Editorial Excerpts, March 2025
Published: March 10, 2025
… Climate change is real. The world must find ways to produce a lot more energy that does not emit greenhouse gases. Trump’s barrage of orders stands in the way of this objective. …
Halting the disbursement of hundreds of billions in grants and loans under the Inflation Reduction Act is likely to slow the deployment of renewable resources. Moreover, stopping further development of offshore wind generation subverts the objective of ensuring America’s energy supply. …
Most alarming is how Trump’s distaste for clean energy might undermine the ongoing multinational effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Lately, this effort has been losing steam. Thirty years after the first United Nations climate summit in Berlin and a decade after the celebrated Paris Agreement, fossil fuels still account for some 80% of the energy humanity consumes. It appears that no country is decarbonizing at the rate it promised under the Paris deal. …
Trump is hostile not only to climate change but also to foreign aid. By curtailing assistance for climate mitigation, America would abandon the affluent nations’ still unfulfilled responsibility to assist less developed countries in decarbonizing. …
To the extent that Trump ignores this challenge, he will increase the chance that a true emergency will occur.
– The Washington Post, January 23, 2025
… After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in mid-2022, leaving it to the states to restrict abortion rights in any way they wanted, Missouri became the first state to institute a near-total ban. The procedure was prohibited from the moment of conception in almost all situations, even in cases of rape or incest.
Doctors who violated the ban could face 15 years in prison. The sole, vague exception was for “medical emergencies.” Inevitably, reports arose of women in dire medical distress who were refused necessary abortions because hospitals and doctors felt they had to err on the side of caution if there was any question whether it was dire enough.
The extremism of that ban explains why even in a conservative state like Missouri, the ballot initiative to overturn it was always destined to pass. Anti-choice lawmakers knew that, which is why they tried every trick in the book to prevent a fair up-or-down vote. Their schemes included a failed attempt to change the rules to make ballot measures harder to pass, as well as a campaign of outright lies about what the amendment would do.
That all failed and the amendment passed, by a margin of a little over 3% — not a landslide, but inarguably a victory. …
Pro-choice legislators and activists must vigilantly defend [reproductive] rights in the Legislature, in court, and in the public forum.