science.org SCIENCEPHOTO: LUIS SINCO/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGESJustices allow higher carbon cost
CLIMATE POLICY | The U.S. Supreme Court
last week allowed the Biden administration
to use a higher number for how much car-
bon pollution costs society, after declining to
take up a challenge from energy-producing,
Republican-led states. Federal agencies
use the figure, known as the social cost
of carbon, when evaluating the costs and
benefits of regulations; it attempts to cap-
ture costs, such as adverse health effects,
that aren’t reflected in market prices. The
court’s refusal to take the case means the
administration can use its proposed cost
of $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions.
That figure was used by former President
Barack Obama’s administration before
former President Donald Trump’s adminis-
tration cut it to $7 per ton.Man admits threatening Fauci
COVID 19 | A West Virginia man faces up
to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty
last week to charges that he repeatedly
emailed Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, to threaten him and his family
with sadistic, graphic violence and death.
Thomas Patrick Connally Jr. sent messages
between December 2020 and July 2021 that
expressed rage over advice from Fauci to the
public and the White House about how best
to respond to the pandemic. Connally, who
was particularly aggrieved about mandatory
vaccination policies, used an anonymous,
encrypted email account, but an investiga-
tor from the Department of Health and
Human Services’s Office of the Inspector
General traced the tirades to him. Connally
also admitted he sent threatening emails to
Francis Collins, former head of the National
Institutes of Health who was then Fauci’s
boss. Fauci has received many other death
threats regarding COVID-19 and has had a
government security detail since soon after
the pandemic started.ARPA-H agency gets interim head
LEADERSHIP | The Biden administration last
week named a temporary overseer of the
new U.S. agency for cutting-edge health
research. Adam Russell, an anthropologistNEWS
T
he U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving to
block construction of a massive copper and gold mine that would
risk polluting the headwaters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay, home to
the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs. EPA announced last
week it plans to forbid disposal of mine waste from the pro-
posed Pebble Mine in the surrounding area, a move that would
effectively kill the project. “Two decades of scientific study show us
that mining the Pebble Deposit would cause permanent damage to an
ecosystem that supports a renewable economic powerhouse and has
sustained fishing cultures since time immemorial,” Casey Sixkiller,
EPA’s regional administrator, said in a press release. The proposal sig-
nals what could be the final chapter in a decadeslong saga that came
to a head in 2014 when the administration of then-President Barack
Obama announced plans to block the mine. EPA reversed course un-
der former President Donald Trump. But in November 2020, the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers announced it would not grant a crucial per-
mit after concluding the project was “contrary to the public interest.”
EPA officials could make a final decision later this year.Recreational fishers cast for salmon in Alaska’s Newhalen River, 32 kilometers from a proposed mine.CONSERVATIONU.S. moves to stop Alaska copper mine
IN BRIEF
Edited by Jeffrey Brainard180
1028 3 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6597Length, in kilometers, of what scientists think is the world’s
largest clone, a seagrass bed off the coast of Western Australia.
Estimated to be 4500 years old, it grew as a hybrid of
two species, possibly as an adaptation to climate change.
(Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)