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The Supreme Court’s debt-relief ruling is a blow to President Joe Biden—and to the millions of people who expected that some of their loans would be forgiven. The Biden administration is quickly moving to its Plan B for relieving student debt, but little about this process will be quick.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Google isn’t grad school. Zombie Twitter has arrived. A radical idea for fixing polarization Compostable plastic is garbage.

Biden’s Plan B

The way President Biden talked about debt relief was vivid, almost epic: When he announced his sweeping student-loan debt-relief plan last August, he said in the West Wing, “People can start to finally crawl out from under that mountain of debt.”

Almost a year later, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that his plan could not move forward. This ruling is a blow to Biden—and to the millions of people who were reshaping their lives and their spending habits around the expectation that their loans would be forgiven. “I don’t think that people are properly understanding how difficult this payment restart is going to be from a logistical standpoint” for borrowers, my colleague Adam Harris, who covers higher education for The Atlantic, told me.

Biden’s initial debt-relief plan relied on the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, or the HEROES Act. That law gives the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify” federal-student-loan provisions after national emergencies (President Donald Trump previously used it to pause loan repayment at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic). But last week, the Court determined that the 2003 law did not give Biden the authority to cancel debt. Chief Justice Roberts invoked the “major-questions doctrine,” which dictates that Congress must clearly authorize action on issues of major economic and political significance. (In a striking dissent, Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether the decision was constitutional. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent,” she wrote. In exercising authority it does not have, she concluded, the Court “violates the Constitution.”)  

Biden’s administration moved quickly to Plan B (and beyond). The Department of Education released a statement on Friday saying that it had already initiated a new rule-making process to open up different paths to push through debt relief, including using the Higher Education Act of 1965, which contains a provision giving the secretary of education the authority to “compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand.” It also announced other changes that would cut borrowers some slack, including a more affordable repayment plan and a year-long “on-ramp” to repayment.

Many advocates wanted Biden to use the Higher Education Act as the basis for debt relief in the first place. Braxton Brewington, the press secretary of the activist group Debt Collective, told me that his group has been “pushing” for Biden to use the HEA. “What we would love to say more than anything is that the Biden administration did everything they could,” he added.

One challenge that comes with pivoting to the HEA is that it needs to go through the negotiated rule-making process, which is likely to be long and drawn-out—“We’re talking several months at minimum,” Adam told me, and maybe up to 18 months. The desire for a quicker process may be one reason the Biden administration turned to the HEROES Act first, he said, though the main reason the Biden administration did things this way is that it thought it had broad authority under HEROES to provide debt relief. (Some Supreme Court justices agreed, Adam noted.) Asked for comment, the Department of Education sent a link to a press conference where Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona echoed that point, saying, “We believe that the HEROES Act pathway was quicker and we had the authority to do that.”

And a new debt-relief plan that uses the HEA instead of HEROES may face similar legal challenges. Jed Shugerman, a Boston University law professor who has written for The Atlantic, told me that, in his view, such a plan would be “dead on arrival” at the Supreme Court. He said that the Court had made this clear both in commentary surrounding the case and in the legal rule that it applied in Nebraska v. Biden. “The rule puts such a thumb on the scale against executive action that it precludes the Higher Education Act from being the basis,” he told me. (At the press conference last week, Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, said, “We think that the pathway that we’re choosing here, the Higher Education Act, is available even with [the major questions] doctrine in place.”)

Shugerman added, however, that it’s “perfectly appropriate” for the Biden administration to challenge the Court’s ruling while also pursuing other avenues to push through debt relief. He suggested that the Biden administration could simultaneously invite individual debtors facing hardship to apply for relief through a settlement process. That would take time, he said, and the plan may still face court challenges—but at least it would not be “simply raising similar problems that the Roberts Court identified.”

Shugerman had long been skeptical that using the HEROES Act to pass student-loan relief would make it past the Court. In The Atlantic last year, he argued that the Biden administration’s framing of debt relief as a COVID-era emergency measure, when in reality it was a much broader initiative, made it likely to fail. “That COVID is not the real reason for such a sweeping program is a serious legal problem,” he wrote.

Taking a bold stance on student debt could be politically useful for Biden and Democrats in the lead-up to 2024. Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me, “If President Biden cares about motivating young people, motivating communities of color, and motivating working people in general who are saddled with student debt, this is a really smart issue to keep leaning into and increase the volume on.”

All of this work may take time, potentially even bleeding into the next presidential race and administration. And broader issues in higher education persist: “Supporting students on the front end going to college and helping them get through would be preferable to having them accrue this large amount of debt” in the first place, Adam Harris told me.

Taken together, he said, the debt-relief ruling and the Court’s ruling on race-conscious college admissions last week tell us that “the Court does not adequately account for the broader history of higher education in these decisions.” He added that it “simply does not think about the weight that history has and continues to play.”

Related:

Biden’s student-debt rescue plan is a legal mess. Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem.

Today’s News

President Trump’s personal aide Walt Nauta pleaded not guilty to federal charges in the classified-documents case. The president of Belarus claimed that the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has returned to Russia, despite a previous peace deal where he had agreed to house Prigozhin in Belarus. Meta unveiled Threads, its competitor to Twitter, yesterday. More than 30 million users signed up on the first day.

Evening Read

Samuel Aranda / Panos Pictures / Redux

In France, Nihilistic Protest Is Becoming the Norm

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena, about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched. To log on to social media or turn on the TV in France over the past week was to have been transported into Athena’s world.

Late last month, an officer in the Parisian banlieue of Nanterre shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent who was driving illegally, after he accelerated out of a traffic stop. His death has triggered days of violence that have convulsed the country and at times verged on open revolt. Groups of disaffected youth have incinerated cars, buses, trams, and even public libraries and schools. Roving mobs have clashed with armored police; giddy teens have ransacked sneaker and grocery stores; frenzied young men have filmed one another blasting what look to be Kalashnikovs into the sky.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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P.S.

Yesterday evening, I read a lovely appreciation of Robert Gottlieb, the legendary editor who died last month at the age of 92, in The New York Review of Books. The essay, written by Daniel Mendelsohn, recalled some delightful stories of years of friendship. But what I found especially moving was the way he highlighted Gottlieb’s roving curiosity. “Although Bob had a first-class formal education,” Mendelsohn writes, “he was ultimately self-taught in the way that many people who are voracious and indiscriminate readers in their formative years are self-taught: because he sampled everything for himself firsthand, his relationship to books and, later, to all culture was wholly unfiltered by received opinion or ‘theory’ or schools of thought. As a result, he was utterly without intellectual or cultural prejudice—not at all a bad model for an aspiring critic.”

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

In 2023, the options for a build-your-own fast-casual lunch can include wild Alaskan salmon, harissa honey chicken, cauliflower shawarma, seasonal roasted zucchini, preserved lemon vinaigrette, za’atar bread crumbs, creamy vegan feta, and skhug. But whatever you choose, it will all inevitably be served in a compostable bowl. As an office worker blessed (and cursed) with endless overpriced meal options, I have shoveled way too much random food into my mouth from a compostable vessel, using a compostable utensil.

The forks, in particular, are not prone to subtlety: Some are embossed with the word COMPOSTABLE; others are green, in case anyone forgets they are “green.” But the compostable-packaging takeover has been tough to miss. Perhaps you have gotten leftovers in a compostable container, stuffed groceries into a compostable produce bag, or sipped coffee out of a compostable straw. Compostable packaging “is growing, and growing a lot,” David Henkes, a food-industry analyst at Technomic, told me. By 2021, 7 percent of all food-service packaging was compostable, Henkes said; its share has almost certainly grown since then, especially in major cities. Among the companies that now use it: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Cava, Sweetgreen, Panera Bread, Taco Bell, and Frito-Lay.

But although compostable packaging is easy to spot, compost bins to put it in are not. All of my office forks and soggy fiber packaging have gone straight into the kitchen trash, just like normal plastic would. Only a tiny fraction of this compostable packaging and plastic, it turns out, is actually getting composted. Even if restaurants, homes, and office buildings have composting bins, in most places this pile of compostable trash has nowhere to go: America doesn’t have the composting infrastructure to deal with it. These products might have the potential to be better for the planet than traditional plastic, but right now, compostable plastic is just plastic.

What makes plastic so great is also what makes it so terrible. The substance, created from fossil fuels, is cheap, moldable, and so durable that most plastic that humans have ever produced still exists. Compostable plastic is made by chemically manipulating plant sugars such as corn starch and sugar cane to achieve similar properties; the flimsier, cardboardlike compostable bowls are molded out of bamboo and other plant fibers. The promise of these products is the same: Whereas a plastic fork or bowl might get used for just a few minutes before lingering in the environment forever, a compostable version degrades over time, not unlike an apple core you throw away in the woods. Only more slowly. Much more slowly.

In most cases, compostable plastic is compostable only under very specific conditions. “It’s not like what you would do in your yard if you tried to compost a banana peel,” Sarah-Jeanne Royer, an oceanographer at Hawaii Pacific University, told me. “You need to have access to a composting facility.” And a home compost pile is like the industrial version in the same way that a pickup-basketball game among preteens is the same sport as the NBA. Fruit and vegetables start to dissolve into soil within a few weeks; meat takes a little longer. Eventually, any form of compostable plastic should break down too, Frederick Michel Jr., a compost expert at Ohio State University, told me. Eventually. In one study, compostable plastic bags buried in soil for three years were so sturdy they could still hold a full load of groceries. Royer submerged a type of compostable plastic in seawater and could not find any signs of degradation 428 days later.

A commercial plant speeds that timeline up to just a few months, using machinery that encourages the best possible conditions for composting. The bugs and microbes that break down organic matter release heat in the process, and all the rotting waste at a composting facility can routinely hit temperatures of 160 degrees. You will never achieve that at home.

But good luck finding one of those facilities. America is churning out all of this biodegradable packaging without the ability to process it: The entire country has roughly 200 full-scale food-waste composting plants, and about three-fifths of those accept compostable packaging, according to not-yet-published research from BioCycle. In practice, getting your compostable plastic into one of those plants means living in one of just a few cities—San Francisco, Seattle, parts of New York—that picks up compost just like trash and recycling and trucks it to a plant. Everyone else is left in compost deserts, Michel said. In Ohio, “the only way for me to compost is in my backyard,” he said. Cities as big as Atlanta do not have a composting plant within an hour’s drive; the entire state of Alabama does not have a single place that can digest compostable plastic.

The companies using these products are aware of these limitations. Consider the 10-email exchange I had with Cava, trying to confirm that the fast-casual chain does in fact use compostable bowls, which the spokesperson originally outright denied. It ended with the spokesperson acknowledging that “CAVA’s bowl containers are primarily made of bagasse” (which is made from sugar cane and is compostable) but that “there are some limitations to the availability of composting facilities, which is why CAVA is careful about how they talk about it.” And in the long term, companies who are handing out single-use items should be trying to switch over. A single fork turned back into biomass is more biodegradation than most of the plastic in human history has ever done. So much of the world’s plastic is used for packaging that, with the proper infrastructure, “if everything that’s now plastic was made out of compostable plastic, then it would dramatically change what we are looking at,” Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineer at Michigan State who studies renewable plastics, told me. The equivalent of a dump truck’s worth of plastic sloshes into the ocean every minute, entangling wildlife, poisoning the soil and water, and splitting into microplastics that accumulate up the food chain; replacing that with something even marginally less permanent would be a positive change.

As long as compostable plastic is ending up in landfills, though, the math is less favorable. In a dump, these products may not biodegrade for more than a century. And they can have an additional knock against them: In the anaerobic conditions of a landfill, certain types of compostable plastic can also spew methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Compostable plastic might backfire in other ways too. A push against single-use plastic has made lots of people reconsider, even if briefly, whether to use that plastic plate or bowl or straw; compostable products implicitly signal to consumers that they can use these instead and walk away with a lighter conscience. “Marketing people are always asking me, ‘So what about compostable plastic?’” says Claire Sand, a packaging consultant for major companies, because consumers badly want this to be the answer to single-use plastic. In the U.S., all certified compostable products are required to have a label making clear that they are meant to be composted in “aerobic municipal and industrial composting facilities.” But fine print is easy to overlook with all the green colors and brand names, including EarthChoice, Eco-Baggeez, Greenware, and Responsible Products. And though a plastic takeout container can live a second life as pseudo-Tupperware, and a plastic bag as a garbage liner, many compostable versions just don’t cut it.

Both compostable plastic—and America’s composting network—will get better. Diverting compostable stuff from landfills is so important for making a dent in emissions that the federal government is throwing $90 million at it. Plenty of companies are also trying to make better compostable products: Can I interest you in plastic that turns into protein powder, banana-peel plastic, avocado plastic, and seaweed plastic? Still, finding the right balance between durability and compostability is tough. No one wants a box of spoons that rots after three weeks in your cupboard.

If you must buy compostable plastic products, some are better than others. Look for items that are certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI), and whenever possible, TÜV OK Compost Home, Michel said, a European standard that signifies that the plastic should disintegrate even in home compost piles. And try to avoid anything made of polylactic acid, or PLA, which is the among most onerous biodegradable plastic to compost, though also the most popular. Broadly speaking, the less something is like real plastic, the easier it is to break down. The best compostable utensil is not embossed with COMPOSTABLE or green in color but made of untreated wood. “It is inherently compostable and does not really pose any more of an issue than a branch falling off of a tree,” Michel said.

The other alternative is, well, not just swapping one kind of single-use plastic with another. Somehow, metal straws have joined the pantheon of reusable water bottles and coffee cups that people trek around, but you know what is already far more readily available? Silverware. Earlier this week, just after tossing my soggy fast-casual bowl to its ominous fate in the trash can, I noticed a clean metal fork sitting on my desk, just waiting for me to use it.

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.