Portside

The Trump administration today pulled out of the Paris agreement on climate change. That pits the U.S. against the world and the scientific consensus on global warming. Trump's comments on climate change during his meeting with European leaders prompted German leader Angela Merkel to conclude that Europe must increasingly go it alone. The Obama administration could have done more, while the Trump administration couldn't have done less. (John Feffer, FPIF)

The evidence is pretty clear: the transition team's policies are problematic and unprecedented. So much so that at least some Trump administration officials have backed away from them once they became the subject of news stories.

Off the Charts -- The thousands of U.S. locales where lead poisoning is worse than in Flint. A Reuters examination of lead testing results across the country found almost 3,000 areas with poisoning rates far higher than in the tainted Michigan city. Yet many of these lead hotspots are receiving little attention or funding.

Catastrophically high lead levels in the West Calumet Housing Complex will force over a thousand residents to leave by July 2017

American workers need jobs. They also need protection from chemicals and pollutants that threaten their lives, health, environment, climate, and future. Gina McCarthy, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, has a unique track record in protecting the environment in ways that also protect and expand jobs.

“If the cost of compliance to our rules outweighs the penalties for breaking them, companies just take a ‘catch me if you can’ approach to worker safety and health,” he said. And serious violations of the rules should not be misdemeanors, he said, but felonies, much like insider trading, tax crimes and antitrust violations. -- David Michaels, OSHA director