The Brief

Your trash, or the place where it ends up, is one of the most serious contributors to global warming. After livestock, landfills are the second-largest source of methane emissions in California, responsible for more than 20% of the state’s output.

That’s why the California Air Resources Board took action Thursday to monitor and capture landfill gases.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is generated from the breakdown of waste. Even though it’s a short-lived climate pollutant compared to long-lasting carbon dioxide, it severely exacerbates human-caused climate change.

The new rules will eventually require landfill operators to take action when a satellite or airplane detects a methane leak, improve routine leak monitoring and reporting and mandate stronger action on recurring issues. The protections will add to a suite of regulations the state passed in 2010, which made California the first state to develop stricter standards than the federal government.

“This is another example of California’s leadership in reducing emissions and harmful climate-warming pollutants across all sources. With these updates, California will be able to more efficiently and effectively monitor methane sources to detect and remedy leaks quickly,” CARB Chair Lauren Sanchez said in a press release.

The board reported that the state’s methane satellite, which passes by four to five times a week, has helped stop 10 large leaks since May.

“We believe that many operators would be interested in adopting these technologies to reduce the need for costly labor, especially as the number of mature technologies increases over time,” said air resources engineer Quinn Langfitt, who introduced the regulator’s proposal at a public hearing on Thursday.

The changes, which will affect 188 landfills in the state, are part of meeting the state’s goal to reduce methane emissions by 40% below 2013 levels by 2030.

Officials said the new rules could reduce landfill emissions by 427,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. They would create $34 million in social benefits and cost landfills around $12 million, with the largest bearing the brunt of the price tag.

A recent report backed up the agency’s findings: By 2050, landfill emissions could be reduced by more than half and up to 64% by the end of the century, according to a March analysis by Industrious Labs. The group noted that California landfills emit 7.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent of methane annually, which has “the same climate impact as driving 1.7 million cars for one year.”

But even though the board passed the new rules, they won’t go into effect immediately; staff will need to address a slew of clarifying questions raised by the public and board members during the hearing.

CARB board member Diane Takvorian supported the rule but pushed for a public-facing dashboard to show when and where emissions plumes are detected.

“People are asking for basic information,” Takvorian said, noting that technology is moving fast and that people need information now, not in years. She and others recommended an 18-month technology review after the rule goes into effect. They also suggested that the state and landfills share any data with the public as soon as possible.

“If we have the data, we should share it,” board member Hector De La Torre said.

John Kennedy, senior policy advocate for the Rural County Representatives of California, said he is “supportive of efforts to reduce emissions.” His group represents more than two-thirds of the landfills to which the standards would apply. Kennedy wants to ensure that the implementation is feasible for local governments “while protecting the communities that are close to those landfills.”

A spokesperson from Waste Management, which does business as WM, representing facilities across the state, thanked staff for the updated plan, but said he hopes they will work with the industry on site-specific conditions, which of the new rules are “necessary and useful to diagnose conditions,” and a framework for using alternative monitoring technologies.

Multiple residents from the Los Angeles community of Val Verde attended the meeting. They said they have suffered because of widespread noxious odors and hazardous gas emissions from the Chiquita Canyon Landfill in recent years. Brandi Howse, who spoke during public comment, said she has lived about 1,000 feet from the landfill for 27 years.

Howse said she has experienced clouds of methane and other gases at her home.

“You become dizzy, disoriented, nauseous. You get headaches, burning sinuses and bloody noses,” Howse said. “We are left to be concerned with long-term effects. I know that myself and my neighbors to my left and my right have all had cancer.”

Community members from the Kern County community of Avenal approached the podium to say that the landfill in their community is causing health concerns, including cancer, and people are leaving the town because of it.

“The smell is really bad,” said Leticia Luna, who moved to Avenal 15 years ago. “People are leaving our community because their homes are not safe, and when they leave, they find it difficult to sell because we live very close to the landfill.”

While many groups applauded the new rule, Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics, said it is a “real first step,” and that CARB needs even stronger rules to prevent fires and large emission leaks at landfills.

If you feel a lift after exercise, you're in good company. Movement can boost mood, and according to the results of a new study, it can also help relieve symptoms of depression.

As part of a review of evidence by the Cochrane collaboration — an independent network of researchers — scientists evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials that included about 5,000 people with depression, many of whom also tried antidepressant medication.

"We found that exercise was as effective as pharmacological treatments or psychological therapies as well," says Andrew Clegg, a professor at the University of Lancashire in the U.K.

The findings are not a surprise to psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Mateka, medical director of psychiatry at Inspira Health. "This new Cochrane review reinforces the evidence that exercise is one of the most evidence-based tools for improving mood," says Mateka.

He explains how it mirrors some of the effects of medication. "Exercise can help improve neurotransmitter function, like serotonin as well as dopamine and endorphins. So there is certainly overlap between exercise and how antidepressants offer relief," Mateka says.

In other words, exercise helps release chemicals in the body that are known to boost mood.

And there's another powerful effect too. Exercise can trigger the release of brain growth factors, explains Dr. Nicholas Fabiano of the University of Ottawa. He says depression can decrease neuroplasticity, making it harder for the brain to adapt and change.

"The brain in depression is thought to be less plastic. So there's less what we call neurotrophic factors, or BDNF," Fabiano explains. He calls it the Miracle-Gro for the brain. "And we know that exercise can also boost it. So I think exercise is a fundamental pillar we really need to counsel patients on," he says.

And while medications and therapy are important tools, Fabiano says exercise is recognized as a preferred treatment for depression.

"Exercise has been adopted as a first-line treatment in guidelines for depression globally with good acceptability and safety," he writes. Yet he says it remains underappreciated and underutilized.

"It's much easier for a primary care physician to prescribe medication to a patient. You just write it on a pad," Fabiano says. It's harder to prescribe exercise, which takes time and effort and can be difficult to start for people who are depressed.

Fabiano says exercise can work best as part of a combination of treatments. "We can start someone on an antidepressant — maybe that improves their mood, and they're able to engage in therapy. And from there, maybe now they're more interested in starting some of these lifestyle habits like exercise," Fabiano says.

How much exercise is enough?

The evidence shows light to moderate exercise — where you get your heart rate up enough to feel slightly winded — can be as beneficial as vigorous or intense exercise, at least early on. And Fabiano says it's OK to start with a "low dose."

"Ultimately you want to work your way up. But going from completely sedentary to even just going for a walk every day, that's where you start seeing those exponential gains," he says, stressing the importance of getting started with modest amounts.

The study found that a combination of aerobic exercise and resistance training appears to be more effective than aerobic alone. The meta-analysis found between 13 and 36 workouts led to improvements in depressive symptoms, though long-term follow-up was rare. Researchers say there's more to learn about how regular exercise may help stave off depression.

Mateka says there are lots of options. "When it comes to exercise, it's about just finding the exercise that works for you, such as something like yoga or tai chi versus something like walking and jogging," he says. For some, group activity can add to the psychosocial benefits.

At the end of the day, it's best to pick something you enjoy or go back to an activity or sport you liked as a child.

"Exercise is something that is extremely low cost. It's very accessible. It has very minimal side effects. And it has the opportunity to impact you positively, mentally, emotionally, socially and physically," Mateka says.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Time to ditch your winter jackets because Southern California is in for a potentially record-breaking heat wave — in January.

Temperatures will peak Wednesday, hitting the mid 80s in some areas, especially in the valleys, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Lewis. Downtown Los Angeles will see a high of around 82 degrees, while Pasadena could be closer to 85 — record numbers for this time of the year.

“We’ll see a little bit of a cooling trend towards the end of the week, but it’ll be quite gradual, so we’ll still stay relatively warm into the weekend,” Lewis said.

Going into the weekend, temperatures will be in the upper 70s to low 80s. Those higher temperatures will be more common, especially away from the coast.

“It’ll be pretty nice weather and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any real significant issues in terms of rip currents or high surf,” he said. “It should be a pretty nice day for the beach here in mid-January.”

What’s causing the high temperatures

“The Santa Ana winds are certainly the driving force,” Lewis said.

Even if you don’t feel the winds, it’s bringing warmer temperatures – and they’re higher than average by about 10 to 15 degrees.

And while Santa Ana winds typically fuel fire conditions, the risk is lower for this heat wave, Lewis said.

“The fire risk is absolutely mitigated by all the rain we got, so it’s really not much of a concern, even though we have these hot, dry and windy conditions,” he said.

For years, the Environmental Protection Agency has assigned a dollar value to the lives saved and the health problems avoided through many of its environmental regulations.

Now, that has changed. The EPA will no longer consider the economic cost of harm to human health from fine particles and ozone, two air pollutants that are known to affect human health. The change was written into a new rule recently published by the agency. It weakened air pollution rules on power plant turbines that burn fossil fuels, which are sources of air pollution of many types, including from fine particles, sometimes called soot.

The EPA writes in its regulatory impact analysis for the new rule that, for now, the agency will not consider the dollar value of health benefits from its regulations on fine particles and ozone because there is too much uncertainty in estimates of those economic impacts.

EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch clarified that the agency is still considering health benefits. But it will not assign a dollar amount to those benefits until further notice, as it reconsiders the way it assesses those numbers.

Health experts worry that the move could lead to rollbacks of air pollution rules, which could result in rising pollution levels, leading to more health risks for millions of Americans.

"I'm worried about what this could mean for health," says Mary Rice, a pulmonologist and air pollution expert at Harvard University and the director of Harvard's Center for Climate Health and the Global Environment. "Especially for people with chronic respiratory illnesses like asthma and COPD, for kids whose lungs are still developing, and for older people, who are especially susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution on the heart, lungs and the brain."

Fine particles, known as PM2.5, come from a variety of sources, including power plants that burn fossil fuels like coal and gas. Long-term exposure to fine particle pollution is known to cause significant health risks, from higher rates of asthma to more heart attacks to dementia, and even premature death. Cleaning up pollution from fine particles has, by the agency's previous estimates, saved more than 230,000 lives and billions of dollars per year in recent years.

The policy shift could facilitate further rollback of air pollution regulations, says NYU environmental law expert Richard Revesz. The economic costs to industry of implementing air regulations are still quantified, at least in the new rule. But if the benefits aren't assigned a similarly concrete dollar amount, he says, it is easier to ignore them. "It looks good only because you ignore the main consequence of the rollback, which is the additional negative impact on public health," he says. "By just saying we are assuming no harm doesn't mean there is no harm."

The health costs of air pollution 

Decades of research have shown that exposure to pollution, such as fine particles, damages people's health. The landmark Harvard University Six Cities study, which ran from the 1970s until the 1990s, showed unambiguously that living in more polluted areas shortened people's lives. Since then, hundreds of research analyses — including many produced by EPA scientists — have linked risks to people's lungs, hearts, and brains with fine particle pollution. And reducing that pollution can have near-instantaneous health benefits: After the closure of a polluting coke plant in Pennsylvania, for example, cardiovascular and respiratory problems dropped dramatically in the surrounding population.

A 1981 executive order from President Ronald Reagan required agencies like the EPA to consider the costs and benefits of major regulations such as the Clean Air Act. So alongside evolving evidence about the health risks of exposure to air pollution, the EPA began to figure out how to assess both.

The cost estimates were relatively straightforward: What would it cost industry to upgrade their equipment and processes to comply with a rule? The benefits were slightly trickier. The agency developed sophisticated ways to estimate how many lives would be saved and health problems avoided from lower pollution, driven by tighter regulations. The EPA also developed economic models that could estimate how much money such changes would save the American people.

Most estimates routinely came up with high economic benefit-to-cost ratios, says Rice, the Harvard pulmonologist. "The Clean Air Act is often cited as having benefit-cost ratios of upward of 30 to 1," she says. "The economic return is so great that even small reductions in pollution, across millions of people, translate into very large savings."

A 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case clarified that agencies like the EPA had to take both benefits and costs into account in their regulatory processes. But the courts have "not waded into the question of how exactly [EPA] should do that," says Jeffrey Holmstead, an EPA expert and lawyer at Bracewell, LLC and former leader of the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during the George W. Bush administration. "So, yes, they do have to consider both, but there is no legally enforceable requirement for them to do it in any particular way," he says. That leaves it up to the agency's discretion, Holmstead says, whether to forgo an economic benefits calculation, as long as the EPA still assesses the health benefits in some way.

Other EPA regulations, he says, assess the health benefits without assigning a specific dollar value, like some of the rules concerning hazardous air pollutants, which are associated with significant but more uncertain health risks.

However, "you can't do a sophisticated cost-benefit analysis without trying to monetize both the costs and the benefits," Holmstead says. "This will be the first time in a long time that EPA hasn't tried to provide a monetary benefit to reducing at least PM 2.5 and ozone."

The move to not consider economic benefits marks a major policy change, says NYU legal expert Revesz. "It's extraordinarily unusual," he says.

Not just air pollution 

Revesz points out that under the Trump administration, the EPA has made moves to reconsider the economic benefits of regulations in other areas, as well.

In its proposal to roll back vehicle emissions standards, for example, the EPA did not assess the potential economic benefits to consumers who switched to electric vehicles instead of choosing gas-powered cars. It also explicitly declined to calculate societal economic benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and significantly lowered the estimates of the health savings from tighter rules. The EPA did the same in its efforts to roll back the endangerment finding, which has been in place since 2009. That finding concludes that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere poses serious risks to public health and well-being.

Revesz says that makes three ways the EPA used to consider economic benefits to Americans from regulations. And now the "EPA has said that it's going to ignore all three of them," he says.

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a 2025 statement that his priorities at the agency were to "lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Scott Adams, the controversial cartoonist who skewered corporate culture, has died at age 68, He announced in May 2025 that he had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live.

Months later, in November, Adams took to X to request — and receive — some very public help from President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in addressing health insurance issues that had delayed his treatment with an FDA-approved cancer drug called Pluvicto.

Adams said he was able to book an appointment the next day. Despite the Trump administration's public intervention, Adams shared on his YouTube show in early January 2026 that "the odds of me recovering are essentially zero."

Adams' former wife, Shelly Miles, announced his death Tuesday during a YouTube livestream, and then read a statement from Adams who said, "I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my life, I ask you pay it forward as best you can."

Adams rose to fame in the early 1990s with his comic strip Dilbert, satirizing white-collar culture based on his own experiences working in company offices. He made headlines again in the final years of his life for controversial comments about race, gender and other topics, which led to Dilbert's widespread cancellation in 2023.

Dilbert, which at its height was syndicated in some 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries, spawned a number of books, a video game and two seasons of an animated sitcom.

"I think you have to be fundamentally irrational to think that you can make money as a cartoonist, and so I can never answer succinctly why it is that I thought this would work," Adams told NPR's Weekend Edition in 1996. "It was about the same cost as buying a lottery ticket and about the same odds of succeeding. And I buy a lottery ticket, so why not?"

He said that he had "pretty much always wanted to be a famous cartoonist," even applying to the Famous Artists School, a correspondence art course, as a pre-teen.

"I was 11 years old, and I'd filled out the application saying that I wanted to be a cartoonist," he said. "It turns out, as they explained in their rejection letter, that you have to be at least 12 years old to be a famous cartoonist."

Turning to more practical matters, Adams studied economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. and earned an MBA from UC Berkeley. He also trained as a hypnotist at the Clement School of Hypnosis in the 1980s.

Adams began his career at Crocker National Bank, working what he described in a blog post as a "number of humiliating and low paying jobs: teller (robbed twice at gunpoint), computer programmer, financial analyst, product manager, and commercial lender."

He then spent nearly a decade working at Pacific Bell — the California telephone company now owned by AT&T — in various jobs "that defy description but all involve technology and finances," as Adams put it in his biography. It was there that he started drawing Dilbert, working on the strip on mornings, evenings and weekends from 1989 until 1995.

"You get real cynical if you spend more than five minutes in a cubicle," he told NPR's Weekend Edition in 2002. "But I certainly always planned that I would escape someday, as soon as I got escape velocity."

Adams satirized corporate culture for decades 

Scott Adams works on his comic strip in his California studio in 2006. He announced in May that he was dying of metastatic prostate cancer.

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Dilbert revolves around its eponymous white-collar engineer as he navigates his company's comically dysfunctional bureaucracy, alongside his sidekick: an anthropomorphized, megalomaniac dog named Dogbert.

"Dilbert is a composite of my co-workers over the years," Adams wrote on his website. "He emerged as the main character of my doodles. I started using him for business presentations and got great responses … Dogbert was created so Dilbert would have someone to talk to."

Dilbert — with his trademark curly head, round glasses and always-upturned red and black tie — fights a constant battle for his sanity amidst a micromanaged, largely illogical corporate environment full of pointless meetings, technical difficulties, too many buzzwords and an out-of-touch manager known only as Pointy-haired Boss.

Even after Adams quit his day job, he kept a firm grasp on the absurdities and mundanities of cubicle life with help from his devoted audience.

He included his email address on the strip and said he got hundreds of messages each day. Recurring reader suggestions ranged from stolen refrigerator lunches to bosses' unrealistic expectations.

"So they all, for example, say, 'I need this report in a week, but make sure that I get it two weeks early so I could look at it,'" Adams said. "Just bizarre stories where it's clear that they either have never owned a watch or a calendar or they are in some kind of a time warp."

Dilbert's storylines evolved alongside office culture, taking aim at a growing range of societal and technological topics over the years. In 2022, Adams introduced Dave, the strip's first Black character, who identifies as white — a choice critics interpreted as poking fun at DEI initiatives.

That ushered in an era of anti-woke plotlines that saw dozens of U.S. newspapers drop the strip in 2022, foreshadowing its widespread cancellation just a year later.

The comic strip was cancelled over Adams' comments

Adams didn't limit himself to cartoons. He was a proponent of what he called the "talent stack," combining multiple common skills in a unique and valuable way: like drawing, humor and risk tolerance, in his case.

He ventured briefly into food retail at the turn of the millennium, selling vegetarian, microwavable burritos called Dilberitos. He published several novels and nonfiction books unrelated to the Dilbert universe over the years.

Adams was open about his health struggles throughout his career, including the movement disorder focal dystonia — which particularly affected his drawing hand — and, years later, spasmodic dysphonia, an involuntary clenching of the vocal cords that he managed to cure through an experimental surgery.

And he opined on social and political events on "Real Coffee with Scott Adams," his YouTube talk series with over 180,000 subscribers.

His commentary, which often touched on race and other hot-button issues, led to Dilbert's widespread cancellation in February 2023.

In a YouTube livestream that month, Adams — while discussing a Rasmussen public opinion poll asking readers whether they agree "It's OK to be white" (which is considered an alt-right slogan) — urged white people to "get the hell away from Black people," labeling them a "hate group." The backlash was swift: Dozens of newspapers across the country ditched Dilbert, and the comic's distributor dropped Adams.

The incident also renewed focus on numerous controversial comments Adams had made in the past, including about race, men's rights, the Holocaust and COVID-19 vaccines. Adams defended his remarks as hyperbole, and later said getting "canceled" had improved his life, with public support coming from conservative figures like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk.

Adams, in his final years, was a vocal supporter of President Trump and a critic of Democrats.

But he extended his "respect and compassion" to former President Joe Biden in a video the day after Biden's prostate cancer diagnosis became public in May 2025.

The prognosis was personal for Adams: He shared that he too had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live, saying he expected "to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer."

"I've just sort of processed it, so it just sort of is what it is," he said on his YouTube show. "Everybody has to die, as far as I know."
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