U.S. President Donald Trump has unveiled a top-to-bottom overhaul of the review process for infrastructure projects that critics contend causes major cracks in bedrock conservations laws.  “This is something that nobody thought was possible,” Trump said on the outskirts of Atlanta’s airport on Wednesday, contending that “horrible roadblocks” due to environmental regulations had cost “trillions of dollars” over the years.  The president said his new rule “completely modernizes the approval review process under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969,” which will cut the timeline for major projects, including highways, from up to 20 years down to two years or less.  “You’re not going to devote a lifetime to doing a project that doesn’t get approved,” Trump said of the streamlined process. “It’s going to be very quick — yes or no, after study.” In his remarks at the Hapeville Airport Hub of United Parcel Service, Trump discussed how he had personally experienced frustration with “mountains and mountains of red tape” over the decades in the real estate industry.  He remarked how “years and years of litigation and tumult” in the maze-like approval process had caused massive delays for his projects and those of other developers.  Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at McGregor Industries in Dunmore, Pa., July 9, 2020.For the second day in a row, Trump pivoted from a presidential announcement to attacking his opponent in this year’s election, former Vice President and presumptive Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden.  “Our past vice president opposes all of our permitting reforms,” the Republican president said.  The rollbacks to the act, known by its acronym, NEPA, could be removed with a simple majority vote in Congress and the president’s signature, something the opposition party is almost certain to attempt, depending on the outcome of the November election.  A number of major polls now give Biden a significant lead over Trump, and some forecast the Democrats could win enough seats in the Senate to take control of both chambers of Congress. FILE – In this March 5, 2020, file photo, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks to the media outside her home in Cambridge, Mass., after she dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.“Trump is once again selling out and silencing communities in favor of giant corporate polluters,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, who unsuccessfully vied for this year’s Democratic Party nomination to take on Trump.   More than 100 Democrat lawmakers wrote to the administration last week, opposing the planned changes to NEPA, noting that communities facing environment inequality “have been targeted for projects, and, in turn, continue to experience negative environmental and health impacts.”   “NEPA was created to give a voice to those who are often rendered voiceless and has successfully allowed impacted populations to challenge projects that negatively affect their water quality, air quality, economic prosperity, and overall health and safety,” the lawmakers added, predicting the changes will threaten and undermine “years of hard-fought progress.” The changes made by Trump’s administration are dangerous, costly and short-sighted, said Cheryl Wasserman, a former policy official with the enforcement and compliance assurance division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  NEPA is a “look and listen before you leap” law, she explained, directing “all federal agencies to work together to assess environmental and social impacts of proposed actions and to explore alternatives to avoid irreparable harm to natural and human resources, to avoid adverse and to enhance beneficial outcomes. Wednesday’s announcement by the president, however, is being praised by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).  “Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever to strengthen U.S. manufacturing capabilities and operations. Onshoring manufacturing requires first establishing basic infrastructure — from water and energy delivery to transportation — before ground can ever be broken on a major facility. Obtaining permits for these items can take years, especially when environmental reviews are piecemeal,” Rachel Jones, NAM’s vice president of energy and resources policy, said.  The “bold steps” announced today “utilize existing authority to strengthen reviews, reduce the time necessary to obtain permits and set the stage to incentivize job creation and investment in America,” she added.  
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There has been an alarming decline in the number of children getting vaccinated for such preventable diseases as diphtheria, tetanus and measles, the United Nations warned Wednesday. The U.N.’s World Health Organization and UNICEF blame the decline on the disruption of routine health care caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of World Health Organization, attends the virtual 73rd World Health Assembly in Geneva, May 18, 2020.“Vaccines are one of the most powerful tools in the history of public health, and more children are now being immunized than ever before,” WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “But the pandemic has put those gains at risk. The avoidable suffering and death caused by children missing out on routine immunizations could be far greater than COVID-19 itself.” The WHO and UNICEF said that even when vaccines are available, many children who need them are afraid to leave their homes because of the coronavirus or the difficulties of traveling because of COVID-19 restrictions.  But even before the pandemic hit, the agencies said, progress in vaccinating children was slipping. They said nearly 14 million children did not get shots against measles and pertussis in 2019. Most of these children live in Africa. Economic hardships also prevented children in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan and the Philippines from getting necessary vaccines. “COVID-19 has made previously routine vaccination a daunting challenge,” UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said. “We must prevent a further deterioration in vaccine coverage and urgently resume vaccination programs before children’s lives are threatened by other diseases. We cannot trade one health crisis for another.”
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President Donald Trump is ready to roll back a foundational Nixon-era environmental law that he says stifles infrastructure projects, but that is credited with ensuring decades of scrutiny of major projects and giving local communities a say. Trump was in Atlanta to announce changes Wednesday to the National Environmental Policy Act’s regulations for how and when authorities must conduct environmental reviews, making it easier to build highways, pipelines, chemical plants and other projects. The 1970 law changed environmental oversight in the United States by requiring federal agencies to consider whether a project would harm the air, land, water or wildlife, and giving the public the right of review and input. The White House said the final rule will promote the rebuilding of America. Critics call the Republican president’s efforts a cynical attempt to limit the public’s ability to examine and influence proposed projects under one of the country’s bedrock environmental protection laws. “This may be the single biggest giveaway to polluters in the past 40 years,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that works to save endangered species. Trump has made slashing government regulation a hallmark of his presidency and held it out as a way to boost jobs. Environmental groups say the regulatory rollbacks threaten public health and make it harder to curb global warming. With Congress and the administration divided over how to increase infrastructure investment, the president is relying on his deregulation push to demonstrate progress. “The United States can’t compete and prosper if a bureaucratic system holds us back from building what we need,” Trump said when first announcing the rollback of National Environmental Policy Act rules. Among the major changes: limiting when federal environmental reviews of projects are mandated, and capping how long federal agencies and the public have to evaluate and comment on any environmental impact of a project. Critics: Toll on minoritiesOpponents say the change will have an inordinate impact on predominantly minority communities. More than 1 million African Americans live within a half-mile of natural gas facilities and face a cancer risk above the Environmental Protection Agency’s level of concern from toxins emitted by those facilities, according to a 2017 study by the Clean Air Task Force and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People FILE – U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) leaves after a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 19, 2020.”Donald Trump is taking away the last lines of defense for front-line communities, and continues to demonstrate a total disregard for our environment and for those demanding racial and environmental justice,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former associate administrator in the Obama administration’s EPA environmental justice office, said Black and other minority communities “will pay with their health and ultimately with their lives” for these latest proposed rule changes. Trump in GeorgiaFor his announcement, Trump chose Georgia, a swing state in the general election. Trump won the Republican-leaning state by 5 percentage points in 2016, but some polls show him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee. This will be Trump’s ninth trip to Georgia and his sixth visit to Atlanta during his presidency. The president’s trip also comes as the state has seen coronavirus cases surge and now has tallied more than 12,000 confirmed cases and more than 3,000 deaths. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat who is running against incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue, said Trump’s decision to come to Georgia to discuss infrastructure as the state’s coronavirus crisis worsens demonstrates that the president is “in denial and out of control.” “Coming here for a routine photo-op is, frankly, bizarre, surreal against this unprecedented health and economic crisis,” Ossoff said. Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said that if Ossoff views a major policy announcement to expedite critical infrastructure projects as anything other than about job growth and economic expansion, then it might explain why he lost a congressional race in 2017. FILE – Heavy traffic traveling northbound on Interstate 75 moves slowly, in Forrest Park, south of Atlanta, Sept. 8, 2017.The White House said the administration’s efforts will expedite the expansion of Interstate 75 near Atlanta, an important freight route where traffic can often slow to a crawl. The state will create two interstate lanes designed solely for commercial trucks. The state announced last fall, before the White House unveiled its proposed rule, that it was moving up the deadline for substantially completing the project to 2028. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce cited a North Carolina bridge in its letter as an example of unreasonable delays, saying the bridge that connected Hatteras Island to Bodie Island took 25 years to complete, but only three years to build. “The failure to secure timely approval for projects and land management decisions is also hampering economic growth,” the business group wrote in support of the rule change. Trump’s trip to Georgia comes one day after Biden announced an infrastructure plan that places a heavy emphasis on improving energy efficiency in buildings and housing as well as promoting conservation efforts in the agriculture industry. In the plan, Biden pledges to spend $2 trillion over four years to promote his energy proposals. 
 
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The era of expanding human populations may be ending, according to a new study, with major implications for societies, the economy and the environment. The world’s population may top out at roughly 9.7 billion around 2064, up from about 7.8 billion today, before shrinking to 8.8 billion by the end of the century, according to estimates published in the journal FILE PHOTO: A combo shows buildings on Nov. 8, 2018 and after air pollution level started to drop during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to slow the spreading of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in New Delhi, India, April 8, 2020.It would be great news for the environment. Fewer people would generate fewer greenhouse gases and other pollutants, for example. It would lower demand for food, reducing the pressure that agriculture puts on land and water.  But it would turn the economy on its head.  Declining populations mean fewer workers, which means lower GDP. It also means fewer consumers, the bedrock of the global economy.  “What happens when you don’t have young people buying their first house, buying their first refrigerator, buying the first car?” said Darrell Bricker, co-author of the book, “Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline.” Bricker was not involved in the study. Also, populations age as fertility rates drop.  “This is actually more serious than just simple population decline,” said Brown University sociology professor Zhenchao Qian, who was not involved with the research.  A smaller workforce would be supporting a larger elderly population, Qian noted, raising political and fiscal questions about how to pay for health care and social security systems.  Population declines could also have geopolitical consequences. Fewer workers also mean fewer potential soldiers, Murray noted. “The balance of power between nation-states has always been related in some ways to the size of the working-age population,” he said. Anti-government protesters wear hazmat suits and gas masks during a rally demanding women’s rights during the International Women’s Day in Tahrir square in Baghdad, Iraq, March 8, 2020.Female empowerment Fertility rates have been declining worldwide mainly because women are getting more education and better access to birth control.  “It’s really a story about female empowerment,” Bricker, the “Empty Planet” author, said. The main difference between the new forecast and the U.N.’s is what they expect to happen after fertility rates bottom out.  Populations hold steady when women have an average of just over two children each. Tourists practice social distancing as they wait to extend their visa at Immigration Bureau in Bangkok, Thailand, March 27, 2020.’Great uncertainty’ The U.N.’s Wilmoth notes that both groups are basing their assumptions on “what’s still early experience in the lives of a few countries. So, I have to confess there’s great uncertainty about that,” he said. “We will know much more about that in 10 or 20 years,” he added. “But for now, we’re both guessing to some extent.” If populations do shrink, Murray said countries have three options to keep themselves afloat.  “One is to make it easier for women to work and have children,” he said, including generous parental leave and support for working mothers with young children.  Most countries that have implemented these policies have found they can help, he added, “but they don’t bring fertility back to (the) replacement (rate).” The second option is to open their borders to immigration.  Public sentiment currently is against this option in parts of the West. The Trump administration, for example, has sought to curb immigration into the United States. Opposition to European Union migration policies helped drive Britain’s Brexit vote. However, “if Murray and colleagues’ predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option,” Ibrahim Abubakar, director of the University College London Institute for Global Health, wrote in a commentary accompanying the Lancet article.    A third scenario, “one that we think is a real risk,” Murray said, is countries would be “tempted to roll back women’s reproductive health rights in order to put pressure on them to have more children for the sake of the nation-state,” a situation he called “very undesirable.” The major exception to Murray’s group’s shrinkage predictions is sub-Saharan Africa.  “Education for women is growing, but it’s still at a very low level in many countries, and it’s growing slowly,” he said.  There is a lot of uncertainty in the longer term, however.  “Birth rates are still really high,” Bricker noted, “but they’re coming down, and urbanization is starting to take place there, too, at a really rapid rate,” which tends to lower fertility rates. On the other hand, the U.N.’s Wilmoth noted, “we’ve consistently had to up the estimates. … I worry about underestimating the future population of Africa, not overestimating it.” 
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Britain announced a ban Tuesday on equipment from the firm Huawei in the rollout of its 5G super-fast mobile networks – reversing a decision made just six months ago. As Henry Ridgwell reports from London, the move appears to have been forced by U.S. sanctions on Huawei – and China is warning of possible consequences in future trade relations with Britain
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