The Brief

A landfill is a place of perpetual motion, where mountains of garbage rise in days and crews race to contain the influx of ever more trash. Amid the commotion, an invisible gas often escapes unnoticed, warming the planet and harming our health: methane.

On Thursday, the climate-data sleuths at Carbon Mapper published a study in Science that shows U.S. landfills emit methane at levels at least 40% higher than previously reported to the Environmental Protection Agency. At more than half of the hundreds of garbage dumps surveyed — in the largest assessment yet of such emissions — most of the pollution flowed from leaks, creating concentrated plumes. The researchers found these super-emitting points can persist for months or even years, and account for almost 90 percent of all measured methane from the landfills. Tackling these hotspots could be a huge stride toward lowering emission rates, but blindspots in current monitoring protocols mean they often evade detection.

“It’s a very hard problem to get totally right without any leaks at any place,” said Daniel Cusworth, an atmospheric chemist and project scientist for Carbon Mapper, a nonprofit that provides data to inform greenhouse gas reduction efforts. Sometimes Cusworth conducts aerial surveys of landfills and is relieved to find nothing. “And then other times, you know, I’ll see a massive billowing plume that’s three kilometers long.”

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas created by, among other things, decaying trash, and it often seeps through the soil and plastic covers meant to contain it. Although federal regulations require large facilities to use gas capture systems, landfills remain the third biggest source of these emissions in the United States, accounting for over 14 percent of the national total. Because methane is 84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, scientists say reducing the amount of it floating around up there is the quickest way to curb global warming. Doing so also benefits communities: A disproportionate number of U.S. landfills are near marginalized neighborhoods, where gas exposure impacts health or poses an explosion risk.

Leaks that exceed the Clean Air Act’s limit of 500 parts per million are common, as shown by the hotspots Carbon Mapper identified. These areas typically appear after unanticipated events, such as cracks in landfill covers, valve failure in the vast gas collection systems, and other maintenance or construction issues. “They really dominated the total emissions for the landfill,” Cusworth said. The survey found that average release from the most surveyed sites was at least 1.4 times, and sometimes as much as 2.7 times, larger than those reported to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.

Although federal guidelines require these facilities to track emissions and provide that data to the EPA, current reporting and monitoring methods just aren’t up to snuff, according to the study. Most operators report an estimate, using EPA guidelines, calculated from the amount of trash they take in, not from measured data. Regulators also require facilities to perform walking ground surveys four times a year, but experts like Cusworth say these efforts aren’t frequent or precise enough. Hotspots can easily escape notice because many areas are too dangerous or inaccessible to walk on, and monitoring sensors react only to high concentrations on the ground and wouldn’t catch dispersed plumes. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” said Cusworth, adding that it’s a popular cliche in the air monitoring business.

In the survey, the Carbon Mapper researchers flew over landfills with airplanes that captured infrared images, revealing the plumes. Similar remote sensing methods, such as drones and satellites, are among recent technological advances that could keep the pollutant in check, helping facilities find and address leaks quickly. Other innovations to methane capturing systems, such as self-calibrating caps on valves and sensors that can detect leaks, further reduce the risk of failures.

“In the waste sector, specifically, we know what technologies to implement – we’ve known for a number of years. They’re feasible, readily available, and a number of them are actually quite cost effective,” said Kait Siegel, waste sector manager on the methane pollution team at Clean Air Task Force. “We need to have regulations in place.” This upcoming August, the EPA is expected to update its landfill management policies as part of a required 8-year review cycle.

Tom Frankiewicz, a waste sector methane scientist at RMI, which collaborated with Carbon Mapper on the study, said addressing outsized methane sources, like landfills, is urgent due to the short lifespan and extreme potency of the gas, compared to the longer-lasting carbon dioxide. The world won’t see the climate benefits of reducing CO2 emissions for a century, he said. That time frame drops to a decade when curbing methane. “We have to be working on both, and leaning in on methane because it buys us time.” And in the race to mitigate climate change, every moment counts.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/science/us-landfills-emit-far-more-methane-than-previously-known/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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In a sharp rebuke to President Trump, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Constitution guarantees automatic birthright citizenship to virtually all children born in the United States.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court's 6-3 opinion.

The decision firmly rejected the executive order that Trump issued on the first day of his second term. It sought to bar citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to parents who either entered the country illegally or who are living and working here legally with temporary visas. The executive order never went into effect because every lower court judge to review it, concluded, in the words of one judge, that it was "blatantly unconstitutional."

Trump has long maintained that the Constitution does not guarantee birthright citizenship. But as Chief Justice Roberts observed the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution after the Civil War defined citizenship in broad terms on purpose, rejecting the views of those who wanted to limit citizenship. The resulting language of the amendment says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

Trump maintained that the provision was meant to apply only to former slaves, but "wasn't meant for the entire world to occupy the United States." That interpretation, however, has not been embraced by the courts or the legal norms of the country for 160 years. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts' opinion for the court pointed to the court's landmark ruling well over a century ago in the 1898 case of case of Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrants. Back then, no documentation was required for immigrants entering the United States, and the parents ran a business in San Francisco until they ultimately returned to China. In 1895 their son visited his family in there, but was denied re-entry upon his return to the U.S., on grounds that he was not a citizen. He challenged that denial and won in the Supreme Court.

By a 6-to-2 vote the justices interpreted the words, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to mean that all children born in the U.S. were automatically granted citizenship—with three limited exceptions, only one of which exists today—for the children of foreign diplomats.

The decision in the Wong Kim Ark case was so widely accepted that even in periods of great hostility to immigrants, the notion of birthright citizenship remained untouchable. So much so that in World War II when Japanese citizens were held as enemy aliens in detention camps in the United States, their newborn children were automatically granted American citizenship because they were born on U.S. soil. In addition, Congress subsequently codified that legal understanding.

The ACLU's Cecillia Wang, herself a birthright citizen born to Chinese parents, argued the birthright case in April at the the Supreme Court. At she put it in an interview with NPR, the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment deliberately chose to confer automatic citizenship on the child, not the parent, the idea being that "in America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you're born in this country, we're all American, all the same."

Dissenting from Tuesday's decision were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito.

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The Supreme Court yet again loosened campaign finance restrictions on Tuesday by striking down limits on how much political parties may raise and spend on candidates.

By a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the court ruled the law, which had been enacted in 1974, violates political parties' First Amendment rights. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion.

At issue in the case was a post-Watergate law that Congress passed to limit the amount of money individuals can give to political parties. The law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, also limited how much money political parties can spend on their candidates. Other types of organizations, like political action committees and Super PACs, have no limits on the amount of money they can raise and spend on elections. But unlike parties, they cannot coordinate with candidates.

Tuesday's decision means that parties get the best of both worlds. They can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds.

Republicans, including Vice President Vance and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, challenged the law as an unconstitutional violation of political parties' First Amendment right to raise and spend money on their candidates.

Backed by the Trump Justice Department, they contended that the only justification for imposing a fundraising limit on parties is to prevent corruption, but they maintained that there is no evidence that the law has prevented corruption.

This decision overturns a 2001 Supreme Court case that declared the limits on party spending to be constitutional. It's the latest in a series of rulings since then that have unraveled campaign finance regulations.

The saga began in 2010, when the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have a First Amendment right to unlimited spending on elections. The following year, the court dismantled Arizona's public election financing scheme, which gave money to less-funded candidates in order to equalize spending between politicians. And in 2014, the court struck down limits on how much money an individual can donate in national elections. All of these decisions were ideologically split votes, just like Tuesday's ruling, and in each case, the court overturned the regulations for burdening the First Amendment right to spend on elections.

The practical implications of Tuesday's ruling are unclear. Lawyers for the Democratic Party, who intervened in the case in support of the campaign finance restrictions, argued that they are necessary to prevent quid pro quo corruption. Authorizing unlimited coordinated expenditures would "fundamentally reshape the campaign finance regime," they wrote. "The potential for actual or apparent corruption is obvious."

Further, in previous decisions, the high court cited these anti-corruption protections as reasons why other campaign finance regulations could be rolled back without worry.

But the Republicans who brought the case argued that the risks of corruption are low. "It doesn't make any sense to think of a party as 'corrupting' its candidates," lawyers for the Republicans argued in a brief submitted to the court, "because the very aim of a political party is to influence its candidate's stance."

This is a developing story and will be updated

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The Supreme Court once again leaped into the culture wars on Tuesday, ruling that states may ban transgender girls from participating in sports at publicly funded schools.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has long coached his daughters' and other girls' basketball teams at school, wrote the court's majority opinion.

The court's decision follows last year's ruling, which upheld state laws that make it illegal for doctors and other health professionals to provide gender-affirming care for minors. Since then, a total of 25 states have criminalized or banned gender-affirming care for minors. And in some states, bills have been introduced to ban gender-affirming care for adults, too.

At the heart of Tuesday's case is Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination in education programs that receive federal money. Enacted in 1972, the law has revolutionized women's sports by requiring equal treatment for male and female athletes, including proportional scholarship funding and equal facilities.

But in recent years, 27 states have barred trans women and girls from participating in girls' sports. The issue has become the newest flashpoint in both politics and law — especially after 2024 when the Trump presidential campaign aired attack ads on the subject more than 15,000 times, putting Democrats on the defensive.

Supporters of the ban on trans athletes say the laws are needed to prevent athletes whose assigned sex at birth was male from having an unfair advantage in women's sports. Opponents of the transgender bans say they discriminate based on sex, in violation of both federal law and the Constitution's guarantee to equal protection of the law. And for athletes at every level, the issue is deeply personal, with tennis greats Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova on opposing sides, for example, along with hundreds of other high-profile athletes.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court tried to thread the needle, ruling that since Title IX explicitly allows sex-segregated athletic teams, states are free to limit team players to their sex at birth.

The two cases before the court were factually quite different. One involved Lindsey Hecox, a trans college student barred by Idaho law from trying out for the Boise State University varsity women's track team. She challenged Idaho's ban on trans athletes, contending it violated her right to equal protection of the law under the Constitution. Ultimately, after dropping out of school, she won her case in the lower courts, but upon returning in 2025, she decided not to play varsity sports.

This is a developing story and will be updated
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President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportations. More than a year into his second term, the White House has taken a sweeping approach to curbing illegal and legal migration.

Ximena Bustillo, NPR's immigration policy correspondent, breaks down the five strategies that make up the administration's mass deportation policy.

They include providing historic funding for immigration enforcement agencies, stripping legal pathways, reshaping previously little-known immigration courts and expanding the infrastructure focused on increasing the number of those detained and deported. It's a strategy that limits immigrants' options for arguing for permission to stay in the U.S., and eliminates previous pathways to legal status.

Over the past year, judges as high up as on the U.S. Supreme Court have weighed in on the measures taken. In some instances, district court rulings have barred some of the strategies, including ordering federal officers to stop making arrests in immigration courts.

Other efforts have been upheld by the courts, including the Supreme Court's most recent ruling allowing the administration to end temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians and a policy that allows border officials to turn migrants away before they physically cross to claim asylum.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday weighs in on Trump's landmark executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship.

Bustillo travels to Arizona, California and New York to break down this strategy — and the impacts on the agency, federal workers and immigrants going through these complicated systems.

Relying on over a year of reporting, policy memos, data and ultimately dozens of interviews, the Trump administration's strategy becomes clear.

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