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If you want to know who changed Manchin's mind--you did
That’s what happened last night when Joe Manchin caved. Now the Senate finally—for the first time in more than three decades—seems set to pass actual serious climate legislation.
The bill—now called the Inflation Reduction Act—is no unmitigated victory. It is larded with presents for the fossil fuel industry, in return for the gifts they’ve lavished on Manchin. And it may come with real defeats: the fear is that when all the details are revealed, Biden will have committed himself to backing absurd projects like the MVP pipeline.
But even those defeats kind of make the case: because people fought so hard to oppose such projects, the tide eventually became too much for Manchin to bear.
The pushback against his decision two weeks ago to blow up the deal was harsh—clearly harsher than Manchin expected. Within hours he was trying to make the case that he hadn’t actually walked away from negotiations. His fellow Senators stopped playing nice and made it clear they had no use for him. And the president seemed to understand he had to hit back: hence his increasingly clear talk of a climate emergency. But most of all it was, I think, the widespread public scorn. Somehow it began to break through to Manchin that the only thing history would ever remember about him is that he blocked action on the worst crisis humans have ever faced.
There’s no longer a real public doubt about climate change. Yes, for partisan Republicans it remains fun to pretend it’s a hoax, but after thirty years of science, fifteen years of movement building, and an ever-increasing cascade of fires, floods, heatwaves and droughts, the public mood is finally strong enough to at least begin to match the political power of the fossil fuel industry.
You could feel it building when Bernie made it a key campaign issue in 2016; by 2020, every Democratic candidate was on board, because primary polling showed it was one of the top two issues for voters. The political force most responsible for this victory was the Sunrise Movement; those young people built that wave and then rode it with immense skill.
But this is a win engineered by everyone who ever wrote a letter to the editor, carried a sign at a march, went to jail blocking a pipeline, voted to divest a university endowment, sent ten dollars to a climate group, made their book club read a climate book. It’s for the climate justice activists who brought this fight into whole new terrain, the scientists who’ve protested, the policy wonks who wonked, and the people whose particular fights may have been sacrificed by the terms of this deal. (Them in particular—if Manchin had to deal because a pipeline he wanted was going down in flames, well, the people who made that possible are heroes).
It's not yet a done deal, and in any event far from a final win, of course. Now it’s time to make that same zeitgeist weigh on the financial industry, the other source of ultimate power in our society. It’s time for bank CEOs to feel what Manchin finally felt—the little shudder of worry at the idea that their names will be forever linked with the ravaging of a planet.
Together we can do it. Together we’ve done this.
Workers harvested wheat to be processed at the Continental Farmers Group facility in Ukraine. (photo: Diego Ibarra Sanchez/New York Times)
Under a successful deal struck last week by the United Nations and Turkey, Moscow halted grain shipments to Ukraine through the Black Sea. If all goes according to plan, a ship laden with grain will sail from a Ukrainian port in the coming days, releasing crops from a major breadbasket to a starving world.
But despite the fanfare in Brussels and Washington, the agreement is being welcomed cautiously in the regions of Ukraine. Farmers who have been living for months at risk of Russian missile attacks and economic uncertainty are skeptical that there will be a deal.
The roar of the combine on these farms is a familiar racket this time of year, but most of the harvest will go straight into storage. Even after last week’s settlement, farmers believe the odds remain against them.
“The opening of Black Sea ports is not in itself the magic answer,” said Georg von Nolken, chief executive officer of Continental Farmers Group, a large agricultural business with vast areas around western Ukraine. “It is certainly a step forward, but we cannot assume that the deal will bring Ukraine back to where it was before the war,” he said.
The blockage has ignited wild price swings for crops and the cost of transporting them. Storage for the latest crop is running out, leaving many scrambling for temporary solutions.
A missile attack on Ukraine’s biggest Black Sea port of Odessa on Saturday shook confidence in the deal and risks undermining efforts before the deal is put into effect.
“No one believes Russia will attack again,” said Vasil Levko, director of grain storage at MHP, one of Ukraine’s largest agricultural produce companies.
There is political will from Ukraine’s allies: the White House welcomed the agreement, as did the United Nations and international aid organizations, which warned of possible famine and political unrest, Ukraine’s grain remains blocked for a long time.
Freeing up grain for shipment is expected to ease a growing hunger crisis caused by Russia’s aggression – not so much because Ukrainian grain can be shipped faster to desperate countries, but because more supplies can help drive down prices. which rose after the war but has been falling recently. “It’s quite positive,” said Nikolay Gorbakov, head of the Ukrainian Grain Union. “It is possible to find a way.”
Yet when reopened, Black Sea ports are expected to operate at about half their pre-war capacity, with experts saying the backlog of more than 20 million tonnes will cover only a portion of the grain. does. The ships would proceed through a path cleared of Ukrainian mines used to prevent Russian ships from entering, and would face inspections in Turkey to ensure that they did not take weapons back to Ukraine.
Our coverage of the Russo-Ukraine War
And it is uncertain whether enough ships will venture back. Shipping companies that once operated in the Black Sea have operated on other cargo routes. Insurers are wary of covering ships in a conflict zone, and without insurance, no one will ship.
Meanwhile, farmers in Ukraine are grappling with huge amounts of trapped grain from last year’s crop. Before the war, new crops moved in and out of grain elevators – from harvest to export – like clockwork. But Russia’s Black Sea barrier created a massive pile-up.
An additional estimated 40 million tonnes – wheat, rapeseed, barley, soy, corn and sunflower seeds – are expected to be produced in the coming months. Storage facilities not destroyed by Russian shelling are filling up, and space for freshly harvested crops is running out.
At an MHP grain processing center an hour east of Lviv, a truckload of freshly harvested rapeseed—small, shiny and black—has dumped its load into a sifter on a recent day. The seed was taken to a dryer and then funneled into a huge silo that still had some space available. A nearby silo didn’t: it was full of soybeans stuck there from a previous harvest.
A major concern was what to do with the wheat crop sown in the current winter, said Mr Levko, whose company uses the grain to make fodder for chicken farms in Ukraine, as well as grain for export. With its silos near capacity at the Lviv site, the wheat will be stuffed into tall plastic sheaths for temporary storage.
The company was scrambling to buy more sheaths, he said, but Russian rockets destroyed the only Ukrainian factory that makes them, and European manufacturers are swamped with orders and can’t keep up, Mr. Levko said. Told.
Updates
July 28, 2022, 12:15 am ET
After wheat comes the corn crop. Mr. Levko said it would have to be piled on the ground and covered with tarpaulin to protect it from the thousands of crows and pigeons hovering nearby like dark clouds, as well as the autumn rain, which can cause rot, Mr. Levko said. he said.
“The crops have to be gathered everywhere,” he said, spreading his hand across a vast field. He said that even if the deal to unblock the Black Sea has worked, it could take months before Odessa’s shipping capacity to help reduce the grain pile-up.
Meanwhile, farmers are trying to expand an alternative labyrinth of transportation routes that have been built across Europe since the outbreak of the war.
Before the Russian blockade, Ukraine exported seven million tons of grain a month, mostly on ships that could carry large loads. Since then, Ukraine has only been able to pump out around two million tonnes per month through a hastily cobbled patchwork of land and river routes.
The Continental Farmers Group used to export the crop through the Black Sea, Mr von Nolken said. Delivery by ship can arrive in the Middle East and North Africa in as little as six days.
But the blockade forced the company to put some of its grain on a curvy path, which included a vast circumnavigation around Europe on trucks, trains, ships and ships through Poland, the North Sea and the English Channel through the Strait of Gibraltar. Involves making a counterclockwise circle. Back in the Mediterranean, an odyssey that could take up to 18 days.
With so many exporters vying to get grain out of Ukraine, the cost of its transportation has soared from about $35 to $130 to $230 a ton before the war, with the eastern regions near Russian-occupied regions facing the sharpest price increases. It has to be done, Mr. von Nolken added. At the same time, grain prices within Ukraine have fallen by about two-thirds because the blockade prevented farmers from holding too much grain, threatening the livelihoods of many.
European countries are working furiously to solve one of the biggest challenges: the transport of grain by rail. Previously, Ukraine’s 38,000 grain cars mostly carried crops to Black Sea ports, but they run on Soviet-era tracks that Europe doesn’t match. Therefore rail shipments going elsewhere must now be transferred to other trains once they reach the border.
The biggest opportunity to increase exports lies with trucks. Roman Sleston, head of Ukraine’s main agricultural lobby, said his group was aiming to truck 40,000 tonnes of grain per day. By June, trucks were moving 10,000 tonnes per day.
But it still only relieves a portion of Ukraine’s backlog. And with so much traffic on the road, border crossings tend to get jammed. MFP’s Mr Levko said it now takes four days for grain trucks to travel from Ukraine to Poland – instead of four hours before the war. It takes 10 days instead of two to cross the Serbian border. The EU is trying to make backup easier with fast-track border permits.
“The question is, how long will the situation continue?” Mr von Nolken said. “On February 24, everyone assumed that it would be a one-week exercise. After more than 150 days, we are talking about reopening the port with reservations.
But a bitter truth still faces Ukraine. Despite the war, it has had a heavy harvest so far this year.
“We are creating a tsunami of grain, we are producing more than we can export,” said Mr. von Nolken. “We’ll still be sitting on crops that won’t come out.”
A sign indicates that an absentee ballot drop box is available to voters outside a Fulton County early voting site at C.T. Martin Natatorium and Recreation Center in Atlanta on May 18. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/NPR)
But after breaking her ankle, she couldn't drive. Even navigating the stairs from her second-floor Atlanta apartment was impossible, so waiting in line to vote wasn't an option. Poole applied for a mail-in absentee ballot, like many Georgians have in recent years, and wanted to return it using a drop box.
But the nearest one in Fulton County, where Poole lives, was a 20-minute drive and accessible only during limited hours and days, unlike 2020 when drop boxes were available all across the county and accessible seven days a week around the clock until Election Day.
The new restrictions made the drop boxes difficult to use for Poole, who had limited mobility and a rigid work schedule. So she was forced to mail in her ballot.
But Poole's ballot didn't count, because it didn't arrive at the county's elections office in time.
"To find out I did all that and still didn't get my vote in, I feel discouraged," Poole said. "I'm an African American female, and we weren't able to vote for many years, so I feel like it's my civic duty."
Poole is one of millions of Georgia voters affected by sweeping changes to state election laws enacted by lawmakers last year. The changes include restricting access to drop boxes in counties that used them the most, which also have the highest number of voters of color and Democrats, according to an analysis by NPR, WABE and Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) of drop box locations, voter registration and other data.
NPR, WABE and GPB compiled drop box usage data by reviewing thousands of forms used to document the number of ballots deposited in drop boxes daily across Georgia in 2020 and calculating travel time intervals to a drop box for more than 7.5 million voters. 2022 drop box locations are current as of Georgia's May 24 primary.
An analysis by NPR, WABE and Georgia Public Broadcasting also found:
- More than half of the roughly 550,000 voters who cast their ballot using a drop box in the state's 2020 general election lived in four metro Atlanta counties — Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett — where about 50% of the voters are people of color.
- Under the new law, the number of drop boxes in these four counties plummeted from 107 to 25.
- Nearly 1.9 million people, a quarter of the state's voters, have seen their travel time to a drop box increase from the 2020 election.
- More than 90% of voters who saw an increase in their travel time to a drop box live in cities or suburbs, which are home to most of the state's minority voters and vote heavily Democratic.
NPR, WABE and GPB compiled drop box usage data and locations by manually reviewing more than 9,000 collection forms from drop boxes used in the 2020 presidential election. Poll workers documented the number of ballots deposited in 295 drop boxes across the state daily.
Ballot drop boxes were provided to Georgia voters in the 2020 primaries for the first time as a way to vote safely while COVID-19 ravaged communities. Even before the pandemic, they were a popular tool for voters in states such as Oregon, Washington and Colorado.
After former President Donald Trump's defeat, many of his allies in Georgia and elsewhere equated drop boxes with voter fraud. So, Republican lawmakers, particularly in Georgia, have moved to curtail access to the boxes before the November midterm election.
The new law, known as Senate Bill 202, requires all 159 Georgia counties to have at least one box — but no more than one per 100,000 voters. Instead of making them available outdoors 24 hours a day as in 2020, the drop boxes must be kept inside early voting locations with limited hours — typically 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. That can be problematic for voters with inflexible work schedules or those with other time constraints. The bill received no Democratic support.
While it's too early to measure the law's impact on turnout, experts say even small changes to voter behavior and turnout can sway election outcomes and erode trust in the voting system, especially in a politically divided state like Georgia with a history of discriminatory voting practices that disproportionately impact people of color.
"In any state that's going to have tight elections, and Georgia's had some nail biters, then even those marginal changes could have significant effects on the outcome of elections," said Benjamin Gonzalez O'Brien, who teaches political science at San Diego State University and has studied drop box access and voter turnout. "Not every election is decided by tens of thousands of votes. Some are decided by under 100 votes."
In 2020, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes. In 2018, Republican Brian Kemp defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams by 54,723 votes — 50.2% to 48.8% — in the race for governor. Polls show similarly tight races this year that could decide control of Congress and who becomes the next governor.
Drop boxes became a political target
Forty-three states used drop boxes during the 2020 election. But in the months following, ballot drop boxes became a stand-in for more sweeping debates around voting rights and election integrity in Georgia and around the country, though they were used by voters of all political parties and in many states like Georgia they were under round-the-clock surveillance. They became a target of conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud promoted by Trump and his allies.
Even after voting to officially add drop boxes as a voting method in 2021, some Republican lawmakers who faced far-right primary challengers later tried unsuccessfully to completely eliminate them, claiming concerns about security and fraud.
"Drop boxes were introduced as an emergency measure during the pandemic, but many counties did not follow the security guidelines in place," Georgia Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller said after proposing that drop boxes be banned altogether. "Moving forward, we can return to a pre-pandemic normal of voting in person. Removing drop boxes will help rebuild the trust that has been lost."
Miller lost his primary election to be the party's lieutenant governor nominee, and the legislation banning drop boxes failed to gain traction.
NPR, WABE and GPB reached out to five Republican sponsors of the new election law, including Miller. None responded to requests for interviews.
In an interview with GPB, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defended the election law as a balance of accessibility and security. He said the state's recent primary election was proof that Georgia has "tremendous opportunities for people to access the vote," including by drop box.
"We have record registrations, we have record turnout," he said. "And we have the appropriate guardrails of making sure that the drop boxes are on government property, that they're now inside an office under the physical surveillance of election workers."
State Rep. Bee Nguyen disagreed. The Atlanta Democrat voted against the 98-page election law and said her colleagues approved the changes to placate voters who agreed with Trump's election lies. She said the law intentionally makes voting by drop box harder for Democrats and nonwhite voters in cities and suburbs.
"The attacks were not backed up by any kind of facts," said Nguyen, who is the Democratic nominee for secretary of state. "All of this was wrapped up in the greater scheme of the 'Big Lie.'"
The Georgia State Board of Elections recently dismissed a handful of complaints about drop boxes, where voters were alleged to each have deposited multiple ballots in a drop box. Investigators determined in each case that voters were legally dropping off ballots for their family members.
Concerns over drop boxes are not limited to Georgia. In Wisconsin, for example, the Supreme Court recently ruled that ballot drop boxes were not allowed under state law. The court suggested that votes cast that way "weaken the people's faith that the election produced an outcome reflective of their will," despite no evidence of fraud.
The provision had a disparate impact
Rep. Jan Jones, Georgia's Republican House speaker pro tem, said during a 2021 floor debate on the law that the drop box provision would provide parity for all Georgia voters.
"The vast majority of counties that offered one drop box will continue to do so," Jones said at the time. "And the very few that had multiple drop boxes will have them according to their population."
But NPR, WABE and GPB found that the uniformity of drop boxes across the state came at the expense of urban and suburban voters, who make up most of the electorate.
The drop boxes in cities and suburbs are now so widely spread out that they have become complicated to access in places already dealing with traffic gridlock or unreliable public transportation.
When Jessica Owens arrived at the library branch a 10-minute drive from her suburban Atlanta home to deposit her ballot in the May primary, the drop box she used in 2020 was gone.
After several hours driving around Gwinnett County with her two toddlers in the backseat, poring over maps and scouring the internet to try and find one, Owens was almost ready to give up. She finally contacted her state representative, who told her that the closest one was now nearly an hour drive roundtrip.
"Now, I have to plan my day around dropping off the ballot," Owens said. "An hour doesn't feel like a long time, but when you have two small kids, it is."
Twenty-three drop boxes were spread across Gwinnett County in 2020. Under the new law, only six remain in Georgia's second-largest county — one of its most diverse.
In 2020, more than 70% of urban and suburban voters lived within 10 minutes' travel of a drop box, the analysis by NPR, WABE and GPB found. That number dropped to less than 50% for this year's midterms.
The percentage of rural voters who can access a drop box within 10 minutes of their home this year is 22%, about the same as it was two years ago, the analysis found.
In one urban county, drop box use plummeted
Edward Grimes, 71, showed up at the C.T. Martin Natatorium and Recreation Center in Atlanta. It was the last day of early, in-person voting before the May primary, and Grimes wanted to deliver his ballot in the drop box.
"You don't have to stand in line, you just go in, put it in the box and you're out," Grimes said, noting the line of mostly Black voters that coiled around the lobby. "I don't think you can beat that."
Grimes is in the minority. Less than 1% of Fulton County voters used a drop box this year, compared to 6.3% in the 2020 primary, according to county election officials.
Interim Fulton County Elections Director Nadine Williams said many voters who took advantage of a drop box in 2020 did not use it again in 2022, mostly because the new laws have made them inconvenient.
"If you're going to have to get out of the car to go inside, you might as well go ahead and vote," Williams said.
Fulton County, like other mostly urban and suburban counties, invested heavily in drop boxes in 2020 as a way to remove voting barriers. But when state lawmakers imposed new limits on the boxes a year later, election officials were forced to slash the county's drop box offerings from 38 to seven.
"There was no way we could possibly cover everything 100%," Williams said. "We did the best we could."
Limiting access to drop boxes could also worsen existing voting problems in these mostly communities of color, which already have more voters assigned to polling places and longer lines on Election Day.
An NPR/ProPublica analysis in 2020 found about two-thirds of Georgia's polling places that had to stay open late because of long lines in the state's primary were in majority-Black neighborhoods, despite those neighborhoods comprising about a third of the state's polls.
Some election experts also worry that restricting drop boxes not only makes it harder for voters to cast their ballots but may discourage them from voting at all.
"When we look at it in terms of the data, it may be a two-minute increase (each way)," Gonzalez O'Brien said. "That may be something that for some voters will lead to them not casting a ballot."
The actual burden on voters is difficult to measure, since the data analysis doesn't take into account other factors such as rush-hour traffic, he said.
Gonzalez O'Brien has co-authored two studies that examined drop box access and voter turnout in Washington state, which has conducted solely absentee voting since 2013. The studies suggest that proximity to a drop box isn't just a matter of convenience; living farther away from a drop box is associated with a lower likelihood of voting.
But little research has been done on drop boxes and turnout. Studies on other similar voting methods, like vote by mail, have had mixed results. Still, Gonzalez O'Brien said that voting methods proven to be secure should be available to voters.
"I don't believe there are any studies saying making voting easier actually leads to less voting," he said.
While some voters in urban and suburban communities find ways to overcome the new obstacles of using a drop box, doing so is even harder for marginalized populations, such as voters who are less likely to own a car.
In 2020, nearly 90% of voters in those communities were able to reach a drop box within 10 minutes. By 2022, that plummeted to 56%, NPR, WABE and GPB found. The bulk of these neighborhoods are majority Black and voted overwhelmingly for Biden.
Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, a voting rights nonprofit, said even with restrictions on the location and hours, drop boxes remain valuable for people with limited options.
"I think it's key that we keep those drop boxes available for people who need to send their ballot with a family member or a disabled person who needs to send it with a caretaker," she said.
Nabers said that Georgia's history with laws that discriminate against nonwhite voters also looms over the drop box changes, prompting voting rights groups to educate voters of the changes.
"I truly believe that the motivation for rolling back drop boxes is to make it harder for voters, particularly in urban communities, to vote," Nabers said. "And I really think it's a shame that our leaders listened to the conspiracy theorists and actually took action that made voting harder."
"We basically have a useless drop box"
While Georgia Republicans have touted expanding access to drop boxes in counties that did not offer them in 2020, voters in many of those communities — mostly rural — haven't used them.
In Heard County, near the Alabama border, elections director Tonnie Adams said the one drop box he's required by law to keep is pointless for his county's roughly 8,000 voters. Voters encounter three election employees before getting to the drop box, so they just drop off the ballots with them.
"We basically have a useless drop box," he said, adding that no one used the drop box in the May primary.
In most elections, especially in rural areas, an overwhelming number of Georgians vote in person — either during the three week early voting period or on Election Day.
In Putnam County, about 80 miles southeast of Atlanta, 107 of the nearly 12,000 ballots were returned via drop box in the November 2020 election. Chattahoochee County saw only 10 ballots returned in the drop box, according to election records.
Election directors are now required to follow the new law instead of making decisions that best serve their voters.
"The nice thing about having local control over elections is that we can all take care of our citizens in a way that works for our citizens," said Joseph Kirk, elections director of Bartow County, 40 miles northwest of Atlanta.
Democrats, including Biden, have slammed provisions in the new law as being akin to "Jim Crow 2.0." But Republicans have publicly insisted the law makes it "easy to vote and hard to cheat."
The reality of Georgia's drop box changes tracked through the analysis by NPR, WABE and GPB paints a more complex picture than political absolutes. Gonzalez O'Brien said that any changes to voting laws, particularly the use of drop boxes, matter.
"Could it only have effects on the margins for certain voters? Sure," he said. "But even if those effects are only marginal, what is the justification for it?"
So far, the changes have been more than marginal for some Georgia voters, including Monica Poole.
In the May primary, Poole's absentee ballot was one of about 1,200 rejected for arriving too late, records show.
She said she has lost confidence in Georgia's voting system and didn't vote in the runoff election in June.
"It just makes you feel apathetic," Poole said.
Members of Black Lives Matter protest on the fifth anniversary of the death of Eric Garner, a day after federal prosecutors announced their decision not to prosecute NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo or other officers on charges related to his death, in New York, July 17, 2019. (photo: Michael A. McCoy/Reuters)
In many cases, the encounters started as traffic stops or there were no allegations of violence or serious crimes
In the past seven years, police in America have killed more than 2,500 people who were fleeing, and those numbers have slightly increased in recent years, amounting to an average of roughly one killing a day of someone running or trying to escape, according to Mapping Police Violence, a research group that tracks lethal force cases.
In many cases, the encounters started as traffic stops, or there were no allegations of violence or serious crimes prompting police contact. Some people were shot in the back while running and others were passengers in fleeing cars.
Two recent cases have sparked national outrage and protests. In Akron, Ohio, on 27 June, officers fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, who was unarmed and running when he was killed. And last week, an officer in San Bernardino, California, exited an unmarked car and immediately fired at Robert Adams as he ran in the opposite direction.
Despite a decades-long push to hold officers accountable for killing civilians, prosecution remains exceedingly rare, the data shows. Of the 2,500 people killed while fleeing since 2015, only 50 or 2% have resulted in criminal charges. The majority of those charges were either dismissed or resulted in acquittals. Only nine officers were convicted, representing 0.35% of cases.
The data, advocates and experts say, highlights how the US legal system allows officers to kill with impunity and how reform efforts have not addressed fundamental flaws in police departments.
“In 2014 and 2015, at the beginning of this national conversation about racism in policing, the idea was, ‘There are bad apples in police departments, and if we just charged or fired those particularly bad officers, we could save lives and stop police violence,’” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence, but “this data shows that this is much bigger than any individual officer.”
‘Hunted down’
US police kill more people in days than many countries do in years, with roughly 1,100 fatalities a year since 2013. The numbers haven’t changed since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, and they haven’t budged since George Floyd’s murder inspired international protests in 2020.
The law has for years allowed police to kill civilians in a wide variety of circumstances. In 1985, the US supreme court ruled that officers can use lethal force against a fleeing person only if they reasonably believed that person was an imminent threat. But the court later said that an officer’s state of mind and fear in the moment was relevant to determining whether the shooting was warranted. That means a killing could be considered justified if the officer claimed he feared the person was armed or saw them gesturing toward their waistband – even if it turned out the victim was unarmed and the threat was nonexistent.
As a result, very few police officers get charged. Adante Pointer, a civil rights lawyer, said it was not hard for officers to prevail when the case boiled down to what was going through the minds of the officer and victim in the moment: “The only person left to tell the story is the cop.”
In 2022 through mid-July, officers have killed 633 people, including 202 who were fleeing. In 2021, 368 victims were fleeing (32% of all killings); in 2020, 380 were fleeing (33%); and in 2019, 325 were fleeing (30%), according to Mapping Police Violence. The data is based on media reports of people who were trying to escape when they were killed, and it is considered incomplete. In roughly 10% to 20% of all cases each year, the circumstances surrounding the shootings are unclear.
Black Americans are disproportionately affected, making up 32% of individuals killed by police while fleeing, but only accounting for 13% of the US population. Black victims were even more overrepresented in cases involving people fleeing on foot, making up 35% to 54% of those fatalities.
“If a person is running away, there is no reason to chase them, hunt them down like an animal and shoot and kill them,” said Paula McGowan, whose son, Ronell Foster, was killed while fleeing in Vallejo, California, in February 2018. The officer, Ryan McMahon, said he was trying to stop Foster, a 33-year-old father of two, because he was riding his bike without a light. Within roughly one minute of trying to stop him, the officer engaged in a struggle and shot Foster in the back of the head. Officials later claimed that the unarmed man had grabbed his flashlight and presented it “in a threatening manner”.
“These officers are too amped up and ready to shoot,” said McGowan, who for years advocated that the officer be fired and prosecuted. Instead, the officer went on to shoot another Black man, Willie McCoy, one year later; he was one of six officers who fatally shot the 20-year-old who had been sleeping in his car. The officer was terminated in 2020 – not for killing McCoy or Foster, but because the department said he put other officers in danger during the shooting of McCoy.
The city paid Foster’s family $5.7m in a civil settlement in 2020, but did not admit wrongdoing. A lawyer for McMahon previously said the officer was attempting to “simply talk to Mr Foster” when he fled, adding that McMahon “believed his actions were reasonable under the circumstances”. Vallejo police did not respond to a request for comment.
“Not only do these officers get away with it, they get to move on to bigger and better jobs while we’re left shattered and are still trying to pick up the pieces,” said Miguel Minjares, whose niece, 16-year-old Elena “Ebbie” Mondragon, was killed by Fremont, California, police.
In March 2017, undercover officers fired at a car that was fleeing, striking Mondragon, who was a passenger and pregnant at the time. The officers faced no criminal consequences. One sergeant went on to work as a sniper for the department, though has since retired, and another involved in the operation continued working as a training officer, records show.
“You shoot into a moving car, which you shouldn’t have done, and you weren’t even close to hitting the person you were trying to target. And now you’re a sniper?” said Minjares. “When I hear sniper, I think of precision. It boggles my mind. It shows the entitlement of officers and the police department – they just put people where they want them, it doesn’t matter what they did. It’s confusing and it’s heart wrenching.”
In June, five years after the killing, the family won $21m in a civil trial, but it’s unclear if Fremont has changed any of its policies or practices.
A Fremont spokesperson declined to comment on the Mondragon case and did not respond to questions about its policies.
The push to prevent the killings
In the rare cases when prosecutors do file criminal charges against police who killed fleeing people, the process often takes years and typically concludes with victory for the officer, either with judges or prosecutors themselves dismissing the charges with or jury acquittals.
In one Florida case where an officer was investigating a shoplifting and fatally shot a man fleeing in a van, prosecutors filed charges and then dropped the case a week later, saying that after a review of evidence, it “became apparent it would be incredibly difficult to obtain a conviction”. In a Hawaii case where officers killed a 16-year-old in a car, a judge last year rejected all charges and prevented the case from going to trial.
For the nine fleeing cases where officers were found guilty or signed a plea deal, the conviction and sentence were much lighter than in typical homicides. A Georgia officer who killed an unarmed man fleeing on foot was acquitted of manslaughter in 2019, for example, but found guilty of violating his oath and given one year in prison. A San Diego sheriff’s deputy pleaded guilty earlier this year to voluntary manslaughter after he killed a fleeing man, but he avoided state prison, instead getting one year in jail. And a Tennessee deputy, found guilty of criminally negligent homicide after shooting at a fleeing car and killing the passenger, a 20-year-old woman, was sentenced to community service.
With the criminal system deeming nearly all these killings lawful, advocates have argued that cities should reduce the unnecessary police encounters that can turn deadly, with measures such as ending traffic stops for minor violations and removing police from mental health calls. There has also been a growing effort to ban officers from shooting at moving cars.
California passed a law in 2019 meant to restrict use of deadly force to cases when it was “necessary” to defend human life, not just “reasonable”. The law stated that an officer can kill a fleeing person only if they believe that person is going to imminently harm someone. The new law also dictated that prosecutors must consider the officer’s actions leading up to the killing, which police groups had argued were irrelevant under the previous standards.
But after its passage, police departments across the state refused to comply and update their policies, said Adrienna Wong, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of southern California, which backed the bill. That’s only now starting to change after years of legal disputes.
“I think we’re going to start to see prosecutors consider all the elements of the new law, but I’m frankly not holding my breath based on the track record of prosecutors in the state. We never thought this law was going to be a full solution.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz addresses attendees during the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit on July 23, 2022, in Tampa, Florida. (photo: Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP)
Olivia Julianna credits Republican for bringing attention to her platform after he ‘decided to body shame me publicly’
Olivia Julianna, 19, said that by Wednesday she had raised $214,000 for abortion funds, a sum she credited to Gaetz bringing attention to her platform via his insults.
“Matt Gaetz decided to body shame me publicly,” the abortion rights activist tweeted on Tuesday. “So I started fundraising for abortion funds and in a little over 24 hours we raised $115K. So let me have one final moment of telling [Gaetz] not to fuck with Texas activist[s], and definitely not to fuck with Gen-Z.”
On Wednesday, Julianna tweeted that the campaign had raised nearly double its Tuesday total.
She told the Guardian: “Originally I wanted to raise a few thousand dollars. I had no idea it would blow up as much as it has.”
The US supreme court overturned the right to an abortion last month, stoking protests across the country.
Last Saturday, at a Turning Point USA convention in Florida, Gaetz insulted abortion rights activists, telling a crowd of students pro-choice campaigners were “odious from the inside out” and “disgusting”.
Julianna criticized the comments on Twitter, referencing allegations of sex trafficking a minor for which Gaetz is under investigation. He emphatically denies wrongdoing.
“Its come to my attention that Matt Gaetz … has said that it’s always the ‘odious 5’2 350 pound’ women that ‘nobody wants to impregnate’ who rally for abortion,” Julianna wrote. “I’m actually 5’11. 6’4 in heels. I wear them so the small men like you are reminded of your place.”
Gaetz then tweeted out a picture of Julianna alongside an article covering his comments, an insult retweeted hundreds of times.
Of Gaetz’s tweet, Julianna said: “I was shocked. I was truly shocked that he would do something so absolutely stupid.”
In response to the congressman’s comments and the online harassment they stoked, Julianna announced on Monday that she would raise money for abortion funds on behalf of the organization Gen Z for Change.
She said she was motivated to begin her fundraiser because “Matt Gaetz is a creep and abortion is healthcare. Simple as that”.
In a thank you note to Gaetz on Twitter, the teen wrote, in part: “Your hateful comments towards me will quite literally help pay for abortion services. Lol. Get rekt.”
Gaetz has not responded publicly to Julianna’s fundraising efforts but he has doubled down on his comments, calling pro-choice activists “ugly and overweight” in an interview with WEAR ABC 3, a Florida news station.
Joel Valdez, Gaetz’s communications director, commented to Today Parents, writing: “Congressman Gaetz’s speech speaks for itself.” Valdez also shared the followup interview, adding: “He provided further comment here.”
“He’s probably afraid,” said Julianna, referring to Gaetz not replying to her comments or campaign. “Last time ‘Matt Gaetz’ and ‘teenager’ were trending it didn’t exactly go well for him.”
A woman prays after offering a bouquet of flowers at the memorial area set up for former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. (photo: Hiro Komae/AP)
The assassination has focused public attention on the religious movement that was apparently the target of the alleged assassin's hatred — and its decades-old ties to Japan's leaders and ruling party.
The original target was reportedly Hak Ja Han Moon, the head of the Unification Church and widow of its founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The self-proclaimed messiah and "true father" of his followers, Moon founded the Unification Church in South Korea in 1954.
Japanese media have reported that the alleged assassin, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, told police that he held a longstanding grudge against the church because his mother had donated more than $700,000 to it, bankrupting the family.
He allegedly had plans to target members of the church, including the head, but switched his focus to Abe instead after viewing a video message Abe had made at a virtual church-linked event last September.
Abe did not belong to the church. But like other Japanese politicians, he had made appearances at church-related events, including last September's, where former President Donald Trump also spoke.
Renewed scrutiny on the church's role in Japan
The church immediately distanced itself from the assassination. Tomihiro Tanaka, president of its Japan branch, officially known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, told a press conference that Yamagami was not a member of the church, but his mother was.
"As for the motive for suspect Yamagami's crime, and the donation issue reported by the media," Tanaka said, "we'd like to refrain from discussing it, as the case is under police investigation."
On Wednesday, Yamagami's mother told investigators that she felt sorry for having caused trouble for the church. "To her, the Unification Church is everything. It is life itself. She thinks nothing about her son," another relative was reported as saying.
The Unification Church has longstanding links to Japanese politics
Abe's ties to the church go back generations, including his father Shintaro Abe, and grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi.
At the end of World War II, his grandfather was jailed as a suspected war criminal. In prison, Kishi contacted other right-wing nationalists, including businessman and politician Ryoichi Sasakawa.
When the Rev. Moon created an anti-communist group in South Korea in 1968, he made Sasakawa honorary chairman of its Japan branch — whose headquarters were located on a plot of land next to Kishi's residence.
"They established the Federation for Victory over Communism and Kishi supported it," says Hiromi Shimada, an expert on religion at Tokyo Woman's Christian University. "And this situation laid the foundation for Abe's assassination."
The church has long provided volunteers to help Abe's Liberal Democratic Party at election time, Shimada says. And while LDP politicians haven't been able to completely shield the church from lawsuits or criticism, they have turned a blind eye to allegations against it, he says.
Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi — who is Abe's brother — said this week that Unification Church members had volunteered in his own past election campaigns. And the head of Japan's agency investigating security lapses in Abe's killing told reporters that he headed the executive committee for a church-linked event in 2018.
The church has faced a series of lawsuits and bad publicity
Despite the current burst of public attention, the Unification Church, like other new religions, has lost influence since its rise in popularity during Japan's period of rapid economic growth in the 1960s.
"It was a time of urbanization, which produced many new believers," explains Shimada. "Now that period is over. The believers are aging, and not many new ones are joining."
The church's anti-communist mission lost relevance with the end of the Cold War, he says. A string of lawsuits against the church also dented its popularity.
Former church members say they were conned
A former church member who goes by the pen name of Fumiaki Tada, because he says the church targets its critics, claims the church duped him into joining as a student. He says their representatives withholding their true identities for months, and says they brainwashed him and then conned him out of his money.
"They plant fear in you, saying that you are full of sin and corrupted, you will end up in hell, and your family will face a similar fate," he says.
In addition to the sins of Adam and Eve, Tada says, church members are taught about the sins of Japan's colonial rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945.
But the church also offered followers a path to salvation.
"We were told that we must make up for it with money," Tada says. "So to the church's South Korean headquarters, the Japan branch is their wallet."
Tada later became a church official in the city of Sendai. He says that church headquarters in South Korea sent fundraising quotas for branches, sub-branches and individual followers to meet. Followers who could not meet the quotas, he says, were often told to borrow money to contribute to the church.
Tada says his family eventually compelled him to leave the church. His successful lawsuit against the church helped him come to grips with his ordeal and share his experiences with fellow plaintiffs.
But that's an opportunity he says Abe's suspected killer never had.
"He was the child of a believer, and he had nobody to talk to," Tada says. "This is one of the reasons he committed the crime, and I feel sorry for that."
Cars stream down Interstate 35 near Austin, Texas, in 2016. (photo: Getty)
The state department of transportation says many of its highway projects have “no significant impact.”
He got involved with a grassroots group called Stop TxDOT I-45 and started spending nights and weekends fighting the expansion. Gradually, he met people fighting freeway expansions across the state, including in the capital city of Austin, and joined a regular Zoom call to discuss strategy. He signed up for automated emails from TxDOT to find out when new projects were proposed and approved.
In 2021, just a few days before Christmas, he got two emails from TxDOT. The agency had issued a “finding of no significant impact” — or FONSI, pronounced like Fonzie, the Happy Days character — for two segments to a $6 billion project to rebuild and expand I-35, which passed through the heart of Austin. Really? he thought. No impact?
Moritz was alarmed by the idea that adding lanes to an interstate running through one of the fastest-growing cities in the country was considered to have no environmental impact. The expansion of the north and south segments of I-35 would consume 30 acres of land, affect more than a dozen streams and creeks, and add millions of metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere over the coming decades.
Moritz called up a few activists he knew in Austin. Together, they wondered: How often was TxDOT declaring that their projects had no impact on the human or natural environment? Moritz decided to find out. He searched TxDOT’s online archives for every environmental review published since 2015, as far back as TxDOT’s records extend.
Moritz quickly noticed that many projects that were physically connected had been spliced into segments, as I-35 was in Austin. Loop 88 in Lubbock, notably, had been evaluated in four segments stretching across 36 miles. Collectively, those segments would consume 2,000 acres of land, displace nearly 100 residences and 63 businesses, and cost almost $2 billion. And yet all four segments received findings of no significant impact, three on the same day.
Overall, between 2015 and 2022, Moritz discovered that 130 TxDOT projects were found to have no significant impact after an initial review, while only six received full environmental analyses detailing their impacts. Cumulatively, those 130 projects will consume nearly 12,000 acres of land, add more than 3,000 new lane miles to the state highway system, and displace 477 homes and 376 businesses. The total projected costs of those projects was nearly $24 billion, almost half of what TxDOT spent on transportation projects during that time and twice as much as the amount spent on projects that received full environmental reviews.
“It can’t be argued with a straight face that these big, multihundred-million-dollar projects don’t have significant impact,” says Dennis Grzezinski, an environmental lawyer in Wisconsin who has worked on NEPA cases for three decades and who was not involved in Moritz’s study. He called Moritz’s analysis “a giant red flag” that TxDOT was approving projects in violation of NEPA. “If TxDOT is producing environmental assessments that result in FONSIs over and over and over again, on large-scale interstates and major highway expansion projects, there is clearly something major that’s wrong and not in line with NEPA requirements,” he says.
Now, a group of activists is suing TxDOT, saying that the agency split the I-35 project into segments in order to obscure its full impacts and “circumvent” the requirements of NEPA. The case, filed in U.S. district court, raises larger questions about the federal government’s decision to give TxDOT the authority to approve its own environmental reviews.
“I think the words ‘no significant impact’ have meaning,” Grzezinski says.
Under the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, any state agency receiving federal funding for a project must document how the project impacts the human and natural environment. That documentation is categorized in one of three ways, depending on the project’s perceived impact. Actions that “significantly affect the environment” require a comprehensive environmental impact statement, which quantifies those impacts, includes specific ways the agency would mitigate them, and asks for significant public feedback. (The final environmental impact statement for the Houston highway expansion exceeded 8,000 pages.) On the other end of the spectrum, relatively minor projects — like repaving an existing road or repairing an interchange — can receive what’s called a categorical exclusion, essentially an exemption from NEPA. Everything in between is considered through an environmental assessment, a relatively concise document, typically a few hundred pages. An environmental assessment leads to either a full environmental review or a finding of no significant impact, which allows the agency to proceed with land acquisition and construction. But because NEPA covers a broad array of government actions, the law doesn’t define what makes an environmental or social impact “significant” — whether it’s acres of land taken or people displaced — and thus what triggers a full environmental review.
One of the people Moritz called in December was Adam Greenfield, the founder of a grassroots campaign called Rethink35, which called on the state to tear down I-35 in Austin, replace it with an urban boulevard, and reroute pass-through traffic around the city on existing roads. A longtime bicycle advocate, Greenfield had been galvanized into action when he saw TxDOT’s plan to expand I-35 from 12 to 20 lanes, including frontage roads, through central Austin, blocks from where he lived.
For Greenfield, that prospect felt like not just a neighborhood threat but also an existential one: Transportation is the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, mostly due to passenger cars and trucks. TxDOT itself has found that vehicle emissions in Texas accounted for 0.48 percent of total worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, even as the state represents 0.38 percent of the world’s population. And more capacity for cars usually leads to more people driving, a phenomenon known as induced demand. According to a calculator developed by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability nonprofit, the entire I-35 project would generate 255 million to 382 million additional vehicle miles traveled per year, resulting in 1.2 to 2.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2050, roughly equal to the annual greenhouse gases generated by a small coal-fired power plant.
Segmenting I-35 obfuscated the full impact of what TxDOT was trying to build, Greenfield says. In June, Greenfield’s Rethink35, along with the Texas Public Interest Research Group and Environment Texas, filed a lawsuit against TxDOT, alleging it had violated NEPA by splitting I-35 into three separate projects with distinct environmental reviews. “If you look at the proposals, it seems pretty obvious to us that this is one big project,” Greenfield says. “They’ve used a lesser environmental review, an environmental assessment, for the north and south portions. For such an important project with such enormous implications for the region, they should be doing a full environmental impact statement.”
Segmenting projects and issuing FONSIs is not a strategy unique to Texas, says Matt Casale, the director of environment campaigns for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “It’s widespread and it’s a problem.” But Texas, as well as seven other states including California, has little federal oversight. In 2012, the Federal Highway Administration, or FHWA — which oversees the construction and maintenance of highways — created a program that would allow state transportation departments to assume federal responsibility to enforce NEPA. The program, called NEPA assignment, allowed agencies like TxDOT to approve their own environmental reviews, with annual audits to ensure compliance. The program solved a capacity problem: At the time, TxDOT had more than 150 people working on environmental review, while the federal agency had a fraction of that. NEPA assignment would allow TxDOT to move more quickly on projects, reducing cost and unnecessary delays.
When TxDOT joined the program in 2014, it signed an agreement with FHWA, which was renewed in 2019. Last year, when FHWA intervened to stop the expansion of I-45 in Houston, citing concerns that the project would disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic communities in violation of the Civil Rights Act, it also alerted TxDOT that it would be reviewing the agency’s compliance with the agreement. Moritz thinks his findings should be included in that review. Last month, he emailed his analysis to FHWA and asked the agency to “consider the number, scale, and segmentation of projects TxDOT has determined to have no significant impact since the execution” of the agreement. FHWA declined to comment on Moritz’s report.
Splitting a large project into discrete parts, as TxDOT did for I-35, is not itself problematic. What makes segmentation illegal is when the act of splitting conceals the overall intent of a project, effectively hiding the forest in the trees. That’s what happened in San Antonio in the 1970s, shortly after NEPA was signed into law. For years, a local conservation group had been fighting a project called the San Antonio North Expressway. The proposed freeway would cut directly through Brackenridge Park, which straddles the San Antonio River and spans nearly 350 acres of parkland, wildlife habitat, and trails. Facing public opposition, the Texas Highway Department, as TxDOT was known until 1975, split the highway project into segments and requested federal approval for the two outer sections of the roadway, which stopped short on either end of the park. This appeared to all but guarantee that the central segment would bisect the park. After the outer segments were approved, the conservation group sued, saying the highway department had violated NEPA by illegally segmenting the project. Under NEPA, highway projects can advance in segments only if those segments begin and end at rational points, exist with “independent utility” from one another, and — importantly — don’t “restrict consideration of alternatives for other reasonably foreseeable transportation.”
A yearslong court battle ensued, eventually attracting the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court. “This case disturbs me greatly,” wrote Justice Hugo Black. “Patently, the construction of these two ‘end segments’ to the very border, if not into, the Parklands, will make destruction of parklands inevitable, or, at least, will severely limit the number of ‘feasible and prudent’ alternatives to avoiding the Park,” he wrote. “The two segments now approved stand like gun barrels pointing into the heartland of the park.” The project was ultimately built after Texas declined to use federal money for it.
The plaintiffs in the I-35 case are now making the same argument, only this time the gun barrels are pointing into the city of Austin. The groups opposing the highway expansion say that TxDOT’s approval of the north and south segments restricts the agency from considering alternatives to expansion in the central segment — like the boulevard proposed by Rethink35, or a completely depressed and covered highway, an idea advanced by the nonprofit Reconnect Austin. “A highway … needs to be cohesive in order for traffic to flow and congestion be avoided,” they argue in the case filing.
That cohesion can now only be achieved by expanding the central portion of I-35, Greenfield says, even as TxDOT ostensibly considers alternatives as it progresses through a full environmental review for that segment. For example, the schematics for the I-35 north and south projects show TxDOT adding two to four managed lanes, basically express lanes for high-occupancy vehicles and transit, and in turn expanding the total number of lanes on the highway. But the whole purpose of an express lane is to move traffic through the city, not stop on either end of it, says David Adelman, an environmental law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who is not involved in the lawsuit against TxDOT. “So if you build an express lane in the north and south, you’re pretty much committing yourself not only to having express lanes through the city, but also expanding the number of lanes,” Adelman said. “And that’s directly impacting the options that you have available to you for the center part of the project,” he says.
TxDOT declined to respond to questions from Grist. But at a TxDOT planning conference in Houston in May, Anthony Horne, an environmental specialist at TxDOT’s environmental affairs division, explained to a crowd of TxDOT employees and consultants how the significance of a highway project is evaluated in context. “You kind of have to work the equation to try to figure out, is this something that is going to cause an issue? Are people concerned about it?” He described projects with “a couple of displacements” that didn’t undergo any environmental assessment. “Those people didn’t seem to be too concerned about it,” Horne said. “Therefore, because there was no sense of significance to it, we could proceed.”
Other TxDOT employees and consultants confirmed that the level of anticipated public controversy can be a determining factor when deciding between an environmental impact statement and an environmental assessment. That public outcry should determine which projects get full environmental reviews is fundamentally inequitable, said Kelly Haragan, who directs UT’s environmental law clinic and is not involved in the lawsuit. “A community that can gin up a whole lot of attention about a project is probably a community that has more resources and time.”
It is also circular logic, Adelman says. Public hearings can surface controversy, which is precisely the process an environmental assessment compresses. “There can be an interaction between the agency’s public process and the degree of public attention and salience to a particular decision,” Adelman says. “It can create perverse incentives on the part of agencies because if they’re worried about public attention, then they just want to get through the process as fast as they can. And if they can do that, then they can depress public attention, which just reinforces the determination that they’re making.” Indeed, the environmental assessment process for the north and south I-35 projects generated just over 800 public comments. In comparison, since 2020, more than 9,500 people have commented on the I-35 central project as it progresses through a full environmental review.
Now, a judge could require TxDOT to expose the entire project to that level of public scrutiny. There is precedent for the federal government to overturn a state department of transportation’s environmental assessment. Last year, FHWA approved a FONSI for an $800 million plan to expand I-5 through central Portland, Oregon — and then rescinded that approval after three community groups sued the federal agency, alleging that the state did not thoroughly study the impacts of the proposed expansion on the surrounding neighborhood.
Because NEPA is a procedural law, mandating the process that a public agency must follow rather than any particular outcome, there are limits to what lawsuits can accomplish. Even if the plaintiffs in the I-35 suit prevail and TxDOT is required to do a single environmental impact statement for the whole project, the agency isn’t obligated to choose an alternative with a lesser environmental impact. “It requires them to say, essentially, here are all the bad things that we’re going to do when we have these other alternatives that do less bad things, and forces those decisions to be made under the glare of public transparency and scrutiny,” Grzezinski says.
Moritz thinks TxDOT has lost the right to approve its own environmental reviews. Officials in Houston have told him that this oversight “takes up a lot of bandwidth for the feds and that they may be disinclined to revoke or not renew” NEPA assignment, he says. “And my response to that generally is: There’s levels of power and checks and balances for a reason. And a bandwidth constraint shouldn’t be determining the fate of the built environment in Texas.”
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