RFK Jr. Denied He Is Anti-Vaccine During His Confirmation Hearing. Here’s His Record

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the most famous vaccine skeptics in the U.S., tried to distance himself from his decades of anti-vaccine sentiment during his Jan. 29 hearing to be confirmed as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health.

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“News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety,” Kennedy said in his opening statement before the Senate Committee on Finance, prompting a protester to shout, “He lies!” Kennedy added that all of his children are vaccinated—a decision he has previously said he regrets—and said vaccines “play a critical role in health care.”

Some Republican senators accepted Kennedy’s pro-vaccine comments at the hearing. But many senators—including Oregon’s Ron Wyden, a Democrat—pressed Kennedy on discrepancies between his past public statements—in which he has repeatedly questioned the safety and necessity of vaccines and said they are linked to autism and chronic diseases—and his sanitized comments during the hearing. “Mr. Kennedy, all of these things cannot be true,” Wyden said. “So are you lying to Congress today when you say you are pro-vaccine, or did you lie on all those podcasts?”

Here’s what to know about Kennedy’s history on vaccines.

What RFK has said in the past about vaccines

Despite Kennedy’s efforts to distance himself from the anti-vaccine movement during the hearing, he has “made a career” out of “planting seeds of doubt about vaccines,” says James Hodge, director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University.

Kennedy has for years questioned vaccines and spread misinformation about them, ignoring broad scientific consensus about their safety and efficacy to argue that they have not been adequately studied. He has also perpetuated the thoroughly disproven idea that vaccines cause autism. “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” Kennedy said in a 2023 interview with Fox News. Kennedy repeated that view in private emails recently published by STAT, along with other false claims—including that one COVID-19 vaccine had a “100% injury rate” in early clinical trials.

Read More: The Origins of the Anti-Vaccination Movement

He “has a series of beliefs that are not supported by science,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a November interview with TIME.

Kennedy’s views are amplified by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a nonprofit he founded and recently resigned from as he’s considered for HHS secretary. CHD’s website implies, without qualitative evidence, that vaccines are to blame for rising rates of autism and chronic disease in the U.S. The organization has also brought legal challenges against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and laws that allow minors to be vaccinated without parental consent.

What happened with the measles outbreak in Samoa 

Kennedy and CHD have reportedly exploited tragedy to spread anti-vaccine sentiment. In 2018, two babies in Samoa died after they received improperly prepared measles, mumps, and rubella shots, leading to a temporary pause on vaccine distribution. Even after regular vaccination resumed, some parents were afraid to have their children vaccinated, worsening a dramatic drop in the small South Pacific nation’s vaccination rates.

In the aftermath of the incident, Kennedy traveled to Samoa and met with numerous health officials, apparently to perpetuate anti-vaccine ideas. (Kennedy denied that characterization during the hearing, saying that his trip had “nothing to do with vaccines.”) CHD also used the situation as fodder for social media posts questioning vaccines, as NBC News recently reported.

Read More: Trump’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Health Agenda Is a Wake-Up Call for Cities and States

Not long after Kennedy’s visit, a measles outbreak killed 83 people—most of them children—in Samoa. While Kennedy has repeatedly denied responsibility for the outbreak, many scientific experts disagree. Offit said in November that there is “no better example” of the real-world consequences of vaccine skepticism.

Kennedy again denied blame during the hearing. “You cannot find a single Samoan who will say, ‘I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy,’” he said.

Kennedy’s stance on banning vaccines 

During the hearing, Kennedy said he will “do nothing, as HHS secretary, that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking” vaccines, saying specifically that he supports the polio and measles vaccines. 

But his past actions—and ongoing alliances—make experts and lawmakers doubt those assurances. In 2021, on behalf of CHD, Kennedy unsuccessfully petitioned the FDA to reverse its emergency authorization of COVID-19 vaccines and refrain from fully approving any COVID-19 shots in the future, according to the New York Times. The following year, Aaron Siri, a lawyer working closely with Kennedy, petitioned the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine, the Times reported in December. (The petition is reportedly still under review.) And, as of 2024, Kennedy had ongoing financial relationships with law firms suing vaccine manufacturers.

Read More: RFK Jr.’s Confirmation Hearings Could Be Banner Moment For Anti-Vax Movement

Kennedy tried to walk back some of his most blatantly anti-vaccine statements during the hearing, sparking anger from several lawmakers. “There is no reason that any of us should believe that you have reversed the anti-vaccine views that you have promoted for 25 years,” said New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat.

How Kennedy could shape vaccine policy as HHS secretary

HHS wouldn’t need to ban or rescind approvals of vaccines to affect U.S. health policy, Hodge says. His research has outlined numerous ways that a Kennedy-led HHS could erode current vaccine standards, from adding additional warning labels to vaccine packaging to refusing to stock the Strategic National Stockpile with shots needed for emergencies. Kennedy outlined some similar possibilities in his 2023 book Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, listed others during the hearing, including making it easier for people to sue vaccine makers based on “junk science” or seek compensation for allegedly vaccine-related health issues. “No one should be fooled,” Warren said. If confirmed, “Kennedy will have the power to undercut vaccines and vaccine manufacturing across our country.”

Even seemingly small changes, Hodge says, have the potential to chip away at the confidence Americans have in vaccines, thereby reducing vaccination rates and increasing the chances of disease outbreaks. Hodge also points to three major pathways by which Kennedy could act. First, he could influence people who hold key roles at the FDA and CDC as well as on those agencies’ vaccine advisory committees, potentially slow-walking the approval of new vaccines and influencing guidance about which already-approved shots should be recommended for the general public and covered by insurance. 

Second, his HHS could attach strings to federal funding for vaccines. While states set their own vaccine policies, including which are required for children entering school, the CDC provides much of the funding states use to carry out their vaccination programs. The federal government could require states to comply with certain policies set by Kennedy’s HHS if they want to continue to receive that money, Hodge says.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Kennedy would have a major and official platform from which to spread vaccine skepticism. “The anti-public-health impact of that, from a pure influencer perspective, is profound—even though it doesn’t require any legal action,” Hodge says. “It would be damaging beyond all control.” 

source https://time.com/7210943/rfk-confirmation-hearing-vaccines/

Why AI Safety Researchers Are Worried About DeepSeek

The release of DeepSeek R1 stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley this month, spooking investors and impressing tech leaders. But amid all the talk, many overlooked a critical detail about the way the new Chinese AI model functions—a nuance that has researchers worried about humanity’s ability to control sophisticated new artificial intelligence systems.

It’s all down to an innovation in how DeepSeek R1 was trained—one that led to surprising behaviors in an early version of the model, which researchers described in the technical documentation accompanying its release.

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During testing, researchers noticed that the model would spontaneously switch between English and Chinese while it was solving problems. When they forced it to stick to one language, thus making it easier for users to follow along, they found that the system’s ability to solve the same problems would diminish.

That finding rang alarm bells for some AI safety researchers. Currently, the most capable AI systems “think” in human-legible languages, writing out their reasoning before coming to a conclusion. That has been a boon for safety teams, whose most effective guardrails involve monitoring models’ so-called “chains of thought” for signs of dangerous behaviors. But DeepSeek’s results raised the possibility of a decoupling on the horizon: one where new AI capabilities could be gained from freeing models of the constraints of human language altogether.

To be sure, DeepSeek’s language switching is not by itself cause for alarm. Instead, what worries researchers is the new innovation that caused it. The DeepSeek paper describes a novel training method whereby the model was rewarded purely for getting correct answers, regardless of how comprehensible its thinking process was to humans. The worry is that this incentive-based approach could eventually lead AI systems to develop completely inscrutable ways of reasoning, maybe even creating their own non-human languages, if doing so proves to be more effective.

Were the AI industry to proceed in that direction—seeking more powerful systems by giving up on legibility—“it would take away what was looking like it could have been an easy win” for AI safety, says Sam Bowman, the leader of a research department at Anthropic, an AI company, focused on “aligning” AI to human preferences. “We would be forfeiting an ability that we might otherwise have had to keep an eye on them.”

Read More: What to Know About DeepSeek, the Chinese AI Company Causing Stock Market Chaos

Thinking without words

An AI creating its own alien language is not as outlandish as it may sound.

Last December, Meta researchers set out to test the hypothesis that human language wasn’t the optimal format for carrying out reasoning—and that large language models (or LLMs, the AI systems that underpin OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s R1) might be able to reason more efficiently and accurately if they were unhobbled by that linguistic constraint.

The Meta researchers went on to design a model that, instead of carrying out its reasoning in words, did so using a series of numbers that represented the most recent patterns inside its neural network—essentially its internal reasoning engine. This model, they discovered, began to generate what they called “continuous thoughts”—essentially numbers encoding multiple potential reasoning paths simultaneously. The numbers were completely opaque and inscrutable to human eyes. But this strategy, they found, created “emergent advanced reasoning patterns” in the model. Those patterns led to higher scores on some logical reasoning tasks, compared to models that reasoned using human language.

Though the Meta research project was very different to DeepSeek’s, its findings dovetailed with the Chinese research in one crucial way. 

Both DeepSeek and Meta showed that “human legibility imposes a tax” on the performance of AI systems, according to Jeremie Harris, the CEO of Gladstone AI, a firm that advises the U.S. government on AI safety challenges. “In the limit, there’s no reason that [an AI’s thought process] should look human legible at all,” Harris says.

And this possibility has some safety experts concerned. 

“It seems like the writing is on the wall that there is this other avenue available [for AI research], where you just optimize for the best reasoning you can get,” says Bowman, the Anthropic safety team leader. “I expect people will scale this work up. And the risk is, we wind up with models where we’re not able to say with confidence that we know what they’re trying to do, what their values are, or how they would make hard decisions when we set them up as agents.”

For their part, the Meta researchers argued that their research need not result in humans being relegated to the sidelines. “It would be ideal for LLMs to have the freedom to reason without any language constraints, and then translate their findings into language only when necessary,” they wrote in their paper. (Meta did not respond to a request for comment on the suggestion that the research could lead in a dangerous direction.)

Read More: Why DeepSeek Is Sparking Debates Over National Security, Just Like TikTok

The limits of language

Of course, even human-legible AI reasoning isn’t without its problems. 

When AI systems explain their thinking in plain English, it might look like they’re faithfully showing their work. But some experts aren’t sure if these explanations actually reveal how the AI really makes decisions. It could be like asking a politician for the motivations behind a policy—they might come up with an explanation that sounds good, but has little connection to the real decision-making process.

While having AI explain itself in human terms isn’t perfect, many researchers think it’s better than the alternative: letting AI develop its own mysterious internal language that we can’t understand. Scientists are working on other ways to peek inside AI systems, similar to how doctors use brain scans to study human thinking. But these methods are still new, and haven’t yet given us reliable ways to make AI systems safer.

So, many researchers remain skeptical of efforts to encourage AI to reason in ways other than human language. 

“If we don’t pursue this path, I think we’ll be in a much better position for safety,” Bowman says. “If we do, we will have taken away what, right now, seems like our best point of leverage on some very scary open problems in alignment that we have not yet solved.”

source https://time.com/7210888/deepseeks-hidden-ai-safety-warning/

AI Could Reshape Everything We Know About Climate Change

With one announcement, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shook up all of Wall Street and Silicon Valley’s conventional wisdom about the future of AI. It should also shake up the climate and energy world. 

For the last year, analysts have warned that the data centers needed for AI would drive up power demand and, by extension, emissions as utilities build out natural gas infrastructure to help meet demand.

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The DeepSeek announcement suggests that those assumptions may be wildly off. If the company’s claims are to be believed, AI may ultimately use less power and generate fewer emissions than anticipated.

Still, don’t jump for joy just yet. To my mind, the biggest lesson for the climate world from DeepSeek isn’t that AI emissions may be less than anticipated. Instead, DeepSeek shows how little we truly know about what AI means for the future of global emissions. AI will shape the world’s decarbonization trajectory across sectors and geographies, disrupting the very basics of how we understand the future of climate change; the question now is whether we can harness that disruption for the better.

“We’re just scratching the surface,” says Jason Bordoff, who runs the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University about the implications of AI for emissions. “We’re just at inning one of what AI is going to do, but I do have a lot of optimism.”

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Many in the climate world woke up to AI early last year. Over the course of a few months, power sector experts issued warnings that the U.S. isn’t prepared for the influx of electricity demand from AI as big technology companies raced to deploy data centers to scale their ambitions. A number of studies have found that data centers could account for nearly 10% of electricity demand in the U.S. by 2030, up from 4% in 2023.

Many big tech companies have worked to scale clean electricity alongside their data centers—financing the build out of renewable energy and paying to open up dormant nuclear plants, among other things. But utilities have also turned to natural gas to help meet demand. Research released earlier this month by Rystad Energy, an energy research firm, shows that electric utilities in the U.S. have 17.5 GW of new natural gas capacity planned, equivalent to more than eight Hoover Dams, driven in large part by new data centers. 

All of this means an uptick in emissions and deep concern among climate advocates who worry that the buildout of electricity generation for AI is about to lock the U.S. into a high-carbon future.

As concerning as this might be, the projections for short-term electricity demand growth might mask much more challenging risks that AI poses for efforts to tackle climate change. As AI drives new breakthroughs, it will change consumption patterns and economic behavior with the potential to increase emissions. Think of a retailer that uses AI to better tailor recommendations to a consumer, driving purchases (and emissions). Or consider an AI-powered autonomous vehicle that an owner leaves to roam the streets rather than paying for parking.  

At the most basic level, AI is bound to generate rapid productivity gains and rapid economic growth. That’s a good thing. But it’s also worth remembering that since the Industrial Revolution, rapid economic growth has driven a rise in emissions. More recently, some developed economies have seen a decoupling of growth from emissions, but that has required active effort from policymakers. To avoid an AI-driven surge in emissions may require an active effort this time, too. 

But AI isn’t all risk. Indeed, it’s very easy to imagine the upsides of AI far outweighing the downsides. Most obviously, as DeepSeek shows, there may be ways to reduce the emissions of AI with chip innovation and language model advances. As the technology improves, efficiencies will inevitably emerge.

The data center buildout could also catalyze a much wider deployment of low-carbon energy. Many of the technology companies that are investing in AI have committed to eliminating their carbon footprints. Not only do they put clean electricity on the grid when they build a solar farm or restart a nuclear power plant, but they help pave the way for others.

“Governments are starting to realize that if they’re going to attract data centers, AI factories, and wider technology companies into their countries, they have to start removing the barriers to renewable energy,” says Mike Hayes, head of climate and decarbonization at KPMG.

And then there are all the ways that AI might actually cut emissions. Researchers and experts group the potential benefits into two categories: incremental improvements and game changers. 

The incremental improvements could be manifold. Think of AI’s ability to better identify sites to locate renewable energy projects, thereby greatly increasing the productivity of renewable energy generation. AI can help track down methane leaks in gas infrastructure. And farmers can use AI to improve crop models, optimizing crop yield and minimizing pollutants. The list goes on and on. With a little consideration, you could probably identify a way to reduce emissions in every sector.  

It remains difficult to quantify how these incremental improvements all add up, but it’s not hard to imagine that emissions reductions thanks to these developments could easily outweigh even the most dramatic estimates of additional pollution. 

And then there are the game changers that could, in one blow, completely transform our ability to decarbonize. At the top of that list is nuclear fusion, a process that could generate abundant clean energy by combining atomic nuclei at extremely high temperatures. Already, start-ups are using AI to help optimize their fusion reactor designs and experiments. A fusion breakthrough, supported by AI technologies, could provide a clean alternative to fossil fuels. It could also power large-scale carbon dioxide removal. This would give the world an opportunity to suck carbon out of the atmosphere affordably and pull the planet back from extreme temperature rise that may otherwise already be baked in. 

“If you think like a venture capital investor, you’re betting 1 or 2% of incremental emissions, but what could the payoff potentially be?” asks Cully Cavness, co-founder of Crusoe, an AI infrastructure company. “It could be things like fusion, which could address all the emissions.”

For those of us, myself included, who haven’t spent the last decade thinking deeply about AI, watching it emerge at the center of the global economic development story can feel like watching a juggernaut. It came quickly, and it’s hard to predict exactly where it will go next. 

Even still, it seems all but certain that AI will play a significant role shaping our climate future, far beyond the short-term impact on the power sector. Exactly what that looks like is anyone’s guess.

TIME receives support for climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. TIME is solely responsible for all content.

source https://time.com/7210942/deepseek-ai-climate-change-reshape-what-we-know/

Why DeepSeek Is Sparking Debates Over National Security, Just Like TikTok

The fast-rising Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is sparking national security concerns in the U.S., over fears that its AI models could be used by the Chinese government to spy on American civilians, learn proprietary secrets, and wage influence campaigns. In her first press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the National Security Council was “looking into” the potential security implications of DeepSeek. This comes amid news that the U.S. Navy has banned use of DeepSeek among its ranks due to “potential security and ethical concerns.”

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DeepSeek, which currently tops the Apple App Store in the U.S., marks a major inflection point in the AI arms race between the U.S. and China. For the last couple years, many leading technologists and political leaders have argued that whichever country developed AI the fastest will have a huge economic and military advantage over its rivals. DeepSeek shows that China’s AI has developed much faster than many had believed, despite efforts from American policymakers to slow its progress.

However, other privacy experts argue that DeepSeek’s data collection policies are no worse than those of its American competitors—and worry that the company’s rise will be used as an excuse by those firms to call for deregulation. In this way, the rhetorical battle over the dangers of DeepSeek is playing out on similar lines as the in-limbo TikTok ban, which has deeply divided the American public. 

“There are completely valid privacy and data security concerns with DeepSeek,” says Calli Schroeder, the AI and Human Rights lead at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “But all of those are present in U.S. AI products, too.”

Read More: What to Know About DeepSeek

Concerns over data

DeepSeek’s AI models operate similarly to ChatGPT, answering user questions thanks to a vast amount of data and cutting-edge processing capabilities. But its models are much cheaper to run: the company says that it trained its R1 model on just $6 million, which is a “good deal less” than the cost of comparable U.S. models, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in an essay..

DeepSeek has built many open-source resources, including the LLM v3, which rivals the abilities of OpenAI’s closed-source GPT-4o. Some people worry that by making such a powerful technology open and replicable, it presents an opportunity for people to use it more freely in malicious ways: to create bioweapons, launch large-scale phishing campaigns, or fill the internet with AI slop. However, there is another contingent of builders, including Meta’s VP and chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who believe open-source development is a more beneficial path forward for AI.

Another major concern centers upon data. Some privacy experts, like Schroeder, argue that most LLMs, including DeepSeek, are built upon sensitive or faulty databases: information from data leaks of stolen biometrics, for example. David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, accused DeepSeek of leaning on the output of OpenAI’s models to help develop its own technology.

There are even more concerns about how users’ data could be used by DeepSeek. The company’s privacy policy states that it automatically collects a slew of input data from its users, including IP and keystroke patterns, and may use that to train their models. Users’ personal information is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China,” the policy reads. 

For some Americans, this is especially worrying because generative AI tools are often used in personal or high-stakes tasks: to help with their company strategies, manage finances, or seek health advice. That kind of data may now be stored in a country with few data rights laws and little transparency with regard to how that data might be viewed or used. “It could be that when the servers are physically located within the country, it is much easier for the government to access them,” Schroeder says.

One of the main reasons that TikTok was initially banned in the U.S. was due to concerns over how much data the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, was collecting from Americans. If Americans start using DeepSeek to manage their lives, the privacy risks will be akin to “TikTok on steroids,” says Douglas Schmidt, the dean of the School of Computing, Data Sciences and Physics at William & Mary. “I think TikTok was collecting information, but it was largely benign or generic data. But large language model owners get a much deeper insight into the personalities and interests and hopes and dreams of the users.” 

Geopolitical concerns

DeepSeek is also alarming those who view AI development as an existential arms race between the U.S. and China. Some leaders argued that DeepSeek shows China is now much closer to developing AGI—an AI that can reason at a human level or higher—than previously believed. American AI labs like Anthropic have safety researchers working to mitigate the harms of these increasingly formidable systems. But it’s unclear what kind of safety research team Deepseek employs. The cybersecurity of Deepseek’s models has also been called into question. On Monday, the company limited new sign-ups after saying the app had been targeted with a “large-scale malicious attack.”

Well before AGI is achieved, a powerful, widely-used AI model could influence the thought and ideology of its users around the world. Most AI models apply censorship in certain key ways, or display biases based on the data they are trained upon. Users have found that DeepSeek’s R1 refuses to answer questions about the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, and asserts that Taiwan is a part of China. This has sparked concern from some American leaders about DeepSeek being used to promote Chinese values and political aims—or wielded as a tool for espionage or cyberattacks.

Read More: Artificial Intelligence Has a Problem With Gender and Racial Bias.

“This technology, if unchecked, has the potential to feed disinformation campaigns, erode public trust, and entrench authoritarian narratives within our democracies,” Ross Burley, co-founder of the nonprofit Centre for Information Resilience, wrote in a statement emailed to TIME.

AI industry leaders, and some Republican politicians, have responded by calling for massive investment into the American AI sector. President Trump said on Monday that DeepSeek “should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.” Sacks posted on X that “DeepSeek R1 shows that the AI race will be very competitive and that President Trump was right to rescind the Biden EO,” referring to Biden’s AI Executive Order which, among other things, drew attention to the potential short-term harms of developing AI too fast.

These fears could lead to the U.S. imposing stronger sanctions against Chinese tech companies, or perhaps even trying to ban DeepSeek itself. On Monday, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party called for stronger export controls on technologies underpinning DeepSeek’s AI infrastructure.

But AI ethicists are pushing back, arguing that the rise of DeepSeek actually reveals the acute need for industry safeguards. “This has the echoes of the TikTok ban: there are legitimate privacy and security risks with the way these companies are operating. But the U.S. firms who have been leading a lot of the development of these technologies are similarly abusing people’s data. Just because they’re doing it in America doesn’t make it better,” says Ben Winters, the director of AI and data privacy at the Consumer Federation of America. “And DeepSeek gives those companies another weapon in their chamber to say, ‘We really cannot be regulated right now.’”

As ideological battle lines emerge, Schroeder, at EPIC, cautions users to be careful when using DeepSeek or other LLMs. “If you have concerns about the origin of a company,” she says, “Be very, very careful about what you reveal about yourself and others in these systems.”

source https://time.com/7210875/deepseek-national-security-threat-tiktok/

The Climate Crisis Is a Housing Crisis. Black Communities Are Paying the Biggest Price

Hours after his inauguration, President Donald Trump rescinded America’s commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement as part of a flurry of executive actions meant to swiftly pivot the nation from the Biden administration’s agenda. Trump made the rollback of America’s climate change mitigation efforts a key campaign promise, arguing that the agreement undermined Americans’ economic interests. But the accord actually has been poised to be fruitful in a number of ways in bolstering the long-term economic stability of Americans, especially when it comes to housing—a major drain on consumers’ wallets—by making it more environmentally durable and energy-efficient.

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According to a September 2024 poll released by Data for Progress, 76% of Americans believe housing affordability is a growing problem. That’s not totally surprising. Over the last two decades, housing demand in the U.S. has grown much faster than housing supply, and housing costs have risen much faster than incomes. Tack on climate change, a pronounced factor in the nation’s deepening housing crunch, and we have the perfect recipe for a national housing crisis. And the crisis isn’t just about the availability and cost of housing.

When considering climate change, it’s also about location and quality. Nowhere clearer is this convergence than in Black communities, where housing costs have become exceptionally hard to juggle in recent years.

In general, Black people spend more money on housing than any other race, and despite that, they’re still generally less likely to have access to stable housing, contributing to them being disproportionately represented in the nation’s unhoused population. Black homebuyers also pay significantly more than white homebuyers for similar homes. And when it comes to climate change, Black people are a staggering 40% more likely than other races to currently live in places with the highest forecasted increases in extreme temperature-related deaths, according to a study done by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). All of these imbalances flow from one common source: the U.S. finance industry.

For decades, America’s finance industry has found increasingly complex ways to advance and capitalize on the racial anxieties and biases of the broader American public. That history begins most famously with the practice of redlining. Redlining, a New Deal-era technique that emerged in the 1930s and soared through the late 1980s, refers to how financial institutions deliberately avoided providing mortgage loans to racial minorities—namely Black individuals—under the guise of the customer being high-risk or otherwise non-creditworthy.

When lenders didn’t outright reject Black customers, they would offer them loans in locations considered undesirable—for example, on low-lying land that was prone to flooding, near pollution-producing highways or industrial waste sites, or on land with poor soil that would foster structurally unsound housing and make agriculture and recreation difficult. That has created an intergenerational phenomenon of Black populations living today on significantly less safe, less productive land with lower levels of appreciation in value.

Climate change is beginning to more directly and deeply exploit these vulnerabilities.

Relative to white populations, Black populations are more likely to dwell on so-called “heat islands” (communities with a predominance of heat-absorbing infrastructure like buildings and concrete roads and little tree shade) and to be exposed to extreme heat. They also carry a substantially higher risk of living in an area that will be impacted by floods. And when it comes to key climate-proofing and adaptation solutions—like improving flood management systems, expanding green spaces, and making energy systems more efficient—Black communities are consistently behind due to ongoing commercial disinvestment and government neglect.

Read More: The Critical Role Trees Play During Heat Waves

These challenges are poised to get even more amplified through the rise of bluelining, a more agile iteration of redlining that is guided by the growing hazards of climate change. Bluelining is a recently coined term referring to the process by which property insurers minimize their potential losses by intermittently inflating insurance costs and trimming and removing coverage in communities most directly confronting climate change. Because of the legacy of redlining, these imperiled communities tend to be nonwhite.

The 2025 Los Angeles wildfires help put the bluelining practice into perspective. In California, towering wildfires have long loomed large as the most nightmarish and concerning outgrowth of climate change. Apart from the visceral damage wildfires cause, Californians are keenly aware of how expensive housing and insurance already are in parts of the state—namely Southern California and the Bay Area—due to the growing intensity and frequency of wildfires. Wildfires cost America up to a stunning $893 billion a year, according to analysis done by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee’s Democratic majority, most of this massive expense coming from diminished real estate.

Against this backdrop, in recent years, national insurers, including Allstate, Nationwide, and Travelers, have adjusted, quietly retooling their policies and redrawing their coverage maps to lower their risks in markets like California. The outcome has been customers getting increasingly low-quality or bare-bones coverage, similar to trends observed in the healthcare industry. In other cases, insurers have paused or entirely withdrawn from state or local markets, thereby creating “home insurance deserts.”

In a poll conducted in 2023, 4 out of 10 Californians indicated they were considering moving out of the state, most citing the costs of living as a primary reason. Black Californians have particularly felt the pinch. The Black population in California decreased from 2.2 million in 2000 to 2.1 million present-day. During this time, cost concerns in California and other parts of the country have become inextricably tied to environmental matters.

Read More: As Wildfires Linger, Focus Turns to Rebuilding in Los Angeles

According to a 2018 study that assessed tens of thousands of census tracts across the U.S., majority Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities were found to have up to 50% higher susceptibility to wildfires in contrast to majority white communities.

Beyond the heightened vulnerability, the burden of recovery is often far steeper for Black populations. Payouts are often significantly lower and more delayed in Black compared to white communities. Altadena, for instance, home to some of the West Coast’s most historic and flourishing Black middle-class neighborhoods, was decimated by the area wildfires. And it’s likely not lost on Altadena’s Black residents that, without intervention, insurance hikes and climate gentrification are likely on the immediate horizon. Racial minorities in places like New Orleans, Houston, and Puerto Rico have vividly experienced this domino effect first-hand in the years following large-scale environmental crises in their communities.

In fact, another 2018 study showed that white households often actually gain wealth in the aftermath of disasters, while Black households indeed lose wealth. Why? White homeowners tend to not only get more aid following disasters, but they also tend to get aid above and beyond the appropriate property valuation.

In addition to the expansive damage to homes that can drive deep, costly repairs, extreme weather events like these also cause catastrophic damage to minority communities’ basic infrastructure and functionality, stifling local commerce, transportation, and access to healthcare. This serves as yet another barrier to recovery.

Ultimately, while the physical and psychological toll of natural disasters like the LA wildfires may appear racially universal, community resilience is very much racialized. So whether speaking figuratively or literally, it remains clear that racial minorities will be paying the biggest price for climate change.

source https://time.com/7210649/climate-housing-black-communities-essay/

Extreme Heat Could Kill Millions of People in Europe, Study Warns

Extreme temperatures — mostly heat — are projected to kill as many as 2.3 million people in Europe by the end of the century unless countries get better at reducing carbon pollution and adapting to hotter conditions, a new study says.

Currently, cold temperatures kill more people in Europe than heat by large margins. But a team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine used climate simulations of different scenarios and looked at death rates in 854 cities. They found as it warms cold deaths lessen slowly, but heat deaths soar rapidly.

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With few reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases and little adaptation like air conditioning and cooling centers, Italy, southern Spain and Greece should see massive increases in the rate of heat deaths due to climate change. On the flip side, much of Scandinavia and the United Kingdom will see fewer temperature-related deaths, mostly due to moderating cold temperatures, the study in Monday’s journal Nature Medicine found.

But even in the most optimistic scenarios — with carbon dioxide emissions from coal, oil and gas cut sharply and massive increases in adaptation — there’s a net increase in temperature-related deaths as the world warms, said study lead author Pierre Masselot, an environmental epidemiologist and statistician.

The drop in cold deaths up north are in places not as populated as places further south, where the heat really kicks in and hurts, Masselot said.

“The Mediterranean is a so-called climate hotspot,” Masselot said. “It’s a region that is warming much quicker than the rest of the world. And Malta is right in the middle of it.”

The study projects Malta’s temperature-related death rate to increase by 269 people for every 100,000 by the end of the century. By contrast, Ireland’s will go down slightly, 15 per 100,000 people.

In general, western Europe being wealthier fares better than eastern Europe, Masselot said.

Several heat waves have killed thousands of people in the last few years in Europe, but one in 2003 is the biggest with about 70,000 deaths.

Big cities with lots of people near the Mediterranean can see the bodies pile up through the rest of the century. The study says in the worst case they studied Barcelona could see nearly a quarter million extra temperature-related deaths, while Rome and Naples get close to 150,000 deaths.

In a scenario with carbon pollution only slightly worse than current trends and no extra adaptation to heat, Masselot’s team found more than 5.8 million excess heat deaths just from climate change, but nearly 3.5 million fewer cold deaths too. The team has a interactive website where cities and different factors can be adjusted.

Masselot’s team was also able to isolate out climate change, removing a major factor of an aging population which made the study even more useful and impressive, said University of Washington public health and climate scientist Kristie Ebi, who wasn’t part of the study.

“This very much lines up with what we would expect,” said Dr. Courtney Howard, a Canadian emergency room physician and vice chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. She was not part of the study. “When you think about summertime daytime temperatures in places like Rome — they start to get up into the 40s (104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit)…. That’s very heat stress/heat stroke territory for healthy young people and very dangerous for older people, particularly if they don’t have air conditioning.”

Europe having older housing stock and not much air conditioning needs massive amount of adaptation, such as central air, more green space and cooling centers, to lower the projected death rates, Masselot said. North America is less likely to have such a strong trend, he said.

Another factor is the aging of Europe makes its population more vulnerable, Masselot said.

source https://time.com/7210563/extreme-heat-deaths-europe-climate-study/

The Doomsday Clock Just Moved Closer to Midnight

Today, the Doomsday Clock was set to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest to midnight ever in its 78-year history. It’s the duty of the United States, China, and Russia to lead the world back from the brink. Humanity’s continuing existence depends on immediate action from the world’s leaders.

Founded by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Manhattan Project scientists who developed the first atomic weapons, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set the hands of the Doomsday Clock since 1947. Nuclear weapons, climate change, biological threats, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence are existential risks weighing heavily on the minds of the world’s top scientists.

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In setting the Clock at 89 seconds to midnight—one second closer since the last movement in 2023—the Bulletin is signaling that we’re unacceptably close to catastrophe. We are the closest we have ever been to midnight, an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every moment of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.

The world needs more international cooperation, not less, to tackle these issues. In 2025, it is our fervent hope that leaders will recognize the world’s existential predicament and act in humanity’s best interest by taking bold action to reduce the threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, and the potential misuse of biological science as well as a variety of emerging technologies. To continue on our current path would be dangerous.

The war in Ukraine risks the use of nuclear weapons at any moment. A simple accident, impulsive decision, or miscalculation could plunge the world into chaos. And it’s not the only conflict zone that worries experts. Approximately 30 countries without nuclear weapons are currently considering developing arsenals of their own, which undermines longstanding nonproliferation efforts and exponentially increases the probability of nuclear war. Meanwhile, the nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and the current high-level contacts among nuclear powers are entirely inadequate given the danger at hand.

The path forward is not simple, but it is clear. The world desperately needs leadership, innovation, and cooperation. Whether we look to the arms control agreements of the Cold War or the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, our history shows us that rivals can negotiate for the common good. But the world needs to work faster. And unfortunately, the withdrawal of the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement are discouraging signs with which to begin the new year.

The situation is profoundly worrisome, especially for a generation of young people that feels like they are inheriting a world of increasing dysfunction and danger. For many, the future looks bleak. A multitude of threats loom, casting a dark shadow of uncertainty and hopelessness over everyday life.

According to a recent study published in the medical journal The Lancet, 57% of 16 to 25-year-olds in the US are “very or extremely worried” about climate change. They are right to worry–their leaders are not acting fast enough. According to The World Meteorological Organization, 2024 was the hottest year on record. Other indicators like sea-level rise and global greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change continued to intensify, and extreme weather and climate change-influenced events hit every continent. But the willingness of the world to address climate change is still falling short, with most governments failing to enact meaningful policies necessary to address the climate crisis.

In regard to nuclear risks, another recent study found that young people are the least likely to believe that nuclear deterrence is a “very effective” strategy in comparison to older generations. They also are most likely to believe that nuclear weapons make America “less safe.” But the U.S.—and other countries that possess nuclear weapons like Russia and China—are continuing to grow their arsenals, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars that could otherwise be spent solving the world’s problems into weapons that can destroy the world many times over.

Meanwhile, top scientists worry that the world is unprepared for the next major pandemic. Emerging, re-emerging, and evolving pathogens continue to threaten society. Bird flu, or highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), is spreading to livestock and dairy products, and new human cases have surfaced, creating the potential for a new pandemic.

These historic challenges are amplified by the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that blur the line between facts and fiction. Science itself is losing the public’s trust; even as scientific breakthroughs sweep over the world. For instance, AI can make it easier than ever for individuals to spread false information across the internet and nations are propagating disinformation and other forms of propaganda to subvert their adversaries’ elections. This corruption of the information ecosystem damages the public discourse and ultimately undermines democracy. It also rewards demagogues who attack science, infringe on human rights, and obstruct our path towards addressing these enormous threats together.

But we must not give up hope that the world can come together and celebrate our shared humanity. Everyone wants to pass down a brighter future to their children and the generations to come. Young people are demanding solutions. World leaders must meet the challenge or risk fueling despair and disillusion.

The cost of failing to choose cooperation over competition can only result in our future doom. The United States, China, and Russia don’t have to agree on every issue, but they should agree on one crucial point: advancing toward a man-made apocalypse benefits none of their national interests. They must come together with the shared intention of setting aside short-sighted competition and working together on our long-term survival. And they must come together now, because every second counts.

source https://time.com/7210372/doomsday-clock-moved-closer-midnight/