Donald Trump’s golf outings have cost U.S. taxpayers $102 million in expenses — which, according to HuffPost, is “255 times the annual presidential salary he volunteered not to take.”

The figure represents millions in “extra travel and security expenses,” according to HuffPost, and will increase again next month when he visits his resort in Doonbeg, Ireland in June.

HuffPost conducted the analysis, which it described as “a conservative approach to determining costs” based off a 2019 Government Accountability Office report on Trump’s presidential travel and secret service expenditures.

Per HuffPost:

U.S. taxpayers have spent $81 million for the president’s two dozen trips to Florida, according to a HuffPost analysis. They spent $17 million for his 15 trips to New Jersey, another $1 million so he could visit his resort in Los Angeles and at least $3 million for his two days in Scotland last summer ― $1.3 million of which went just for rental cars for the massive entourage that accompanies a president abroad.

“It’s obviously an incredible waste of money,” Robert Weissman, president […]

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Plastic waste washed up on the beaches of Haiti.
Credit: Coastalcare

Nearly every country in the world except the United States took a historic step to curb plastic waste last week, when more than 180 nations agreed to add plastic to the Basel Convention, a treaty that regulates the movement of hazardous materials between countries. The U.S. is one of just two countries that has not ratified the 30 year-old treaty. During negotiations last week in Geneva, the Environmental Protection Agency and State Department joined the plastics industry in trying to thwart the landmark, legally-binding agreement. Despite this, the United States will still be affected by the agreement, because countries will be able to block the dumping of mixed or unrecyclable plastic wastes from other nations. The amended treaty will make it much more difficult for wealthy countries to send their plastic waste to poorer nations by prohibiting countries from exporting plastic waste that is not ready for recycling. The U.N. estimates there are 100 million tons of plastic waste in the world’s oceans. We […]

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Credit: Illustration by Olivier Bonhomme/The Washington Post

Nuclear power was supposed to save the planet. The plants that used this technology could produce enormous amounts of electricity without the pollution caused by burning coal, oil or natural gas, which would help slow the catastrophic changes humans have forced on the Earth’s climate. As a physicist who studied esoteric properties of subatomic particles, I admired the science and the technological innovation behind the industry. And by the time I started working on nuclear issues on Capitol Hill in 1999 as an aide to Democratic lawmakers, the risks from human-caused global warming seemed to outweigh the dangers of nuclear power, which hadn’t had an accident since Chernobyl, 13 years earlier.

By 2005, my views had begun to shift.

I’d spent almost four years working on nuclear policy and witnessed the influence of the industry on the political process. Now I was serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where I saw that nuclear power was more complicated than I knew; it was a powerful business as […]

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Collapsed houses lie on the beach after a storm surge in Hemsby, eastern England, 6 December 2013. Parts of England’s east coast, from Yorkshire to Essex are vulnerable to stronger storms and rising sea levels due to climate change.
Credit: Darren Staples/Reuters

Donald Trump held what was essentially a campaign rally in Louisiana this week, and his message was that he deserves credit for reversing the Obama administration’s efforts to combat climate change.

President Trump traveled to an energy state on Tuesday to boast about his administration’s reversal of Obama-era environmental policies, ticking off actions like approving oil pipelines, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and opening up Arctic drilling that he said have resulted in an “American energy revolution.”

However, back in the reality-based world, the bad news kept coming.

Over the weekend, the climate system sounded simultaneous alarms. Near the entrance to the Arctic Ocean in northwest Russia, the temperature surged to 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 Celsius). Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in […]

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