

The fundraising dinner held last month at Mar-a-Lago with more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Occidental Petroleum, reportedly involved Trump asking for large campaign contributions and promising, if elected, to remove barriers to drilling, scrap a pause on gas exports, and reverse new rules aimed at cutting car pollution.

Congressional Democrats have launched an investigation into the “ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues” raised by what one Democratic senator called an “offer of a blatant quid pro quo,” while a prominent watchdog group is exploring whether the meeting warrants legal action.

But the analysis shared with the Guardian shows that the biggest motivation for oil and gas companies to back Trump appears to be in the tax system, with about $110 billion in tax breaks for the industry at stake should Joe Biden be re-elected in November’s election.

Biden wants to eliminate the tax breaks, which include long-standing incentives to help drill for oil and gas, with a recent White House budget proposal targeting $35 billion in domestic subsidies and $75 billion in overseas fossil fuel income.

“Big oil executives are sweating in their seats at the thought of losing $110 billion in special tax loopholes under Biden in 2025,” said Lukas Ross, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Action, which conducted the analysis.

Ross said the tax breaks are worth nearly 11,000 percent more than the amount Trump allegedly asked the executives for in donations. “If Trump promises to protect polluter handouts during tax negotiations, then his $1 billion shakedown is a cheap insurance policy for the industry,” he said.

Some of the tax breaks have been around for decades, and are a global issue, but the US oil and gas industry benefited disproportionately from tax cuts passed by Trump when he was president in 2017.

Next year, regardless of who is president, a raft of individual tax cuts included in that bill will expire, prompting a round of Washington deal-making over which industries, if any, will help fund an extension.

Lobbying records show that Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Occidental, Cheniere, and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have all met lawmakers this year to discuss this tax situation, likely encouraging them to ignore Biden’s plan to target the fossil fuel industry’s own carve-outs.

Chevron and ConocoPhillips, the analysis shows, lobbied on a deduction for intangible drilling costs, the largest federal subsidy for US oil and gas companies, which is worth $10 billion, according to federal figures.

Other lobbying centered on more generalized tax breaks that the oil and gas industry has taken advantage of. ExxonMobil lobbied for a little-known bill that would restore a bonus depreciation deduction to its full value, which, according to Moody’s, would allow Big Oil to avoid Biden’s newly established corporate minimum tax.

“Unlike previous administrations, I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to big oil,” Biden said following his inauguration in 2021. But Congress and the president will have to agree to any new tax arrangements next year, and the fossil-fuel industry continues to have staunch support from Republicans and some Democrats.

The API insisted its industry gets no favorable treatment in the tax system. “America’s energy industry proudly invests in communities, pays local, state and federal taxes and receives no special tax treatment from the federal government,” a spokesperson said. “This nonsense report is another attempt to distract from the importance of all energy sources—including oil and natural gas—to meet America’s growing energy needs.”

The high stakes for the fossil-fuel industry, as well as for the climate crisis, have placed scrutiny upon those who attended Trump’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Although representatives of large oil companies were present, the majority of known attendees were executives of smaller firms focused on specific subsections of the fossil-fuel industry, such as fracking or gas exporting.

Those companies are not often held to account in international forums such as the UN climate talks or the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which means they are less likely to make buzzy climate pledges. They may also be more threatened by regulations on individual parts of the US fossil fuel economy, such as auto-emissions standards aiming to quell gas-car usage.

“The oil majors…see their future in plastic [production]. That doesn’t apply to the smaller companies who don’t work across the industry,” said Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity. “They’ve got nothing to shift to.”

Among other reported attendees were the head of the company Venture Global, which rivals Qatar as one of the world’s leading liquefied natural gas exporters. This year, the company came under fire after it was revealed to have been using millions of gallons of water to construct a Louisiana LNG terminal while a nearby community faced extreme shortages. The firm was also accused late last year of reneging on its contracts by Shell and BP.

Another attendee: Nick Dell’Osso, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, which after years of court fights had to pay $5.3 million to Pennsylvania landowners who say they were cheated out of gas royalties. The company’s earlier CEO, John McClendon, was indicted in 2016 on charges of conspiring to rig bids on oil and gas leases in Oklahoma.

Billionaire oil tycoon Harold Hamm, who founded fossil fuel exploration company Continental Resources, was also present. He helped raise money for Trump’s 2016 presidential run and was under consideration to be Trump’s energy secretary, and was reportedly one of the seven top donors who had special seats at Trump’s inauguration. Though he eschewed the former president after his 2020 loss, he donated to Trump’s primary campaign in August.

Asked about the meeting, API spokesperson Andrea Woods said the organization “meets with policymakers and candidates from across the political spectrum on topics important to our industry.” She said the premise of Democrats’ investigation into the meeting is “patently false and an attempt to distract from a needed debate about America’s future—one that requires more energy, including more oil and natural gas.”

Amid the scrutiny of last month’s Mar-a-Lago dinner, Trump is continuing to court oil-tied funders. On Tuesday evening, he held a Manhattan fundraising dinner that cost a minimum of $100,000 to attend.

Among the event’s hosts, advocacy group Climate Power noted, was John Catsimatidis, the chief executive of the much-scrutinized gas refiner United Refining Company and owner of two grocery chains, a radio station, and holding company Red Apple Group.

Between 2017 and 2023, United Refining Company’s small refinery in western Pennsylvania was the most dangerous refinery in the country, with federal data showing it reported 10 times the average number of injuries for a refinery—63 percent higher than the next-most dangerous facility.

The company also reportedly sought to dodge environmental regulations using a process championed by Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.

Catsimatidis has also been criticized for neglecting vacant gas-station properties and for blaming gas prices on “open” borders, corporate taxes, and worker benefits. The Pennsylvania town home to United Refining pays some of the highest gas prices in the state, despite the presence of the refinery, raising suspicions among some residents about the company’s practices.

Trump this week also held a fundraiser hosted by the Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who is one of the largest recipients of Big Oil funding in Congress, and another with Joe Craft, a major Trump donor who owns massive coal producer Alliance Resource Partners. In 2016, Craft reportedly gifted Pruitt courtside basketball tickets after the agency crafted pro-coal regulations.