GOLDEN CRESCENT AND 1000 ISLAND NEWS

  The past 75 years have brought the greatest improvement of human welfare in history. But over the past decade, much of that progress has stalled. This happened at the same time that the rich world shifted its attention to climate change. This isn’t a coincidence, and it has to change. Consider extreme poverty, long defined as living on less than $1 a day, adjusted for inflation and purchasing power. In 1950, more than half of humanity was that poor (using the 1985 dollar as the benchmark). Today the share is 7.6%, the lowest ever recorded. Average schooling has almost tripled, from 3.2 years to nearly nine. Electricity access has soared. Problems remain, but the gains have been spectacular. Yet that development has lately slowed to a crawl. After almost two centuries of declining poverty, the number of poor people in the world hasn’t budged since 2016. Global progress is at its slowest pace since 1950, according to the World Bank. There are many causes, but one stands out. In ...

  The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York struck down the state’s Climate Change Superfund Act on Monday, ruling that the 2024 law is invalid under the federal Clean Air Act. The law set up a cost recovery scheme whereby fossil fuel companies would pay into a fund used to finance climate change adaptation-related infrastructure projects. The state’s argument rested in part on the Trump administration’s decision earlier this year to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, which gave the agency authority to regulate climate pollution. Judge Brenda K. Sannes dismissed that argument in her decision, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling in American Electric Power v. Connecticut from 2011, which, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo put it , “established companies’ protection from federal public nuisance claims over greenhouse gas emissions. That decision sprang from the Court’s earlier 2007 decision that the Clean ...