Joseph Winters, Grist

Among the several controversial proposals emerging from the U.S. Senate this week as it considers the tax and spending bill that President Donald Trump has promoted as “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is one that would make parts of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington state, the Buffalo Hills Wilderness Study Area in Nevada, and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona eligible for sale to housing developers.

The proposal, laid out in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s draft portion of the bill, would force the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, over the next five years, to identify and sell between 2.2 million and 3.3 million acres across 11 Western states for “the development of housing or to address associated infrastructure to support local housing needs.” In total, 250 million acres of land would be eligible for those mandatory sales — including campgrounds and other recreation sites, roadless areas, and important wildlife habitat. The bill excludes protected areas like national parks and designated national recreation areas.

In a statement, Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, called the proposal “a complete betrayal of future generations.” Conservation groups have likewise pilloried it as “a shameless ploy to sell off pristine public lands for trophy homes and gated communities” in order to pay for “tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.”

The proposal expands on a failed attempt in the House version of the spending bill to sell 500,000 acres of federal lands in Nevada and Utah. That proposal was nixed due to opposition from Representative Ryan Zinke, a Republican from Montana and the former interior secretary. The new, dramatically expanded proposal came from Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, who said in a YouTube video that federal land ownership is “not fair.”

“We’re opening underused federal land to expand housing, support local development, and get Washington, D.C. out of the way of communities that are just trying to grow,” he said. “We’re turning federal liabilities into taxpayer value.“ The states wherein the land sales are being proposed are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Zinke’s state of Montana is notably not on the list.

Many Indigenous and environmental advocates have noted that the idea of “public lands” disguises the ways that the territories were stolen from tribes. Beginning in the 16th century, white European settlers swept across North America, expelling Native Americans in order to build homesteads, railroads, and other infrastructure.

After the founding of the country, the U.S. government extended that dispossession, often by force or coercion, and to this day land holders such as universities profit from stolen tribal lands. The federal government now claims up to 63 percent of some Western states, with high concentrations in Idaho and Utah. While a faction of the Republican party has spent more than 50 years advocating against “federal colonialism” in the West, some Republicans are intensifying their efforts to impose expropriation of the same land in a new way.

From his first day in office, Trump has promised to turn over federal lands to private interests — including logging interests and oil and gas companies, as well as housing developers. In March, the Trump administration launched a task force to identify “underutilized federal lands suitable for residential development,” an ostensible effort to address the U.S.’s affordable housing crisis.

Critics say home affordability is a product of multiple factors like migration trends and construction costs, exacerbated by cities not prioritizing building new housing within their limits to account for new demand. But opening up remote areas far from existing infrastructure is, they say, a misguided approach to bringing down housing costs.

“The housing argument is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Jordan Schreiber, government relations director for the nonprofit The Wilderness Society. “It doesn’t even pass the laugh test.”

Some advocacy groups and experts have also noted that Lee’s proposal in the spending bill, which he reportedly declined to share with most other lawmakers for weeks before unveiling it on June 11, does not include any affordability requirements, leaving room for profit-motivated developers to build large ranch houses, second homes for wealthy urbanites, or short-term rentals to be listed on Airbnb. In some cases, land sales have already yielded the creation of luxury real estate clubs.

”There would be no significant guardrails to prevent valued public lands from being sold for trophy homes, pricey vacation spots, exclusive golf communities, or other developments,” the think tank Center for American Progress wrote in an analysis of the proposed bill.

Democrats, conservation groups, and representatives from the outdoor industry opposing Lee’s proposal have emphasized the irreplaceable nature of the land in question. “Our public lands are not disposable assets,” Patrick Berry, CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a group that seeks to preserve undeveloped land for hunting and fishing, told Colorado Public Radio.

Schreiber, of The Wilderness Society, said the bill is “hugely problematic from a tribal perspective” because it fails to give tribes the right of first refusal to bid on lands that are part of their ancestral homelands. (It’s also arguable that even the idea of giving tribes the option to buy back lands that were stolen from them is a low bar for justice.) Schreiber also criticized the bill for making land sales possible “at breakneck speed” without public hearings or input.

In a Colorado College poll released this January, only 14 percent of registered voters across eight Western states said they supported selling “some limited areas of national public lands to developing housing on natural areas.” Nearly 90 percent said they visited federally owned lands at least once in the past year.

The Trump administration just dismissed all 400 experts working on America’s official climate report

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Every several years for the past 25 years, the federal government has published a comprehensive look at the way climate change is affecting the country. States, local governments, businesses, farmers, and many others use this National Climate Assessment to prepare for rising temperatures, more bouts of extreme weather, and worsening disasters such as wildfires.

On Monday, however, the Trump administration told all of the more than 400 volunteer scientists and experts working on the next assessment that it was releasing them from their roles. A brief memo said the scope of the report was being “reevaluated” within the context of the Congressional legislation that mandates it.

The move throws the National Climate Assessment, whose sixth iteration is supposed to be released in late 2027 or early 2028, into even deeper uncertainty. Earlier this month, the Trump administration canceled funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the White House office that produces the report and helps coordinate research across more than a dozen federal agencies.

Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was among the authors who were dismissed on Monday. She and her colleagues had just submitted a draft outline for a chapter about coastlines, with information on how sea level rise could affect communities and urban infrastructure.

“It was an honor and I was looking forward to contributing,” Cleetus said. “This is the kind of actionable science that people need to help prepare for climate change and address the challenges that climate change is already bringing our way.”

Cleetus said it was “irresponsible” that the administration would dismiss hundreds of experts working on the assessment, seemingly without a plan for creating an alternative. Although the memo says participants may still have “opportunities to contribute or engage,” it doesn’t elaborate and the White House did not respond to a list of questions from Grist.

The Trump administration is required by the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to, among other things, commission a scientific report every four years on “global change, both human-induced and natural.” The report is supposed to cover the latest science on a wide range of climate and environmental trends and how they might affect agriculture, energy production, human health, and other areas for the next 25 to 100 years.

Since 2000, this report has taken the form of the National Climate Assessment. The last one, released in 2023, broke down climate impacts by topic and geography, with individual chapters on the Northeast, Midwest, Southwest, and so on. It also laid out the state of the science on mitigating and adapting to climate change, including examples of what many cities and states are already doing. The fourth assessment was published in 2018, during Trump’s first term in the White House.

All of the science that informs the national assessments must be peer-reviewed, and the reports themselves don’t endorse specific policies. “They’re not telling anyone what to do,” said Melissa Finucane, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ vice president of science and innovation and an author of the fifth assessment. “They’re just providing information on how to best address problems with effective solutions.”

What’s next for the National Climate Assessment is unclear. Legally, only Congress can scrap it altogether, but experts say the Trump administration could decide to publish a dramatically scaled-back version or use it as a tool for misinformation — by, for instance, downplaying the link between global warming and the use of fossil fuels.

“One might be concerned that the administration will replace it with something much less robust, replacing it potentially with junk science,” Finucane said.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a list of policy recommendations that the Trump administration seems to have drawn from during its first 100 days, only mentions the National Climate Assessment in a short section about the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Russell Vought, now director of the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget, recommended that the program be scaled back to a limited advisory role. He wrote that the program typified “climate fanaticism” and “the woke agenda.”

Another possibility is that the experts involved in the assessment will continue their work, even without federal support. That’s what happened earlier this year with what was supposed to be the country’s first National Nature Assessment. When the Trump administration canceled work on it in February, its authors vowed to carry on and publish their results anyway.

Finucane said the Nature Assessment had been farther along than the sixth climate report, and that it wouldn’t be possible for a small group of volunteers to take on the massive amount of work and coordination required to put together the sixth assessment “I absolutely hope that the work that has been done can continue in some way, but we have to have our eyes wide open,” Finucane said.

Dave White, director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University, said there are some international and state-level climate reports that could fill in the gaps left by a scaled-back or canceled National Climate Assessment. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, synthesizes climate science on a global level every few years (although the Trump administration recently blocked federal scientists from participating in it).

“I’m disappointed, upset, frustrated on behalf of not only myself and my colleagues, but also on behalf of the American communities that benefit from the knowledge and tools developed by the assessment,” White said. “Those will be taken away from American communities now.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/science/trump-administration-experts-official-climate-report-nca/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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In 2023, Seattle voters authorized the city to create a new organization to develop “social housing,” a type of publicly-owned affordable housing that accommodates low- and middle-income renters. Now, as residents prepare to vote on another ballot initiative on whether and how to fund the developer, local advocacy organizations are pitching social housing as a climate solution.

“If we’re thinking long-term, this is a transformative solution,” said Akiksha Chatterji, campaigns director for the local nonprofit 350 Seattle.

Chatterji’s group, which advocates for climate and social justice as part of an equitable transition away from fossil fuels, has made social housing a core part of its advocacy platform since the proposal’s early days. It has recently rallied supporters around the ballot initiative to fund it through a new tax on wealthy corporations, which voters will consider on Tuesday. Sunrise Seattle, a branch of the national youth climate organization Sunrise Movement, has also endorsed the social housing initiative.

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Seattle already has a few public housing developers, as well as programs that require new developments to include a minimum number of affordable units, provide assistance to first-time homebuyers below a certain income, and grant tax exemptions in exchange for the creation of low-rent apartments. But the city still faces a housing crunch, with the broader region expected to fall 140,000 units short of the 640,000 new homes needed to meet projected demand by 2044.

The broad goal of social housing is to equitably alleviate that housing crunch by creating apartments and townhouses that aren’t subject to market speculation. Under the new developer’s model, units would be publicly owned and would remain affordable indefinitely. Other forms of affordable housing developed by nonprofits are often built with expiring federal tax credits and revert to market rates after a period of 15 to 30 years.

If climate activists get their way on Tuesday, the Seattle Social Housing Developer — the organization that voters established in 2023 — will serve people across a wide income range: from those making 60 percent of the area median income to those making 120 percent of it. (The Seattle area’s median household income is about $106,000, so the social housing would be available to those making around $64,000 to $127,000 a year.) House Our Neighbors, the advocacy group that spearheaded the campaign to create the social housing developer, says this will create “cross-class communities” and also make it easier to fund building construction and maintenance.

Similar social housing experiments have proven successful in a handful of other places — most famously, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Vienna, Austria.

There are two broad reasons why Seattle advocates are describing their social housing model as climate-friendly. The more straightforward one is that the Seattle Social Housing Developer is required to build all new construction in line with “passive house” standards for energy efficiency. These standards involve high-quality insulation, air-tight seals, and other strategies to keep heat, cold, and moisture from entering (or exiting) buildings.

Michael Eliason, founder and principal of the architecture firm Larch Lab, said these requirements can save a significant amount of energy on heating and cooling — which means fewer emissions from burning fossil fuels. This is the case even though Seattle has fairly strict energy codes for all newly constructed buildings. Some of the city’s recently built passive house buildings use 30 to 35 percent less energy than affordable housing built to standard code requirements.

Passive house construction is also better adapted to climate disasters like wildfire, thanks to powerful air filtration systems that help keep embers outside. In one Los Angeles neighborhood that was recently razed by the Palisades Fire, the only house that remained standing was one built to passive house standards. And for those living downwind of wildfires, airtight ventilation keeps smoke from entering buildings, meaning less exposure to hazardous particulate matter.

The other climate argument for social housing is less obvious, and applies to many forms of affordable housing. Adding more housing to desirable urban areas allows more people to live near workplaces, schools, grocery stores, and other amenities, reducing car dependency and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it. According to one estimate, doubling urban density — the amount of people and development in a given square mile — could reduce travel-related CO2 emissions by 35 percent, and household energy-related emissions by about half. (This is largely because apartment buildings are typically more energy efficient than single-family homes.)

Some of Seattle’s existing public housing developers, like Community Roots Housing, are already working to equitably increase density, and in some cases are exceeding the city’s baseline energy code requirements. Mason Cavell, Community Roots’ director of real estate development, said it wasn’t clear what “additional tools or benefits” the Seattle Social Housing Developer would have at its disposal to “surpass what the existing industry is able to do” on these fronts.

Proponents say that the answer depends on how the developer gets funded. On Seattle’s upcoming ballot, voters will be asked whether the Seattle Social Housing Developer should be funded at all. A second question asks voters to opt between two potential sources of funding.

Proposition 1A would create a new excess compensation payroll tax that social and environmental justice advocates are backing. The tax would apply to companies that pay their executives more than $1 million a year, and supporters of the plan expect it to generate more than $50 million annually to create 2,000 new units over 10 years.

Having that revenue stream, said Julie Howe, a housing researcher at the University of Washington, would allow the Seattle Social Housing Developer to take on projects that aren’t as attractive to other affordable housing developers. More money could mean housing in smaller niches closer to existing transit infrastructure, instead of cheaper sites that are more remote.

Proposition 1B would leverage funding from an existing tax on large companies, which is already shared by the city’s other affordable housing programs.

Al Levine, former deputy executive director of the Seattle Housing Authority, prefers 1B because it reflects an approach to housing that has had more time to prove its financial viability. He also questioned whether the pros of passive house construction outweigh the cons. “Obviously a passive house is a better building in the long run,” he said, but he thinks it could raise the cost of building by 10 to 30 percent. “In making it work, what are the tradeoffs?” he added. “If you spend more up front, you have to recoup that in rent.”

House Our Neighbors, 350 Seattle, and other advocacy groups oppose the 1B funding mechanism because it would lower the income cap on social housing residents to just 80 percent of median area, fundamentally changing the program and making less funding available. It “essentially forces social housing back into the same low-income system that the affordable developers are operating in,” Howe said. “It doesn’t give us the ability to be nimble and flexible.”

Chatterji said the climate justice vision of social housing is bigger than just emissions reductions from lower energy use and easier access to transit. A new tax on big businesses would boost equity, she said, by making healthy and eco-friendly building features available to everyday people.

“You see a lot of rich people making their houses super fireproof, or all of these amenities only being available to people who can afford it,” she said. “Passive house and social housing challenges that by saying, ‘No, these are all public goods, and they should be available to the public in perpetuity.’”

Plus, she added, high-quality construction enabled by the revenue from mixed-income tenants and the 1A tax could mean longer-lasting housing that won’t need to be frequently renovated or replaced.

Tiffani McCoy, House Our Neighbors’ co-executive director, said social housing should be paired with other urban policies like increased transit and zoning reform to unlock further emissions reductions and make Seattle more equitable. Washington state recently banned single-family zoning statewide, though some of Seattle’s richest neighborhoods are exempted from the prohibition.

Seattle’s social housing advocates say that the decisions their city makes now could influence other urban areas contending with problems around housing, affordability, and climate resilience. In New York City, which faces a particularly dire housing crunch, recent zoning reforms are expected to enable the creation of 82,000 more homes over the next 15 years. California has also passed reforms allowing homeowners to divide their property into two lots, creating opportunities for new housing. Yet the country still has an affordable housing gap of about 7.3 million units, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

McCoy said that funding affordable housing with a progressive revenue source, as proposed by Proposition 1A, could insulate cities from the vagaries of the federal government. As President Donald Trump attempts to slash spending on climate mitigation and social programs, she said it’s “even more prudent and incumbent for people at the local level to act now … to make sure that we’re still providing social services, environmental protections, and environmental programs.”

Editor’s note: The author of this article was an intern at 350 Seattle in 2021. He was not involved in the organization’s housing campaigns.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/cities/seattle-social-housing-climate-solution-ballot-initiative-proposition-1a/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.

If you were to create a recipe for plastics, you’d need a very big cookbook. In addition to fossil fuel-based building blocks like ethylene and propylene, this ubiquitous material is made from a dizzying amalgam of more than 16,000 chemicals — colorants, flame retardants, stabilizers, lubricants, plasticizers, and other substances, many of whose exact functions, structures, and toxicity are poorly understood.

What is known presents many reasons for concern. Scientists know, for example, that at least 3,200 plastic chemicals pose risks to human health or the environment. They know that most of these compounds can leach into food and beverages, and that they cost the U.S. more than $900 billion in health expenses annually. Yet only 6 percent of plastic chemicals — which can account for up to 70 percent of a product’s weight — are subject to international regulations.

Over the past few months, a flurry of studies and reports have highlighted one group of substances as particularly problematic: “endocrine-disrupting chemicals,” or EDCs. These chemicals, released at every stage of the plastic life cycle, mimic hormones and interfere with the metabolic and reproductive systems. They were recently found in samples of plastic food packaging from around the world, and a study published last month linked them to 20 percent of the United States’ preterm births.

The unchecked production, distribution, and disposal of plastics and other petrochemical-based products has led to “a perpetual cycle of human exposure to EDCs from contaminated air, food, drinking water, and soil,” Tracey Woodruff, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this month. Philip Landrigan, a public health physician and professor of epidemiology at Boston College, told Grist that the crisis has “quietly and insidiously gotten worse while all attention has been focused on the climate.”

Although some policymakers have taken steps to protect people from EDCs — the European Commission, for example, in 2022 proposed stricter labeling regulations that would require companies to alert consumers of their hazards — many in the field believe the overarching response has been incommensurate with the scale of the crisis. Because so many plastics and petrochemical products are traded internationally, some endocrinologists and public health authorities believe a global approach is needed.

“This is an international problem that is affecting our world and its future,” said Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Texas, Austin.

Gore and others are appealing to the negotiators of the U.N. global plastics treaty, who meet for their next round of talks next month in Ottawa, Canada. There is increasing interest among delegates for a treaty that not only protects the environment, but public health — a step that the international nature of the EDC problem makes clear must be taken.

The endocrine system is complex, involving a series of glands throughout the body that secrete chemical messengers called hormones. These molecules lock onto a cell’s receptors to induce some kind of response: perhaps the production of another hormone, or the correction of a nutrient imbalance. Endocrine hormones control a long list of necessary human functions like growth, metabolism, reproduction, lactation, and managing blood sugar — any malfunction, let alone absence, of these processes can lead to health problems like infertility, diabetes, hypertension, and death.

EDCs tamper with the endocrine system, often by mimicking hormones to trigger the corresponding response, or by blocking them to prevent it from happening at all. Research has identified at least 1,000 of these substances in pesticides, inks, building materials, cosmetics, and plastic products, but the nonprofit Endocrine Society, whose members include physicians and scientists, calls this “only the tip of the iceberg” due to the enormous number of chemicals yet to be tested.

Some of the most common or familiar EDCs found in plastics include phthalates, used to make the material more flexible; bisphenol A, or BPA, used to make strong, clear products; and PFAS, a class of more than 14,000 chemicals used to make food containers, outdoor clothing, and other products oil- or water-repellent. Other EDCs of concern include organophosphate ethers, benzotriazoles, and PBDEs, all of which are used to make plastic products fire- and light-resistant.

What makes this particularly worrisome is that humans can be exposed to endocrine-disrupting chemicals simply by touching plastic, inhaling microplastics within dust, and eating food or drinking water that has been in contact with plastic. According to one 2022 study, more than 1,000 chemicals — including many EDCs — commonly used in packaging like takeout containers can migrate into food. A separate study from 2021 found that more than 2,000 chemicals can leach from a single plastic product into water.

As noted in a report published last month by the Endocrine Society and the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, exposure to endocrine-disrupting substances can occur throughout the plastic life cycle. Fracking for oil and gas — the material’s main ingredients — uses more than 750 chemicals, many of which are known or suspected endocrine disruptors, and people living near these operations may have an elevated risk of developmental or reproductive problems. More EDCs are released during plastics manufacturing, sometimes in air and water emissions, other times on the backs of nurdles, tiny plastic pellets that can be shaped into larger products. These pebble-sized pieces often spill directly from factories or during transportation, and can release their chemicals once in the environment.

At the end of the plastic life cycle, incinerators and landfills can release PFAS, dioxins, PCBs, and other endocrine disruptors as air or soil pollution — some of which may contaminate nearby food supplies. Littered plastics tend to make their way into the ocean, where they break down into microplastics and leach some of those same EDCs, along with others like dibutyltin and mercury.

Those facing the greatest risk tend to be residents of low-income communities and people of color. “They’re more likely to be living in areas where there’s more pollution,” Gore said — like from nearby plastics manufacturing facilities or waste disposal sites. Plus, she added, low-income families often live without easy access to fresh produce and are more dependent on foods packaged in plastic. “We know people of lower socioeconomic status have disproportionate exposures.”

Reducing exposure to endocrine disruptors presents a challenge for several reasons. The biggest is the U.S. and other countries’ lax approach to chemical regulation, which doesn’t usually require that new compounds be tested for endocrine-disrupting properties or other safety concerns before they can enter production and get incorporated into products. “Right now we operate on the basis that all chemicals are innocent until proven guilty,” Landrigan told Grist.

Even when scientists agree that something is harmful, bureaucratic delays and industry lobbying often impede regulation. The Toxics Substances Control Act, or TSCA — the United States’ main chemical law — has for example only banned a handful of substances in the nearly 50 years since it was passed, a period in which at least 100,000 new chemicals have entered the market, according to Landrigan. This is partly due to the unrealistic expectation that scientists draw a direct, causal link between a substance and specific health effects, which would require unethically exposing people to toxicants and observing the outcomes.

Another unfortunate side effect of that expectation is a phenomenon called “regrettable substitution,” where companies swap chemicals known to be harmful for lookalikes that haven’t been studied as extensively. Later research often reveals the substitute is just as toxic as the original, if not more so. This has occurred on a wide scale with EDCs such as PFAS, as well as bisphenols — although now that several countries have restricted BPA from plastic products like baby bottles, products labeled (often inaccurately) as free from that substance are now being manufactured with bisphenol S, despite research suggesting it also disrupts the endocrine system.

Some scientists accuse the chemical industry of “weaponizing uncertainty” to delay or kill regulation, a strategy they liken to Big Oil’s campaign to raise doubt about the reality of climate change. But for many EDCs in particular, they agree there is strong enough associative evidence of their harms — from cell and animal studies, as well as observations in people who have been exposed to the chemicals at work or as a result of an accident — to warrant bans and restrictions.

Scientists and public health advocates have been trying to reform chemical regulations for years now, but the U.N.’s global plastics treaty presents an opportunity to do so on an international level. “A global treaty can’t reform TSCA,” Landrigan said, “but it can set benchmarks telling countries that if they want to ship their products internationally, they have to conform to certain standards.”

One leading proposal for the treaty is that negotiators create a comprehensive inventory of the many chemicals used in plastic production, along with a list of “chemicals of concern” identifying which should be prioritized for phasing out. According to Sara Brosché, a science adviser for IPEN, this list should include classes of chemicals rather than individual ones. “EDCs would be one very clear category” to be phased out, she told Grist, along with carcinogens and so-called “persistent organic pollutants” that don’t break down naturally in the environment.

Scientists also support listing and phasing out “polymers of concern,” the types most likely to contain EDCs and other hazardous substances. Polyvinyl chloride, for example — frequently used in plastic water pipes — can expose people to endocrine disruptors including benzene, phthalates, and bisphenols.

So far, these ideas have only been suggested for inclusion in the treaty; negotiators don’t even have a first draft yet, and are still debating whether the primary goal should be to “end plastic pollution” or to “protect human health and the environment … by ending plastic pollution.” The existing text, a laundry list of nearly every suggestion made thus far, leaves plenty of room for countries to simply “minimize,” “manage,” or vaguely “regulate” hazardous plastic chemicals, rather than eliminate them altogether. The final draft is due by year’s end, though many expect an extension, with further negotiations continuing into 2025.

To Landrigan and many others, the most important thing is that the treaty include a global cap on plastic production, which could triple by 2060 to more than 1.2 billion metric tons annually if current trends continue. That’s the weight of more than 118,000 Eiffel Towers. “We see the current exponential increase in plastic production as simply not sustainable,” he said. “It will overwhelm the planet.” Less plastic will mean fewer opportunities for EDC exposure, he added. And that will surely save lives.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/science/plastic-chemicals-are-inescapable-and-theyre-messing-with-our-hormones/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org