Think those bags are recyclable? California says think again
Don Thompson – December 29, 2022
FILE-This Friday, Jan. 24, 2014 file photo conveyors carry mixed plastic into a device that will shred recycle them at a plastics recycling plant in Vernon, Calif. California in 2014 enacted the nation’s first ban on single-use plastic shopping bags. But in 2022, state Attorney General Rob Bonta says consumers who think they’re helping the environment with reusable plastic bags had better think again. He says manufacturers can’t back up their claim that the thicker, more durable bags are recyclable in California. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)This undated photo shows a plastic bag, in Los Angeles. California in 2014 enacted the nation’s first ban on single-use plastic shopping bags. But state Attorney General Rob Bonta says the thicker, reusable plastic bags that many retailers now use may not be recyclable as required by law. (AP Photo/John Antczak)In this Oct. 25, 2013, file photo, a plastic bag sits along a roadside in Sacramento, Calif. California in 2014 enacted the nation’s first ban on single-use plastic shopping bags. But in 2022, state Attorney General Rob Bonta says consumers who think they’re helping the environment with reusable plastic bags had better think again. He says manufacturers can’t back up their claim that the thicker, more durable bags are recyclable in California. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Since California adopted the nation’s first ban on single-use plastic shopping bags tin 2014, most grocery stores have turned to thicker, reusable plastic bags that are supposed to be recyclable.
But Attorney General Rob Bonta is now investigating whether the bags are truly recyclable as required by law.
“We’ve all been to the store and forgotten to bring our reusable bags,” Bonta said recently. “At least the plastic bags we buy at the register for 10 cents have those ‘chasing arrows’ that say they are 100% recyclable, right? Perhaps wrong.”
He asked six bag manufacturers to back up their claims that the bags can be recycled and threatened legal action that could include banning the bags temporarily or issuing multimillion-dollar fines.
His office declined to say last week how many of the companies responded, citing an ongoing investigation. The American Chemistry Council, a plastics industry group, said that manufacturers disagree with Bonta’s characterization.
Other states, including New York, New Jersey and Oregon, have followed California in banning single-use plastic bags. Beyond California, only a handful of states require that stores take back plastic bags for recycling, with Maine first adopting such a law in 1991, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Policy experts and advocates estimate that just 6% of plastics are recycled in the United States, with the remaining burned, trashed or littered. More plastic bags ended up in California landfills in 2021 compared with 2018, according to data from the state’s recycling department.
Californians Against Waste Executive Director Mark Murray in part blames pandemic policies.
Consumers are supposed to be able to return their plastic bags to grocery stores and other retailers. But many removed their bag recycling bins during the early days of the pandemic, fearing contamination.
For the system to work, retailers must collect the bags and sell them back to manufacturers for use in making new bags that must include 40% recycled content and be reusable at least 125 times. Murray suspects that most are reused once.
“That’s not meeting the standard and it may be time to phase these bags out,” he said.
The California Retailers Association declined comment because it said each retailer has its own policy, and the California Grocers Association did not respond to a request for comment.
As of now, makers of the bags get to self-certify to the state that their bags can be recycled. But Bonta said that requires a comprehensive system to collect, process and sell the used bags, none of which exist. Putting the bags in most curbside recycling bins interferes with recycling other products by clogging equipment and increasing the risk of worker injury, he said.
Plastic bags and similar products are “a top form of contamination in curbside recycling bins,” California’s Statewide Commission on Recycling Markets and Curbside Recycling wrote in a 2021 report.
Bonta asked six manufacturers — Novolex, Revolution, Inteplast, Advance Polybag, Metro Polybag and Papier-Mettler — to prove their bags can be recycled in California. His office hasn’t said if they all responded, citing an “active and ongoing investigation.”
Revolution Chief Executive Sean Whiteley said the company has been recycling more than 300 million pounds of plastic material annually for decades and is “confident in our own sustainability and compliance record.”
He noted lawmakers publicly introduced the single-use bag ban legislation in 2014 at one of the company’s Southern California subsidiaries.
“At our core, we are an environmental recycling company that also makes sustainable plastic solutions,” he said in a statement.
Novolex said it is “committed to complying with all state laws and regulations.” The company responded to Bonta’s request but declined to share its full response with The Associated Press, a spokesman said.
Novolex’s bags have been certified as eligible for recycling by an independent laboratory and, therefore, must be marked that way, the company said in a statement.
The other four companies did not respond to multiple emailed requests.
Manufacturers are “aggressively working so that all plastic packaging that is manufactured is remade into new plastics,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics at the American Chemistry Council.
It’s not Bonta’s first plastics-related clash with industry. Earlier this year he subpoenaed ExxonMobil as part of what he called a first-of-its-kind broader investigation into the petroleum industry and the proliferation of plastic waste.
Thompson recently retired from The Associated Press.
What about my right to live without violence? Supreme Court decisions on guns harm survivors.
Richard Alba – December 27, 2022
I have lived since the age of 2 with the damage inflicted by a gun death.
My father was killed while serving in the U.S. military in late 1945 by another soldier test firing his souvenir Luger in a barracks. I can still feel the powerful reverberations of that shot. It immediately threw the life of what remained of my family onto a much more difficult trajectory – less upwardly mobile, much less happy – than it had been on before.
My mother, though she remarried for a time and bore additional children, never knew sustained contentment and took her own life at the age of 60, three decades later. I struggled through an emotionally fraught childhood into a prickly young adulthood. Only years of psychological therapy and finally finding love in my 30s made it possible for me to break with my anger and melancholy.
The 1939 wedding photo of Richard and Mary Alba. Sgt. Alba died in 1945. He was shot by a soldier test firing a gun in the barracks.
This personal background gives me an unusually intense interest in the current rash of American mass shootings and its relation to our Constitution, as interpreted by a conservative Supreme Court. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 609 mass shootings (those with four or more victims) by Thanksgiving this year, though last year’s record of 690 looks safe.
There’s a simple explanation for this level of violence: The American rate of gun ownership is exceptional because of the Second Amendment. That part of the Bill of Rights has made it difficult for government to limit gun ownership and even now to restrict concealed arms in public places.
Right to guns vs. right to live free of gun violence
Recent Supreme Court decisions have torqued that difficulty. The District of Columbia v. Heller decision of 2008 established for the first time an individual right to gun ownership and invalidated a widespread previous understanding that the Second Amendment referred to a collective “right of the people,” organized in a “well regulated Militia.”
Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion offers a tutorial on the conservative doctrine of originalism, as he strove to demonstrate the general acceptance in the 18th and 19th centuries of the principle that guns are necessary for individual self-defense.
But there is a glaring lack of balance in the opinion because Scalia, while admitting limits on Second Amendment rights in the abstract, provides no systematic reasoning or principles that might help us establish where the individual’s right to gun ownership ends and the right of the community to live without the constant threat of gun violence begins.
Recent Supreme Court decisions have hampered government efforts to limit gun ownership and restrict concealed arms in public places.
It then opines, “The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need (as the New York law did).” Ergo, Second Amendment rights should not require it, either.
One would hope that the average law student could spot the flaw in this reasoning: For when the right of speech is abused, an injured party can seek redress in the courts. But what redress is open to the person shot dead or grievously wounded by a gunman?
This distinction makes evident why government and the public have compelling interests in the exercise of Second Amendment rights that they do not for other rights.
It matters that guns are more deadly
Gun rights pose a severe test for the idea of originalism because of the enormous technological advance of weapons since the 18th century. Today’s semi-automatic firearms bear almost no resemblance to the muskets and rifles of the 18th century, which had to be reloaded after a single shot. Can originalism logically justify the right to own a weapon that could not be conceived when the Constitution was written?
In a recent speech, Justice Samuel Alito declared that the court’s decision extending the anti-discrimination provision in civil rights legislation to sexual orientation and gender was wrongly decided. His originalist reasoning: “It is inconceivable that either Congress or voters in 1964 understood discrimination because of sex to mean discrimination because of sexual orientation, much less gender identity.”
It seems highly doubtful that the Second Amendment as now understood can survive the Alito test. Can anyone seriously maintain that the Founders, whose knowledge of guns was limited to single-shot weapons, would have sanctioned constitutionally the widespread keeping and bearing of modern arms of war, which can tear the human body apart in seconds? Can anyone really believe that they would have intended such sanction for these weapons if given the knowledge that they are being used regularly to massacre American schoolchildren?
When is a society civilized?
The damage of gun violence is a spreading blight on American society. It affects not only the victims themselves but also their survivors, who must live with emotional loss and psychic trauma indefinitely.
In refusing to consider how to balance the Second Amendment’s right to gun ownership with the right of other citizens to live without the constant threat posed by ubiquitous weaponry, the court is contributing to the deterioration of the United States as a civilized society.
In common understanding, a society is civilized when citizens can go unarmed about their daily business without fear of violence. Today, pedestrians in many parts of the United States have to fear that the person walking by may be armed, and that the police can do nothing to protect them until he or she pulls out the weapon and starts shooting.
And then it is too late, as so many recent mass shootings instruct us.
Richard Alba is a distinguished professor of sociology at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
Richard Alba is a distinguished professor of sociology emeritus at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Fears of extremist campaign after attack on US power substations
December 27, 2022
Vandalism at four power substations in the western US state of Washington over the weekend added to concerns of a possible nationwide campaign by right-wing extremists to stir fears and spark civil conflict.
Local police on Tuesday gave no information on who they suspected was behind the vandalism, which knocked out power on Christmas Day for some 14,000 in Tacoma, a port city area south of Seattle.
Tacoma Public Utilities, which owned two of the facilities targeted on Sunday, said in a statement that it was alerted by federal law enforcement in early December about threats to their grid.
The Pierce County Sheriff’s office said Sunday it was investigating but had made no arrests and did not know if it was a coordinated attack.
They said in a statement that they were aware of similar incidents elsewhere in Washington, in Oregon, and in North Carolina.
“It could be any number of reasons at this point… We have to investigate and not just jump to conclusions,” they said.
But it follows warnings by US officials that neo-Nazis who say they want to spark a race war are targeting electricity infrastructure.
Violent extremists “have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020, identifying the electric grid as a particularly attractive target given its interdependency with other infrastructure sectors,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a January intelligence memo, according to US media.
In early December, 45,000 homes and businesses in Moore County, North Carolina were out of power after someone used a high-powered rifle to damage two electricity substations.
In February three men with neo-Nazi ties pleaded guilty in Columbus, Ohio to plotting to use rifles and explosives to damage power infrastructure in various locations.
They pursued “a disturbing plot, in furtherance of white supremacist ideology, to attack energy facilities in order to damage the economy and stoke division in our country,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen at the time.
And last year five men who allegedly belonged to white supremacist and neo-Nazi online discussion groups were charged in North Carolina with planning attacks on power infrastructure.
They planned the attack to create “general chaos” as part of their “goal of creating a white ethno-state,” the indictment said.
Jon Wellinghoff, the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said on CNN in early December that the Moore County attack resembled one on an electricity network substation near San Jose, California in 2013.
In that case, which has never been solved, one or more people fired close to 100 rounds at the substation, damaging 17 high voltage transformers at a cost of $15 million.
The Washington Post said after the Moore County incident that law enforcement was investigating eight incidents in four states.
An earlier version of this story referred to the objects vandalized as power stations. They are in fact power substations.
“It is virtually certain that human activities have increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases,” a national panel of experts concluded in a draft of the 5th National Climate Assessment released in November. They see high confidence in forecasts for longer droughts, higher temperatures and increased flooding.
JULY 28, 2022: Aerial view of homes submerged under flood waters from the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Jackson, Kentucky. Flash flooding caused by torrential rains has killed at least eight people in eastern Kentucky and left some residents stranded on rooftops and in trees, the governor of the south-central US state said.
Warming sea surface temperatures around the globe provide more fuel for tropical storms and exacerbate the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.
Why is climate change important?
“Every part of the U.S. is feeling the effects of climate change in some way,” said Allison Crimmins, director of that 5th National Climate Assessment. Representing the latest in climate research by a broad array of scientists, the final version of the assessment is expected in late 2023.
Disaster costs are rising, and scientists warn the window to further curtail fossil fuel emissions and put a lid on rising temperatures is closing rapidly.
Many scientists and officials worldwide agree: Yes. By the end of this century, projections show global average surface temperatures compared to pre-industrial times could increase by as much as 5.4 degrees.
Merriam-Webster defines “crisis” as a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger. A mix of warmer temperatures, extreme rainfall and rising sea levels often make naturally occurring disasters worse, while droughts become more intense and heat waves occur more often.
“The climate crisis is not a future threat, but something we must address today,” Richard Spinrad, administrator of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in August 2022.
The term “climate crisis” has been used to describe these worsening impacts since at least 1986. Since the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was organized in 1988, its reports steadily have grown more dire.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment, released during the Trump administration, warned natural, built and social systems were “increasingly vulnerable to cascading impacts that are often difficult to predict, threatening essential services.”
“Every increased amount of warming will increase the risk of severe impacts, and so the more (rapidly) we can take strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the less severe the impacts will be,” Cornell University professor Rachel Bezner Kerr said after the release of one recent IPCC report.
Warmer climates put animals on the move and increases the risk they’ll spread pathogens to other animals and to humans. A group of University of Hawaii researchers looked at how 376 human diseases and allergens such as malaria and asthma are affected by climate-related weather hazards and found nearly 60% have been aggravated by hazards, such as heat and floods.
The Summer 2024 Olympics are scheduled to kick off in July in France, where the country’s meteorological officials expect 2022 to be its hottest year since records began in 1900. Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee has delayed choosing the location for the 2030 winter games, in part over climate concerns.
Even fly fisherman see changes all around them. “Everyone knows if this keeps up, the places we can fish for trout are going to be limited,” said Tom Rosenbauer of Vermont, whose job title at sporting goods retailer Orvis is chief enthusiast.
How does climate change affect animals?
Warmer temperatures are forcing some animal species to move beyond their typical home ranges, increasing the risk that infectious viruses they carry could be transmitted to other species they haven’t encountered before. That poses a threat to human and animal health around the world.
A roseate spoonbill stands bright against the green of a southeast Arkansas swamp. Jami Linder, an Arkansas photographer, documented the first spoonbill nest in the state in 2020.
In the U.S., roseate spoonbills, a brilliant pink wading bird, are moving north as temperatures warm and they’re pushed out of native coastal habitats by rising sea levels.
Thousands Will Live Here One Day (as Long as They Can Find Water)
Keith Schneider – December 27, 2022
A golf cart on a path at Verrado, an 8,800-acre planned community, in Buckeye, Ariz., Dec. 19, 2022. (Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times)
BUCKEYE, Ariz. — Surrounded by miles of creosote and ocotillo in the Sonoran Desert, state officials and business leaders gathered in October against the backdrop of the ragged peaks of the White Tank Mountains to applaud a plan to turn 37,000 acres of arid land west of Phoenix into the largest planned community ever proposed in Arizona.
The development, Teravalis, is expected to have 100,000 homes and 55 million square feet of commercial space. But to make it happen, the project’s developer, the Howard Hughes Corp., will need to gain access to enough water for its projected 300,000 residents and 450,000 workers.
Teravalis is seen by local and state leaders as a crowning achievement in a booming real estate market, but it also represents the intensifying challenge in Arizona and other fast-growing Southwestern states: to build huge mixed-use projects in an era of water scarcity.
“You can’t grow and grow on these far-flung lands and put industries anywhere you want,” said Kathleen Ferris, former director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources and a senior research fellow at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “You have to be smarter about where and how we grow.”
Persistent dry conditions are driving up the cost of water and prompting more resistance to new development. But the scarcity of water is also pushing developers to innovate with design and install expensive infrastructure to save fresh water and recycle more wastewater.
A deep drought has settled on the Southwest since 2000, exacerbated by climate change. Water flow has dropped precipitously in the Colorado River and other surface water supplies that serve Arizona and its neighboring states. That is putting more pressure to supply homes and businesses from finite water reserves held in aquifers.
The consequences are being felt across the West. A proposal for a new water pipeline to supply St. George, Utah, has become the focus of public opposition. Communities in Colorado and Utah have declared moratoriums on new developments. And water supply is one reason that rural residents are fighting a proposal to increase the density of homes in Washoe County, Nevada.
In Arizona, groundwater levels are falling so fast that thousands of residential wells all over the state are going dry. In 2021, the Arizona Department of Water Resources halted new-home construction in Pinal County, south of Phoenix, because groundwater pumping exceeded the supply.
In New Mexico, two proposals for big planned communities outside Albuquerque have languished because of concerns over water. At one project, Campbell Farming Corp. proposed building 4,000 homes, a commercial and retail center and two golf courses on 8,000 acres in the mountains east of the city more than two decades ago, according to planning documents, but it faced objections to groundwater use, which would total about 400 million to 500 million gallons annually. The Office of the State Engineer found that Campbell Ranch would not meet a New Mexico requirement for developers to demonstrate that their projects have a 70-year supply of water.
“It’s fundamental; you’re not doing that development without water,” said Kathy Freas, a co-founder of East Mountain Protection Action Coalition, a citizens’ group that opposed the plan.
Similar concerns are buffeting Santolina, a 13,700-acre planned development proposed in 2014 and still not under construction. Located between Albuquerque and the Rio Grande, Santolina is the focus of active public opposition because it would need 7.3 billion gallons of water a year to serve its projected 90,000 residents.
County officials may require Santolina’s developer, Western Albuquerque Land Holdings, to install expensive wastewater treatment and recycling infrastructure to reduce water use and waste. The company has submitted a plan that would convert hundreds of acres from housing to solar energy development, a change that would significantly reduce water consumption but could potentially require it to restart the planning process.
“In the West, water has always been an issue, right? People are just much more alert now,” said Enrico Gradi, deputy county manager for Bernalillo County, who is overseeing the review of the Santolina project.
Water scarcity is also changing the design of the Southwest’s planned communities, which no longer feature big lakes, irrigated lawns, golf courses or open drainage canals.
One example is Sterling Ranch near Littleton, Colorado, a development with roads and parks that are designed to collect and store stormwater for reuse. The 3,400-acre project will have a $350 million closed-loop water supply system that collects, treats and recycles wastewater for more than 12,500 residences, as well as commercial and retail spaces. The developers are also studying how to most efficiently collect and use rainwater from rooftops.
“Until there’s scarcity, most developers aren’t incentivized to conserve water,” said Brock Smethills, president of the site’s developer. “For us, the incentives were aligned on Day 1 to use less water and conserve as much as possible.”
Another example is Verrado, an 8,800-acre planned community in Buckeye, Arizona, that houses 16,000 residents. Along with 30,000 trees for shade and to slow evaporation, Verrado features a water recycling system that collects all of the wastewater from homes and businesses and directs it to a treatment plant capable of recycling 1.5 million gallons a day that is stored and used to irrigate two golf courses.
“Every responsible developer in Arizona knows water is a constraint,” said Dan T. Kelly, chief operating officer and general manager for DMB Associates, the company behind Verrado. “It’s the first question you deal with.”
The intensifying attention to water supply is especially relevant to the Teravalis project. Hughes Corp. paid $600 million to purchase the property from its previous owners, who had proposed to use 3,000 acres for a planned community that would rely on the Hassayampa Basin, an aquifer beneath the project, to supply water. In 2006, the Arizona Department of Water Resources issued two certificates to supply and build 7,000 homes.
Those certificates are still valid, but Hughes Corp. does not have access to supply water to the remaining 34,000 acres — more than 90% of its property. The Department of Water Resources has put the Hassayampa Basin off limits to new development while it studies how much water the underground reserve actually holds.
Water supply options for Teravalis include tapping another aquifer and delivering water by pipeline. It could also lease water from one of Arizona’s Native American tribes that have extensive water rights.
Developers also could buy rights to Colorado River water. Queen Creek, a Phoenix suburb, secured state permission and is preparing to spend $27 million to draw from the river nearly 750 million gallons for its 66,000 residents.
The adage in the West that “water runs uphill to money” applies. This year, Arizona lawmakers approved a $1 billion, three-year appropriation, essentially a down payment to secure stable water supplies.
“We’re at the very start of a new era of innovation and investment,” said Greg Vogel, founder and CEO of Land Advisors Organization, a national brokerage and development consultancy in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Teravalis will be in the making for 50 years, maybe 70 years, until build-out. They’ll have enough water.”
By no means, though, is that a consensus view.
The city of Buckeye, where Teravalis is, uses nearly 3.5 billion gallons annually for its 115,000 residents. Water consumption by Teravalis’ 300,000 residents could amount to three times as much.
In 1980, Arizona enacted a groundwater conservation law that requires developers in the Phoenix metropolitan region to assure buyers that their homes and businesses have a 100-year water supply. The law also requires developers to replenish aquifers with the same amount of water that they withdraw.
Bruce Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona who signed the 1980 groundwater law while in office, said that Teravalis would not meet either requirement. “My conclusion, based on a lot of analysis, is the project is not viable on the scale they are talking about,” he said.
Older and unappreciated: Workers over 50 face a rough time on the job
Katrin Park – December 26, 2022
Forget the Great Resignation. The shakeup of Generation Z workers, seeking fulfillment and treating their jobs like a game of musical chairs, will sort itself out over time. They have their whole lives ahead of them to find something that fits.
The larger crisis is what to do with all the older-than-50 workers searching for gainful employment. This is one of the worst times to be a worker in the twilight of a career. Only half of Americans are steadily employed throughout their 50s. Last year, more than a quarter of workers ages 55 to 59 were out of the workforce, which meant that they didn’t have jobs to retire from.
Across the globe, full-time, stable employment that culminated in pensions has become a relic of the pre-pandemic past. In the United States, an increasing number of workers can’t afford to retire, not with inflation and uncertain retirement savings. Now, a worker must wait to age 70 to collect maximum Social Security benefits, and Congress is expected to discuss raising the age for Social Security eligibility next year.
Multiple factors create challenges for older workers
The disappearance of stable employment with a living wage and benefits – once the driver of upward mobility – has added to growing inequality. Global crises like COVID-19, changing business models and emerging technologies have led to the rise of low-quality, temporary jobs.
If workers have physically demanding jobs such as in retail or hospitality, poor health can force them to drop out. Many workers in their 50s also have caregiving responsibilities for older generations, which temporary gigs don’t accommodate. And of course there’s ageism.
A Brookings Institution report found a strong relationship between holding steady employment in one’s 50s and working in their 60s and beyond. So interventions to support older workers must start earlier on, even in one’s 40s. This can be done by improving the quality of low-wage jobs – including through higher minimum wages, greater work schedule flexibility and paid leave – to reduce turnover. That will help people work longer.
Likewise for firms, this is an opportunity to avoid productivity losses in the long run by maintaining a stable workforce. Firms that rely on disproportionately large numbers of hourly workers tend to have higher turnover rates. They are also less likely to invest in employee training and technologies.
Assisting older workers with developing skills that are in demand can help them get jobs again and meet businesses’ needs.
Such efforts are vital to maintain Social Security benefits, projected to be cut by more than 20% come 2034 unless Congress and the president intervene. Without action, monthly benefits would shrink by hundreds of dollars on average, and anyone 55 or younger would never get a full benefit.
And yet, unemployment statistics tend to leave out 50-something workers who are forced into early retirement. That happens because they are not part of the prime-age workforce, and they haven’t yet reached the benchmark ages associated with retirement, according to Beth Truesdale, a sociologist and author of the Brookings paper. Labor force policy and retirement policy should be considered as one system but are not, and these workers fall through the gap.
It’s a gap that’ll only get wider and harder to fill with the passage of time.
Which is alarming, given that an aging population, not a growing one, is the ticking time bomb.
The global population has just hit the 8 billion milestone, with life expectancy soaring and fertility rates dropping. Across the world, people 75 and older are the fastest-growing group in the labor force. Today, 40 million Americans are 65 and older, a figure expected to double over the next 40 years.
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Not preparing for this inescapable demographic shift will result in a shrinking workforce that struggles to support a ballooning number of “retirees.”
To be sure, improving the working conditions of low-wage jobs or training programs alone will not solve the myriad challenges older workers face. Age discrimination persists.
Katrin Park is a freelance writer and a former director of communications with the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Unfortunately, among the more than 40 million Americans 50 and older in the labor force, according to a 2018 analysis by ProPublica and the Urban Institute, half of them are likely to be laid off or forced into retirement regardless of income, education level or geography.
Without stronger legal protection for older workers and changing business models so they value work experience as a competitive advantage necessary for greater productivity, older workers will face fewer opportunities, resulting in higher rates of poverty in old age.
The disappearance of 50-something workers should factor more prominently in future of work debates. Even if all the quirks of Gen Z work habits were resolved tomorrow, a massive demographic work crisis still looms.
In Arizona, Colorado River crisis stokes worry over growth and groundwater depletion
Ian James – December 26, 2022
The Central Arizona Project Canal running through the desert in Arizona. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)
Kathleen Ferris stared across a desert valley dotted with creosote bushes, wondering where the water will come from to supply tens of thousands of new homes. In the distance, a construction truck rumbled along a dirt road, spewing dust.
This tract of open desert west of Phoenix is slated to be transformed into a sprawling development with up to 100,000 homes — a 37,000-acre property that the developers say will become Arizona’s largest master-planned community.
“It’s mind-boggling,” Ferris said. “I don’t think there is enough water here for all the growth that is planned.”
Water supplies are shrinking throughout the Southwest, from the Rocky Mountains to California, with the flow of the Colorado River declining and groundwater levels dropping in many areas. The mounting strains on the region’s water supplies are bringing new questions about the unrestrained growth of sprawling suburbs.
Ferris, a researcher at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, is convinced that growth is surpassing the water limits in parts of Arizona, and she worries that the development boom is on a collision course with the aridification of the Southwest and the finite supply of groundwater that can be pumped from desert aquifers.
For decades, Arizona’s cities and suburbs have been among the fastest growing in the country. In most areas, water scarcity has yet to substantially slow the march of development.
But as drought, climate change and the chronic overuse of water drain the Colorado River’s reservoirs, federal authorities are demanding the largest reduction ever in water diversions in an effort to avoid “dead pool” — the point at which reservoir levels fall so low that water stops flowing downriver.
Already, Arizona is being forced to take 21% less water from the Colorado River, and larger cuts will be needed as the crisis deepens.
To deal with those reductions and access other supplies to serve growth, the state is turning more heavily to its underground aquifers. As new subdivisions continue to spring up, workers are busy drilling new wells.
Ferris and others warn, however, that allowing development reliant solely on groundwater is unsustainable, and that the solution should be to curb growth in areas without sufficient water.
“What we’re going to see is more and more pressure on groundwater,” Ferris said. “And what will happen to our groundwater then?”
Construction workers erect new homes in a residential development called Sun City Festival in Buckeye. Dwindling Colorado River water is delivered to central Arizona, one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S., via the Central Arizona Project Canal. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
One of the fastest-growing cities in the Phoenix area is Buckeye, which has plans to nearly triple its population by 2030. According to its 2020 water resources plan, 27 master-planned communities are proposed in Buckeye, which depends primarily on groundwater. If all the proposed developments are fully built, the city’s population, now 110,000, would skyrocket to about 872,000.
In the area Ferris visited, construction has begun on the giant development called Teravalis, where the developers plan to build the equivalent of a new city, complete with more than 1,200 acres of commercial development.
State water regulators have granted approvals to allow an initial portion of the project to move forward. But in other nearby areas of Buckeye, state officials have sent letters to builders putting some approvals on hold while they study whether there is enough groundwater for all the long-term demands.
The sun sets on the vast desert landscape along Sun Valley Parkway in Buckeye, Ariz. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
“It’s hard for me to imagine wall-to-wall homes out here,” Ferris said, standing on the gravel shoulder of the Sun Valley Parkway, which runs across miles of undeveloped land. “This is the epitome of irresponsible growth. It is growing on desert lands, raw desert lands, where there’s no other water supply except groundwater.”
Nearby, the Central Arizona Project snakes through the desert, filled with Colorado River water. The CAP Canal was built between 1973 and 1993, bringing water that has enabled growth. But its supply came with low-priority water rights that made it vulnerable to cuts in a shortage.
The Phoenix metropolitan area’s population has more than doubled since 1990, expanding from 2.2 million to about 4.9 million people. Subdivisions have been built on former farmlands as development has expanded across the Salt River Valley, also called the Valley of the Sun.
Ferris, a lawyer and former director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, helped draft the state’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act, which was intended to address overpumping and has since regulated groundwater use in urban areas.
Water from the CAP Canal has enabled cities to pump less from wells. For years, they have banked some of the imported Colorado River water underground by routing it to basins where it percolates down to aquifers.
The Central Arizona Project Canal runs beside a community in the suburbs of North Phoenix. Development projects envisioning thousands of new homes around Phoenix now are in question because of lack of water. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The state requires that new developments around Phoenix and other urban areas have a 100-year “assured water supply,” based on a calculation that allows for groundwater to be pumped down to a level 1,000 feet underground. Changes by the Legislature and regulators in the 1990s cleared the way for subdivisions to rely on groundwater as an assured water supply.
Since then, a groundwater replenishment district has been charged with securing water and using it to recharge aquifers, creating an accounting system. The problem with this system, Ferris said, is that groundwater has been overallocated, allowing for excessive pumping in some areas.
“We’ve got to learn to live within our means. Groundwater was always supposed to be a savings account, to be used only in times of shortages. Well, now those shortages look permanent,” Ferris said. “We ought to be saying, ‘How much growth can we really sustain?’ And put limits on how much water we’re going to use.”
The desert aquifers contain “fossil” water that has been underground for thousands of years.
“That water is not replenished. And so once it’s pumped, it’s pretty much gone,” Ferris said.
In recent years, Arizona has received about 36% of its water from the Colorado River. The river has long been severely overallocated, and its flows have shrunk dramatically during 23 years of megadrought intensified by global warming.
One of a growing number of developments in Buckeye, Ariz., that depend on groundwater. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)
The river’s largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, now sit nearly three-fourths empty. Federal officials have warned there is a real danger the reservoirs could drop so low by 2025 that water would no longer flow past Hoover Dam to Arizona, California and Mexico.
Ferris said Arizona now needs to plan for years with little or no Colorado River water. She said she feels sad and angry that federal and state water managers, despite warnings by scientists, failed to act sooner to address the shortage.
“The Colorado River is dying,” Ferris said. “It is dying from overallocation, overuse, aridification, mismanagement.”
In the same way that tough decisions about the Colorado River were neglected for years, she said, “we’re not managing our groundwater well.”
“Either we do something about this now or we pay the consequences later. And we’re paying the consequences now with the Colorado River, because we didn’t deal with those problems soon enough,” Ferris said. “If we fail to plan for the idea that our groundwater will no longer be sufficient, then shame on us.”
Alongside the river’s decline, the Southwest is undergoing a parallel crisis of groundwater depletion. Scientists found in a 2014 study, using measurements from NASA satellites, that pumping depleted more than 40 million acre-feet of groundwater in the Colorado River Basin over nine years, about 1.5 times the maximum capacity of Lake Mead.
The sun sets on the vast desert landscape along Sun Valley Parkway in Buckeye, Ariz. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
“Our research has shown that the groundwater in the lower basin has been disappearing nearly seven times faster than the combined water losses from Lakes Powell and Mead,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrology professor and executive director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security. “Groundwater losses of that magnitude are literally an existential threat to desert cities like Phoenix and Tucson.”
Next year, Arizona’s allocation of Colorado River water delivered through the CAP Canal will be cut by more than a third. Some Arizona farmers are losing their CAP supplies, while irrigation districts are drilling new state-funded wells.
Arizona’s cities have yet to see major reductions. But that could soon change.
Ferris said she thinks growth should happen in areas where sufficient water is available, and from multiple sources.
A workman prepares a rig to drill for water in the suburbs of Phoenix. Colorado River flows are at historic lows due to warmer and drier conditions caused by climate change. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The city of Peoria, northwest of Phoenix, is one example of an area with a variety of sources, including the Colorado River, the Salt and Verde rivers and recycled wastewater. Since 1996, the city has been banking water underground, storing treated wastewater effluent and a portion of its Colorado River water.
The city is now drilling wells to pump out some of those supplies.
“Even if the Colorado River went away completely, we expect to have enough water banked underground to last us for years,” said Cape Powers, Peoria’s water services director. “We’ll continue to prepare for whatever comes our way.”
Nearby, a drilling crew was preparing to bore one of eight new wells for the city.
“Every drill rig that my company has is spoken for until May or June of next year,” said Ralph Anderson, the owner of Arizona Beeman Drilling. “The business in the next 3 to 5 years is going to just go through the roof.”
Some cities are maneuvering in other ways, reaching outside the Phoenix area to secure water.
The growing Phoenix suburb of Queen Creek recently won approval for a controversial $22-million deal to buy water rights from an investment company that will leave farmland dry in the community of Cibola, next to the Colorado River.
Queen Creek has also signed a 100-year contract to pay landowners $30 million to leave farmland fallow in the rural Harquahala Valley west of Phoenix, allowing them to pump groundwater and ship it to the suburbs.
Other cities are also looking to pump groundwater in the Harquahala Valley and other areas where they would be allowed to transport the water by canal.
Landscaped yards and green grassy playing fields typify the suburbs of North Phoenix. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Buckeye has a substantial amount of groundwater locally and plans to seek additional water that could be brought in from other areas, said Terry Lowe, the city’s director of water resources.
“It’s a hot market, the Phoenix metro area in general, and we’ve got to be able to have that water to meet that demand,” Lowe said. “And so we’re looking at working with others outside to find sources.”
For the planned 37,000-acre community Teravalis, the developers have two existing water approvals, called certificates of assured water supply, to build about 7,000 homes, and plan to seek additional approvals to build more. The developers plan to pump groundwater from the aquifer beneath the property, which lies in the Hassayampa River watershed.
“It’s one of the most plentiful aquifer basins in the state of Arizona. So we feel pretty good about that,” said Heath Melton, regional president for The Howard Hughes Corp. “We feel like we’re in a really good place.”
Melton said the community will conserve water by having low-water-use plants and fixtures, and will use recycled wastewater for outdoor irrigation and to recharge the aquifer.
Developers are also supporting the state government’s efforts to secure additional water from new sources.
Colorado River water flows into the Agua Fria groundwater recharge basins (or groundwater recharge facilities) in Peoria, Ariz. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)
Legislation signed this year by Gov. Doug Ducey established a new Water Infrastructure Finance Authority that will have about $1.4 billion for conservation projects and to secure additional supplies, including possibly bringing in water from outside the state. Arizona officials have been looking into a possible deal with Mexico to desalinate seawater at the Sea of Cortez and exchange that water for some of Mexico’s Colorado River water.
In the Hassayampa watershed in Buckeye, state water regulators have been working on an updated analysis of the groundwater basin. In letters to some other developers in the area, they have warned that although their report is not yet complete, they have “information indicating that the proposed subdivision’s estimated groundwater demand for 100 years is likely not met when considered with other existing uses and approved demands in the area.”
The Arizona Department of Water Resources similarly announced in 2019 that projections showed insufficient groundwater available for all the planned developments in Pinal County, between Phoenix and Tucson.
“The amount of groundwater we can allocate for these purposes is finite,” said Tom Buschatzke, the department’s director. He said in the Hassayampa basin, all the proposed developments won’t be able to grow on groundwater alone.
“They’ve got to find a different way to do business than what they’ve historically done,” he said. “They’ve got to find different pathways, more likely more expensive pathways.”
Buschatzke said the area still has options, such as bringing in water from other areas or using recycled water.
Even as the supply of Colorado River water shrinks, some researchers are optimistic about the state’s ability to adapt.
“The whole state is at an inflection point where we have to take some definite actions toward making sure of water supplies to serve the populations that are here now and into the future,” said Sarah Porter, director of ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. “Arizona has a long history of meeting these water challenges, and I think Arizona will do that again.”
Ferris said she feels more pessimistic.
Homes are being built in a new community in Buckeye, Ariz. (Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)
Visiting a new development in Buckeye, Ferris drove past an entrance with flowing fountains. She watched workers building homes beside a golf course with ponds.
Nearby, new homes stood beside the open desert. On empty lots, flattened patches of dirt lay ready for the foundations to be poured.
“We have to stop growing these giant developments on groundwater. It is unsustainable,” Ferris said. “We need to limit the growth.”
Column: I begged Santa — let Trump lead the Republican Party to defeat
Nicholas Goldberg – December 26, 2022
Former President Trump at a “Save America” rally in Perry, Ga., in 2021. (Ben Gray / Associated Press)
Prognostication is thankless work, especially when it comes to politics.
But because it’s the happy holiday season, I’m going to pay a little attention to a faint and uncharacteristically optimistic voice in the back of my head and lay out what to me seems to be a not-inconceivable and oh-so-delicious scenario of the future.
It is this — that Donald Trump sticks around to run a real 2024 campaign, as promised. But instead of successfully rallying his loyal troops and cruising demonically back into power, he continues his downward slide in the polls, becomes increasingly desperate — and foments within his own party the sort of self-destructive internecine trouble that he alone has the ability to stir up.
In this scenario, instead of causing fear and trembling in Democrats, he spews his bitterness and bile at his fellow Republicans, further weakening his already splintering party, trolling opponents, sowing chaos, division and confusion and making a bitter, bruising battle out of the primary process because he can still command the loyalty of millions of voters.
As a result, the Republicans lose big in November 2024.
Why would Trump do such a thing? Because why not!
He’s not a party loyalist. He doesn’t feel a smidgen of allegiance to his fellow Republicans or to conservative ideology or to the GOP’s ultimate victory over the Democrats. He’s all about Trump, remember? And anyone who gets in his way is an enemy.
Could it really happen? Could Trump cripple his own party that badly?
Well, the latest holiday elf to hint at these glad tidings is no left-of-center optimist or self-serving Democratic operative. It’s none other than that grand old man of the GOP, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich told the New York Times that he was worried about what he called a “1964 division” — a rancorous, disabling rift between Trump’s supporters and the anti-Trump wing of the party comparable to the divide in 1964 between the conservative Republicans who backed Barry Goldwater for president and the moderates who supported Nelson Rockefeller.
“I can imagine a Trump-anti-Trump war over the next two years that just guarantees Biden’s reelection in a landslide and guarantees that Democrats control everything,” Gingrich said.
You can be sure that’s what I asked Santa for. It’d be a better gift than 1,000 Trump NFT trading cards depicting the former president in superhero spandex or white tie and tails or riding a giant red, white and blue elephant.
Just imagine how it could play out.
Trump could seek the nomination and, in the process, lay into his fellow Republicans so viciously that the eventual nominee would emerge battered beyond recognition. (Trump’s already starting his attacks on Florida Gov. “Ron DeSanctimonious.” Heh-heh.)
If he loses the nomination, Trump could refuse to endorse the winner. Or come out against the nominee, which would be a big deal given how many supporters he has.
He could lose the nomination and (petulant spoiler that he is) run as an independent.
He could even walk away and start his own party — the MAGA Party, let’s say, which could siphon off millions of rural, non-college-educated white voters from the GOP.
After all, he’s got no sense of fair play or good sportsmanship, and no concept of limited war.
It’s obvious that Republican voters are already badly divided over Trump.
On the one hand, he won 74 million votes in 2020. And some substantial portion of those voters are unwaveringly loyal to him, not to the party. The Q-Anoners, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and their ilk, for example. They’re not going to shift their allegiances to the Jeb Bushes of the world. Probably not to the Cruzes, Rubios or DeSantises either.
“I don’t think we should underestimate the stickiness of [Trump’s] base,” one Democratic operative told the L.A. Times recently.
On the other hand, Trump is currently declining in the polls, thanks to the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the Justice Department investigation and the other criminal inquiries — and to the embarrassing fact that his handpicked candidates in the midterms performed so badly that his influence is being carefully reevaluated.
He’s damaged goods, to say the least. Some Republicans — the rational ones — are beginning to run for the hills.
In a Wall Street Journal poll released last week, 71% of Republicans said they held a favorable view of him, down from 85% in March and 90% or higher during most of his presidency.
Party bigwigs, eager to see Republican voters united behind a strong presidential candidate, had no doubt hoped Trump would not run again. When he declared several weeks ago that he would, Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former director of strategic communications for Trump, said, “No credible person in the Republican Party wanted this announcement today.”
Fading away quietly is not Trump’s style. And it would be foolish to discount his influence. For all his bombast and bluster and his current travails, he’s shown a remarkable political resilience and acumen.
So an acrimonious, polarizing, punishing 2024 battle is entirely possible.
On the other hand, all my cheerful prognostication could be wrong.
This could be the end of the Trump era; he could slink away from the 2024 battle rather than risk becoming a diminished and rejected “loser,” and the GOP could rebound. Or, worse, he could keep his base and grow it again through his peculiar brand of political charisma and reemerge as president for a second term. That would be an unspeakable disaster.
But from Christmas to New Year’s, at least, I’m choosing to believe in the joyful possibility of a Trump-instigated Republican meltdown.
Colorado River Basin policymakers stand at a critical juncture. They have an opportunity to avert more severe impacts of the crisis by implementing policy and management changes that go beyond the relatively incremental steps taken thus far.
How do we find long-term sustainability?
However, negotiating such major changes is extremely challenging, especially given the basin’s complex legal structure of water rights, its users’ diverse demands and uncertainty around how much water will be available in the future.
This raises the question: How can basin policymakers create transformational change that advances the long-term sustainability of the Colorado River amid this crisis?
A buoy sits high and dry on cracked earth previously under the waters of Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area near Boulder City, Nev., on June 28, 2022. Living with less water in the U.S. Southwest is the focus for a conference starting Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022, in Las Vegas, about the drought-stricken and overpromised Colorado River.
First, policymakers must stabilize the Colorado River system, meaning that water use does not exceed water availability. However, because streamflow is expected to continue to decline as temperatures rise, any stabilization solution must be adaptable to changes in water availability as they occur.
One way to achieve this is to change the indicators of system-wide water availability that trigger water management actions. Basin managers currently use slow-responding reservoir levels (which may also be muddled by complex water accounting) for this purpose. A more responsive indicator, such as a 5-year rolling average of inflow, could be used in the short term to minimize reliance on dwindling storage.
In the longer term, Basin managers could also consider an adaptive approach used in other areas of the West that converts fixed-quantity water rights to shares of the total quantity of available water, with the allocation of shares tailored to account for the existing water rights priority structure. The total quantity of available water could be adjusted to slowly refill reservoirs, serving to mitigate large water cuts in dry years. This additional step would help the system move beyond stabilization and into longer-term recovery.
2. Prioritize ideas to reduce uncertainty
Moving to the type of management regime described above will likely mean painful cuts for water users throughout the Colorado River Basin in the coming years. However, it could create more predictability and reliability in the long term – values that Basin managers have previously signaled agreement around.
Managing for a smaller known quantity of water is often easier than managing for the unknown. Achieving this, however, requires that all water users, including historically marginalized tribes and environmental groups, have an equitable seat at the negotiating table in order to reduce uncertainty about future water uses and needs.
3. Think beyond ‘how to share water cuts’
Finally, policymakers must expand their conception of “water sustainability” in the Colorado River Basin. For thriving communities and economies, water is a means, not an end. Beyond water use directly for human, public and ecological health, water enables food production and energy generation.
Broadening our thinking from “how to share water reductions” to “how to maintain regional food and energy security” opens new opportunities for negotiation and collaboration beyond the traditional “zero-sum” mentality.
These could include investing recently allocated federal funds for drought mitigation in improving agricultural water use efficiency, supporting the clean energy transition and conserving ecosystems to achieve more holistic sustainability goals, rather than temporarily buying more time through short-term conservation measures.
Transforming Colorado River Basin management to mitigate the current water crisis and realize long-term water sustainability requires changing not only policies but also the way we think about water use and needs.
The three suggestions presented above can help policymakers to meet this moment of historic challenge and historic opportunity by moving beyond incremental change and fostering a new era of solutions for the Colorado River.
Margaret Garcia, Ph.D, is an assistant professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. Elizabeth A. Koebele, Ph.D., is an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she researches the use and implications of collaborative approaches to governing water resources.
Sepsis is one of the most expensive medical conditions in the world – new research clarifies how it can lead to cell death
Alexander (Sasha) Poltorak, Professor of Immunology, Tufts University and Hayley Muendlein, Research Assistant Professor of Immunology, Tufts University – December 23, 2022
Bacteria (clusters of light pink, surrounded by larger magenta blood cells) can cause deadly infections, but overreactive immune responses can deliver the lethal blow. Scharvik/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Sepsis is a life-threatening condition arising from the body’s overreactive response against an infection, leading it to injure its own tissues and organs. The first known reference to “sepsis” dates back more than 2,700 years, when the Greek poet Homer used it as a derivative of the word “sepo,” meaning “I rot.”
Weareresearchers who study how certain types of bacteria interact with cells during infections. We wanted to understand exactly how an overreactive immune response can result in detrimental and even lethal effects like sepsis. In our newly published research, we discovered the cells and molecules that potentially trigger death from sepsis.
TNF in autoimmunity and sepsis
The body’s response to infection starts when immune cells recognize components of the invading pathogen. These cells then release molecules like cytokines that help eliminate the infection. Cytokines are a broad group of small proteins that recruit other immune cells to the site of infection or injury.
While cytokines play an essential role in the immune response, excessive and uncontrolled cytokine production can lead to a dangerous cytokine storm associated with sepsis. Cytokine storms were first seen in the context of graft versus host disease, arising from transplant complications. They can also occur during viral infections, including COVID-19. This uncontrolled immune response can lead to multi-organ failure and death.
Among the hundreds of cytokines that exist, tumor necrosis factor, or TNF, stands tall as the most potent and the most studied for nearly the past 50 years.
Tumor necrosis factor owes its name to its ability to induce tumor cells to die when the immune system is stimulated by a bacterial extract called Coley’s toxin, named after the researcher who identified it over a century ago. This toxin was later recognized to be lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, a component of the outer membrane of certain types of bacteria. LPS is the strongest known trigger of TNF, which, once on alert, aids in the recruitment of immune cells to the infection site to eliminate invading bacteria.
In normal conditions, TNF promotes beneficial processes such as cell survival and tissue regeneration. However, TNF production must be tightly regulated to avoid sustained inflammation and continuous proliferation of immune cells. Uncontrolled TNF production can lead to the development of rheumatoid arthritis and similar inflammatory conditions.
In infection conditions, TNF must also be tightly regulated to prevent excessive tissue and organ damage from inflammation and an overactive immune response. When TNF is left uncontrolled during infections, it can lead to sepsis. For several decades, studies of septic shock were modeled by investigating responses to bacterial LPS. In this model, LPS activates certain immune cells that trigger the production of inflammatory cytokines, in particular TNF. This then leads to excessive immune cell proliferation, recruitment and death, ultimately resulting in tissue and organ damage. Too strong of an immune response is not a good thing.
Researchers have shown that blocking TNF activity can effectively treat numerous autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. Use of TNF blockers has dramatically increased in the past decades, reaching a market size of roughly $40 billion.
However, TNF blockers have been unsuccessful in preventing the cytokine storm that can arise from COVID-19 infections and sepsis. This is in part because exactly how TNF triggers its toxic effects on the body is still poorly understood despite years of research.
How TNF can be lethal
Studying sepsis might provide some clues as to how TNF mediates how the immune system responds to infection. In acute inflammatory conditions such as sepsis, TNF blockers are less able to address TNF overproduction. However, studies in mice show that neutralizing TNF can prevent the death of the animal from bacterial LPS. Although researchers do not yet understand the reason for this discrepancy, it highlights the need for further understanding how TNF contributes to sepsis.
Blood cells made in the bone marrow, or myeloid cells, are known to be the major producers of TNF. So we wondered if myeloid cells also mediate TNF-induced death.
First, we identified which particular molecules might offer protection from TNF-induced death. When we injected mice with a lethal dose of TNF, we found that mice lacking either TRIF or CD14, two proteins typically associated with immune responses to bacterial LPS but not TNF, had improved survival. This finding parallels our earlier work identifying these factors as regulators of a protein complex that controls cell death and inflammation in response to LPS.
Next, we wanted to figure out which cells are involved in TNF-induced death. When we injected a lethal dose of TNF in mice lacking the two proteins in two specific types of myeloid cells, neutrophils and macrophages, mice had reduced symptoms of sepsis and improved survival. This finding positions macrophages and neutrophils as major triggers for TNF-mediated death in mice.
Our results also suggest TRIF and CD14 as potential treatment targets for sepsis, with the ability to both reduce cell death and inflammation.
The Conservation is an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
