This story was originally published in High Country News.

High winds tore at Gothic Mountain as the sleeping giant watched over the cabins nestled in Gothic, Colorado, a remote outpost accessible only by skis during the valley’s harsh alpine winters. The plumes of snow that lifted from the peak briefly appeared to form a cloud and then disappeared.

To many, the snow that seemed to vanish into thin air would go unnoticed. But in a region where water availability has slowly begun to diminish, every snowflake counts. Each winter, an unknown percentage of the Rocky Mountain West’s snowpack disappears into the atmosphere, as it was doing on Gothic Mountain, near the ski-resort town of Crested Butte.

In the East River watershed, located along the high reaches of the Colorado River Basin, a group of researchers at Gothic’s Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) is trying to solve the mystery by focusing on a process called sublimation. Snow in the high country sometimes skips the liquid phase entirely, turning straight from a solid into a vapor. The phenomenon may be responsible for anywhere from 10 to 90 percent of snow loss. This margin of error is a major source of uncertainty for the water managers attempting to predict how much water will enter the system once the snow begins to melt.

[Read: Why California can’t catch a break]

Although scientists can measure how much snow falls onto the ground and how quickly it melts, they have no precise way to calculate how much is lost to the atmosphere, says Jessica Lundquist, a University of Washington researcher focused on spatial patterns of snow and weather in the mountains. With support from the National Science Foundation, Lundquist led the Sublimation of Snow project in Gothic over the 2022–’23 winter season, seeking to understand exactly how much snow goes missing and what environmental conditions drive that disappearance.

“It’s one of those nasty, wicked problems that no one wants to touch,” Lundquist says. “You can’t see it, and very few instruments can measure it. And then people are asking, ‘What’s going to happen with climate change? Are we going to have less water for the rivers? Is more of it going into the atmosphere or not?’ And we just don’t know.”

The snow that melts off Gothic will eventually refill the streams and rivers that flow into the Colorado River. When runoff is lower than expected, it stresses a system already strained because of persistent drought, the changing climate, and a growing demand. In 2021, for example, snowpack levels near the region’s headwaters weren’t too far below the historical average—not bad for a winter in the West these days. But the snowmelt that filled the Colorado River’s tributaries was only 30 percent of average, according to Lundquist.

“You measure the snowpack and assume that the snow is just going to melt and show up in the stream,” says Julie Vano, the research director at the Aspen Global Change Institute and a partner on the project. Her work aims to help water managers decode the science behind these processes. “It just wasn’t there. Where did the water go?”

As the West continues to dry up, water managers are pressed to accurately predict how much of the treasured resource will enter the system each spring. One challenge federal water managers face is deciding how much water to release from reservoirs to satisfy the needs of downstream users.

[Read: French people are fighting over giant pools of water]

Although transpiration and soil-moisture levels may be some of the other culprits responsible for water loss, one of the largest unknowns is sublimation, says Ian Billick, the executive director of RMBL.

“We need to close that uncertainty in the water budget,” Billick says.

The East River’s tributaries eventually feed into the Colorado River, which supplies water to some 40 million people in seven western states, dozens of federally recognized tribes, and parts of Mexico. This watershed has become a place where more than 100 years of biological observations collide, many of these studies focused on understanding the life cycle of the water.

Lundquist’s project is one of the latest. Because of the complex, intersecting processes that drive sublimation, the team set up more than 100 instruments in an alpine meadow just south of Gothic known as Kettle Ponds.

“No one’s ever done it right before,” Lundquist says. “And so we are trying our very best to measure absolutely everything.”  

Throughout the winter, the menagerie of equipment quietly recorded data every second of the day—measurements that would give the team a snapshot of the snow’s history. A device called a sonic anemometer measured wind speed, while others recorded the temperature and humidity at various altitudes. Instruments known as snow pillows measured moisture content, and a laser-imaging system called Lidar created a detailed map of the snow’s surface.  

From January to March, among the coldest months of the year, Daniel Hogan and Eli Schwat, graduate students who work under Lundquist at the University of Washington, skied from their snow-covered cabin in Gothic to Kettle Ponds to monitor the ever-changing snowpack.

Their skis were fitted with skins, a special fabric that sticks to skis so they can better grip the snow. The two men crunched against the ground as they made their near-daily trek out to the site, sleds full of gear in tow.

It was a chilly day in March, but the searing reflection of the snow made it feel warmer than it was. When Hogan and Schwat arrived, they dug a pit into the snow’s surface, right outside the canopy of humming instrumentation.

The pair carefully recorded the temperature and density of the snow inside. A special magnifying glass revealed the structure of individual snowflakes, some of them from recent storms and others, found deeper in the pit, from weeks or even months before. All of these factors can contribute to how vulnerable the snowpack is to sublimation.

This would be just one of many pits dug as snow continued to blanket the valley. If all of the measurements the team takes over a winter are like a book, a snow pit is just a single page, Hogan told me.

“Together, that gives you the whole winter story,” he said, standing inside one of the pits he was studying. Just the top of his head stuck out of the snowpit as he examined its layers.

Lundquist’s team began analyzing the data they collected long before the snow began to melt.

They hope the information will one day give water managers a better understanding of how much sublimation eats into the region’s water budget—helping them make more accurate predictions for what is likely to be an even hotter, and drier, future.

United States junior rider Magnus White, 17, dies after being hit by a car in a training accident in Colorado.

The debate over covid masks has reignited, courtesy of In-N-Out Burger. The fast food chain issued a guidance telling workers in five states—Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah–will be banned from wearing masks starting Aug. 14, unless they provide a doctor’s note. According to the memo, which first …

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Hidetora Hanada will be joining the Colorado State Rams, marking another huge step in what has been a whirlwind 16 months for the university sumo ...

This article was originally published by High Country News.

It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky-blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets across the grassy meadow. A minute later, another bull answers from somewhere in the shadows.

Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now new research has found that male elks’ bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live. Other studies have shown that whale, bat, and bird calls have dialects of sorts too, and a team led by Jennifer Clarke, a behavioral ecologist at the Center for Wildlife Studies and a professor at the University of La Verne, in California, is the first to identify such differences in any species of ungulate.

Hearing elk bugle in Rocky Mountain National Park decades ago inspired Clarke to investigate the sound. “My graduate students and I started delving into the library and could find nothing on elk communication, period,” she says. That surprised her: “Thousands of people go to national parks to hear them bugle, and we don’t know what we’re listening to.”

[Read: Who’s the cutest little dolphin? Is it you?]

Her research, published earlier this year in the Journal of Mammalogy, dug into the unique symphony created by different elk herds. Although most people can detect human dialects and accents—a honey-thick southern drawl versus nasal New England speech—differences in regional elk bugles are almost imperceptible to human ears. But by using spectrograms to visually represent sound frequencies, researchers can see the details of each region’s signature bugles. “It’s like handwriting,” Clarke says. “You can recognize Bill’s handwriting from George’s handwriting.”

Pennsylvania’s elk herds were translocated from the West in the early 1900s, and today, they have longer tonal whistles and quieter bugles than elk in Colorado. Meanwhile, bugles change frequency from low to high tones more sharply in Wyoming than they do in Pennsylvania or Colorado.

Clarke isn’t sure why the dialects vary. She initially hypothesized that calls would differ based on the way sound travels in Pennsylvania’s dense forests compared with the more open landscapes of Colorado and Wyoming, but her data didn’t support that theory. Clarke hopes to find out whether genetic variation—which is more limited in Pennsylvania’s herd—might explain differences in bugles, and whether those differences are learned by young males listening to older bulls.

[Read: The mystery of the disappearing elephant-seal dialects]

Clarke’s research adds a small piece to the larger puzzle of animal communication, says Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study. “It’s not as though a song or vocal learning is ‘all environmental’ or ‘all genetic,’” he says. “It’s an interplay between both.” Blumstein, a marmot-communication researcher, adds that the mechanisms behind these vocal variations deserve more study.

These unanswered questions are part of the larger field of bioacoustics, which blends biology and acoustics to deepen our understanding of the noises that surround us in nature. Bioacoustics can sometimes be used as a conservation tool to monitor animal behavior, and other studies are shedding light on how it affects animal evolution, disease transfer, and cognition.

Elk are not the only species with regional dialects. In North America, eastern and western hermit thrushes sing different song structures, and the white-crowned sparrow’s song can help ornithologists identify where it was born. Campbell’s monkeys also have localized dialects in their songs and calls, as does the rock hyrax, a mammal that looks like a rodent but is actually related to elephants.

Similar differences exist underwater, where whale songs have unique phrases that vary by location. Sperm whales in the Caribbean have clicking patterns in their calls that differ from those of their Pacific Ocean counterparts. Orcas in Puget Sound use distinctive clicks and whistles within their own pods.

Clarke also studies the vocalizations of ptarmigan, flying foxes, and Tasmanian devils. Her next research project will shed light on how bison mothers lead their herds and communicate with their calves. “They’re the heart of the herd,” she says. “What are they talking about?”  

If it’s wrong to want to live in a bucolic neighborhood largely populated by people who can comfortably afford exorbitantly high housing prices, most Americans don’t want to be right.

That is the central challenge facing the YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) movement, an ideologically diverse collection of scholars, policy makers, and grassroots activists committed to the disarmingly simple idea that building new homes in the nation’s most prosperous cities and towns would be a really good thing to do. As an intellectual project, YIMBYism has been wildly successful, and for good reason. The evidence that boosting housing supply to meet housing demand can foster economic growth and spur upward mobility is overwhelming. There is even tentative evidence to suggest that curbing local land-use regulation could help reverse the collapse of marriage among working-class families, which is no small thing. Among economists and legal scholars who work on local land use, the debate over zoning reform is essentially over.

Yet the YIMBY movement has failed to overcome deep-seated skepticism among voters, who intuit that new homes mean new neighbors, and that new neighbors can mean new headaches.

Consider California, where YIMBY lawmakers have made their greatest strides. Since 2016, the California state legislature has passed a series of measures preempting some of the most egregious local land-use regulations, prompting a boomlet in accessory dwelling units. But despite incontrovertible evidence of a housing-affordability crisis, one that is still driving hundreds of thousands of low- and middle-income families out of the state, many Californians are bitterly opposed to the recent housing push, so much so that there is a real danger that voters will pass a ballot measure in 2024 rolling back the reforms.

[Jerusalem Demsas: California isn’t special]

To understand why California voters have proved so hard to win over, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, one of the leading philanthropic champions of YIMBYism, commissioned a series of focus groups and surveys, culminating in a report published last year. According to the authors, “Most renters and owners we heard from expressed that they are wary of affordable housing solutions in their neighborhood, citing worries that it will result in crime, noise, litter, illegal dumping, and a general lack of property upkeep.” Moreover, although a large majority of respondents “broadly embraced diversity as a current or aspirational feature of their neighborhood,” they expressed deep discomfort with the idea of having neighbors significantly poorer than them.    

This skepticism is not unique to the Golden State. In January of this year, Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled the “New York Housing Compact,” an ambitious set of reforms aimed at boosting housing production in New York City and its notoriously expensive suburbs. By May, the Housing Compact was dead. Statewide zoning-reform proposals in Colorado, Arizona, and Texas also went down to defeat.

None of this is to suggest that YIMBYism is doomed. But if YIMBYs want to nudge more Americans in their direction, they’d do well to hector less and listen more.

Convinced of their righteousness, some of the most ardent YIMBYs have adopted a moralistic posture, denouncing recalcitrant homeowners as snobs or bigots, and calling for sweeping legislative measures that would strip local governments of their land-use authority and further circumscribe the ability of landlords to choose their tenants. Richard Kahlenberg’s new book, Excluded, is a perfect distillation of this sensibility.

Best known for his contrarian critique of racial preferences at selective colleges, Kahlenberg has dedicated his public life to making the case for racial and economic integration. Not content to make a prudential case against exclusionary zoning that might appeal to the self-interest of homeowners, Excluded argues that the practice is a moral outrage—classist, and implicitly racist as well—and that we need a moral campaign to eradicate it backed with the full force of the federal government, one modeled on the fight against Jim Crow in the previous century. To that end, Kahlenberg calls for an Economic Fair Housing Act that would allow lawsuits to challenge zoning policies for discriminating against the poor or having an unnecessary disparate impact by class, with judges deciding what counts as necessary. This would amount to a de facto federal ban on single-family zoning, would threaten countless other zoning policies as well, and would work, in large part, by cowing local governments with the threat of expensive lawsuits based on vague, subjective legal standards.

While this line of argument is sure to resonate with some number of social-justice progressives, it is unlikely to persuade anxious homeowners and renters who dread the prospect of neighborhood change. Chris Elmendorf, a professor of land-use law at UC Davis, has warned that framing zoning reform as a matter of economic justice is likely to backfire. Today’s affluent suburbanites might resent the suggestion that they’re guilty of racial animus, but they’re entirely comfortable with being accused of colorblind class prejudice.

Opponents of new housing in their backyard might not be especially enlightened, but they aren’t delusional either. Exclusionary zoning is, as the name suggests, a strategy for improving the local tax base by deploying local land-use regulation to attract rich residents and deter poor ones. Local public services in the U.S. are largely financed by local property taxes and other municipal revenues, such as sales taxes and parking and sewerage fees. One needn’t be a hateful snob to recognize that while some newcomers will generate more in local revenues than they receive in services, others will not.

Indeed, these local fiscal pressures are arguably the central force shaping America’s fragmented metropolitan geography. As the Princeton economist Leah Boustan argues in Competition in the Promised Land, the “white flight” of the postwar era was driven in no small part by these fiscal concerns. As poor Black migrants made their way to urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, large numbers of more affluent white families moved to suburban jurisdictions with higher average incomes than the cities they left behind. Some of this outmigration was undoubtedly driven by white reluctance to live alongside Black neighbors, but because U.S. cities were so intensely segregated in this period, most of the flight was from neighborhoods that remained exclusively white. Urban departures from these white neighborhoods were motivated less by fear of social intermingling with Black neighbors than by fear of fiscal intermingling with lower-income neighbors who had different needs and priorities. “Moving to the suburbs,” Boustan writes, “allowed white households to isolate themselves from the changing bundle of local public goods and fiscal obligations offered in the central city.”

[Read: White flight never ended]

Given these powerful fiscal incentives, NIMBYism in small suburban jurisdictions is almost inevitable. Rather than expect moral suasion to change the politics of zoning in these communities, YIMBYs would do well to embrace a more humble and realistic approach, one that endeavors to meet suburban NIMBYs halfway.

One straightforward way to win over suburban homeowners is to advance housing reforms that help them build wealth, as Elmendorf has recommended. Legalizing accessory dwelling units, for example, enriches ordinary homeowners, who enjoy more public sympathy than large-scale developers, fairly or otherwise, and who can be mobilized against cost-increasing municipal-impact fees and discretionary review procedures. As an added bonus, this brand of reform allows YIMBYs to make a more optimistic appeal grounded in respect for property rights and personal freedom, a pitch that’s helped pass zoning-reform laws in Oregon, Utah, and Montana.

When faced with determined suburban resistance, as in downstate New York, where Hochul’s Housing Compact proved an immense political liability, YIMBYs ought to focus their efforts on dialing back land-use regulation in large cities. Opposition to housing production tends to be less intense in more populous jurisdictions, in part because their ratio of rich to poor residents is by definition harder to change. Urban neighborhoods are also more dynamic than suburban neighborhoods: They’re disproportionately populated by renters, young adults, low-income families, and other populations that experience above-average levels of housing churn. Neighborhood change is a fact of life in these communities. If zoning reform in urban cores proves successful, the case for housing growth in smaller communities will be that much more compelling.

At the risk of rankling anti-business progressives, YIMBYs should also do more to cultivate large employers as political allies. Lower housing costs are a powerful tool to attract and retain workers, and large employers can exert significant influence in state legislatures. That employers in California’s technology sector have played an important role in the fight against tight zoning is no coincidence—they’re keenly aware that as housing costs in the Golden State rise, they can either pay higher wages or watch as their workers decamp for cities in Idaho or Nevada.

And finally, YIMBYs should work to soften the local fiscal incentives that drive exclusionary zoning in the first place. Zachary Liscow of Yale Law School found that when states take on a larger share of school funding, rich people become more willing to move into poorer jurisdictions, likely because doing so would no longer saddle them with the special burden of supporting services for large numbers of neighbors who pay little in taxes. Consistent with this pattern, he found that centralized school funding led to lower taxes in lower-income municipalities.

A similar logic would apply to state funding for policing and public-safety efforts. If NIMBYs worry that an influx of lower-income migrants will lead to a surge of crime and disorder, as the Chan Zuckerberg Institute’s findings strongly suggest, increased state aid to local law-enforcement agencies might allay their concerns. Some arch social-media leftists have disapprovingly dubbed this blend of support for zoning reform and “broken windows” policing “carceral urbanism,” but of course social-media leftists are not the target audience.

Granted, changing local fiscal incentives would be a significant undertaking, one that would meet with resistance from voters who’d fear losing out under the new fiscal dispensation. But 30 percent of local-government revenue already comes in the form of transfers from state governments. Increasing state-government responsibility for funding local policing or public education would represent a relatively modest and potentially very welcome change, especially when compared with, say, fair-share requirements that mandate the production of deed-restricted affordable-housing units and other priorities of the YIMBY left.

Tinkering around with local fiscal incentives, forging alliances with regional business elites, and helping some property-rich homeowners get richer won’t usher in an egalitarian new millennium of integrated neighborhoods from coast to coast, but it will help YIMBYs build a more persuasive case that housing growth is in the enlightened self-interest of suburbanites who might otherwise be concerned about rising tax burdens and sinking home values. That’s not a bad start.

This article was originally published by High Country News.

The first grainy film clip shows a black bear exploding out of the trail camera’s frame. In another, a mule deer stops munching wildflowers, backs away, and takes off in the opposite direction. In a third, a moose doesn’t move at all but stands there, vigilant.

All three animals were reacting to sound bites from boom boxes in the woods, part of a study measuring the effect of outdoor recreationists’ noise on wildlife. The sounds included people chatting, mountain bikers spinning down trails—even just quiet footfalls. Each clip lasted less than 90 seconds.

The new study, currently under way in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, adds to mounting evidence that the mere presence of human sound, no matter how loud or quiet, fast or slow, changes how animals behave.

Don’t start feeling guilty about going for a hike just yet, though. Researchers are also trying to understand the significance of those reactions. For some species, hikers and bikers may be little more than a sideshow in a forest full of natural disturbances. For others, recreationists could have an impact similar to that of terrifying predators, invading habitat where food can be found, resulting in lower birth rates and even increasing deaths.

“The whole point of the study isn’t to vilify recreationists,” says Mark Ditmer, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station and one of the study’s co-leaders. “It’s to understand where and when we cause the most disturbance.”

[Read: How animals perceive the world]

The idea that we must know and love the outdoors in order to protect it is ancient. In the United States, recreation was meant to build a constituency that helped protect wild places. But even decades ago, there was evidence that using wilderness—whether formally designated or otherwise—as a human playground caused its fair share of collateral damage. Trails crisscrossed woods without rhyme or reason; used toilet paper clung to bushes in the backcountry. Groups such as Leave No Trace began reminding people to pack their garbage out with them, leave wildlife alone, and poop responsibly.

Still, “non-consumptive recreation,” the wonky term for enjoying oneself outdoors without hunting or fishing, has generally been considered a net good. At best, the thinking goes, outdoor recreation connects people to the land and sometimes inspires them to protect it—to write lawmakers, attend land-use meetings, support advocacy groups, perhaps remind others to stay on trails. At worst, it seems harmless.

But recent research suggests otherwise. A study out of Vail, Colorado, showed that increased trail use by hikers and mountain bikers disturbed elk so much that the cows birthed fewer calves. Another out of Grand Teton National Park showed that backcountry skiers scared bighorn sheep during winter, when food was scarce. A 2016 review of 274 articles on how outdoor recreation affects wildlife revealed that 59 percent of the interactions were negative.

Much of the research looks at the impacts of random encounters with hikers, backcountry skiers, and others. Few have questioned what exactly it is about humans that bothers wildlife so much, whether it’s the way we look, how we smell, or the sounds we make.

“Wildlife, more often than not, probably hear us before they see us, and so we can rarely observe if it is a negative response,” says Kathy Zeller, a co-leader on the new study and a research biologist with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute at the Rocky Mountain Research Station.

Ditmer and Zeller decided to record people biking and hiking in the woods. Last summer, they carted boom boxes of those recordings into the forest and set them up on game trails away from heavily traveled areas.

On and off for about four months, whenever a motion-sensitive camera at one end of the trail detected an animal, a boom box about 20 yards away played human sound bites—nothing like a ’90s dance party, just recordings of two hikers chatting or walking quietly, or of large or small groups of mountain bikers. Two more cameras near the boom boxes and one at the other end of the trail recorded wildlife reactions. They also played forest sounds and even blank tracks to be sure the animal wasn’t simply reacting to sudden noises or the almost imperceptible sound of a speaker turning on and off.

[Read: A not-so-silent spring]

Judging by an initial analysis of last summer’s data, large groups of mountain bikers were the most likely to cause animals such as mule deer and elk to flee. Smaller groups of mountain bikers and hikers talking also triggered a response. The animals paused and listened to people walking, but didn’t flee as often.

Researchers are still figuring out how harmful those reactions are. Joe Holbrook, a University of Wyoming professor who was not involved in the study, suspects that it depends on the species and the time of year. He and his team have spent years studying wolverines’ reactions to backcountry skiers and snowmobilers. His most recent work shows that female wolverines avoid areas with backcountry recreationists nearby. That suggests they’re losing access to good habitat, but he still doesn’t know if that means they’re also having fewer babies or dying more often.

And some wildlife gets accustomed to the presence of humans: the herds of elk that wander the streets of Mammoth, Montana; the mule deer that munch roses in towns across the West. Ditmer and Zeller found that in areas with more recreation, some species became less likely to flee.

Not all wild animals adapt to humans, though, and Ditmer says that planning for trails and other projects should take into account the impacts we have on them—whether we can see them or not.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been called many things, but she has never been called a moderate squish.

Until now.

The U.S. representative from Georgia was apparently kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group famous for bedeviling Republican House speakers, in a vote last month, Politico first reported. Representative Andy Harris, a board member, told several outlets about the outcome. The HFC says it does not comment on membership, and Greene released a statement that did not specifically address the expulsion but said, “In Congress, I serve Northwest Georgia first, and serve no group in Washington.”

[Read: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

Greene was not ejected for subscribing to QAnon beliefs, or for encouraging violence against colleagues, or for blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers, or for supporting Vladimir Putin. Instead, Harris said, Greene was punished for tangling with her fellow HFC member Lauren Boebert of Colorado and daring to take a minimal step toward governance by aligning herself with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a conservative Republican. The vote shows just how radical the MAGA fringe in Congress is today—a wild-eyed clique implacably opposed to governance.

When Greene entered Congress in 2021, she was viewed, correctly, as wacky and toxic. In February of that year, Democrats moved to kick her out of her formal committee assignments after McCarthy hesitated to punish her for offensive remarks. But Greene used the ensuing two years to build her power within the party. She forged an alliance with McCarthy: It saved her from pariahdom and made her a major face of the party, and it gave him credibility (or at least cover) with right-wing members. When his bid for the speakership nearly faltered in January 2023, she was a crucial backer. And when McCarthy needed votes for the debt deal he struck with President Joe Biden in May, Greene was there.

But the closeness to McCarthy, whom the right views as an unreliable and moderate speaker, and support for the debt deal was too much for her HFC colleagues to bear, according to Politico’s reporting. The fury over the debt deal is silly. McCarthy never had much leverage to bring against Biden, and he managed to extract more from the White House than many Democrats would have liked. The alternative to the deal he struck wasn’t a better deal—it was a catastrophic national default. Greene’s sin, to HFC members, was insufficient nihilism.

[David A. Graham: Marjorie Taylor Greene is just a symptom of what ails the GOP]

The idea that Greene has become some sort of moderate is belied by the other reason she was kicked out. Last month on the House floor, she called Boebert “a little bitch”—amid a disagreement over competing resolutions to impeach Biden. (A typically unrepentant Greene defended her word choice to Semafor, explaining, “She has genuinely been a nasty little bitch to me.” Boebert, for her part, said that she had defended Greene’s comments on free-speech grounds ahead of the caucus vote.)

Greene is as extreme as she ever has been, but she became prominent not just for her “loony lies and conspiracy theories”—to use Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s phrase—but for her savvy wielding of those views in the press to get attention. But some of the remaining members of the Freedom Caucus, although not so well known, have terrifying views of their own.

The chair, Scott Perry, a Pennsylvanian, was a key plotter of Donald Trump’s attempted paperwork coup to steal the 2020 election, and has been swept up in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chief inquisitor of the House majority, is the vice chair. Andy Biggs of Arizona responded to Donald Trump’s federal indictment in June by tweeting, “We have now reached a war phase. Eye for an eye.” His colleague Clay Higgins of Louisiana outdid him with a mélange of militia vernacular incomprehensible to the average citizen. Mary Miller of Illinois first reached national attention in 2021 when she told rally attendees, “Hitler was right on one thing: He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” She may not have intended to praise Hitler; the same cannot safely be assumed about Paul Gosar of Arizona, who is deeply entwined with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Matt Gaetz of Florida is, well, Matt Gaetz.

[Jeff Sharlet: The congressman telling Trump supporters to “buckle up”]

When Greene was kicked off her committees back in 2021, I argued that the GOP was disingenuously treating her as one lone, unhinged figure who could be ignored. The problem for Republican leaders was that they couldn’t very well punish her for views that the party had tolerated and fostered.

A little more than two years later, the center of the House congressional caucus has moved so far that Greene is no longer a fringe member—in fact, the fringe members view her as an avatar of compromise and weakness. That’s no longer just a problem for Republican leaders. It’s a problem for the entire country.

Just past midnight on a Tuesday in June, a fire broke out in an e-bike repair shop in Manhattan. Sometime around midnight, an e-bike battery erupted into flames mid-charge. The blaze was quick and likely very, very hot. Firefighters responded within five minutes, but it was already too late: Flames spread to nearby apartments, killing four people.

It was not the first incident like this. New York City has been rattled by more than 100 battery fires so far in 2023, according to its fire commissioner, killing 13 people. In one incident in January, an e-bike or e-scooter battery caught fire and injured 18 children at a day care in Queens. Battery fires are not just happening in New York: From January 2021 to late November 2022, the Consumer Product Safety Commission received reports of more than 200 “fire or overheating incidents” and 19 fatalities, from 39 states, related to “battery-powered micromobility products”—industry jargon for e-bikes, e-scooters, and hoverboards.

America has an exploding e-transportation problem—and no easy way to fix it. Many e-bikes and e-scooters are perfectly safe, but bad batteries (and other bad hardware, such as chargers) at risk of igniting are making their way into some products. Policy makers are working on the issue, but no solution will arrive overnight. For the foreseeable future, more e-bikes will explode, and more people may die. “That’s the simple and horrifying truth right now,” William Wallace, the associate director for safety policy at Consumer Reports, told me. Unfortunately, when it comes to e-bikes and the like, we are stuck in a kind of battery purgatory.

If this problem has an epicenter, it’s New York City. New York’s density makes it particularly vulnerable to these fires. The city’s delivery workers often rely on e-bikes to do their job, because they are particularly useful in compact areas. And because millions of people live stacked on top of one another, fires can more easily spread between apartments there than in more sprawled cities such as Los Angeles (though a fire at an electric-scooter store in Venice Beach did kill one dog in March). But as e-bikes and e-scooters have taken off across the country, fires have been reported in other places, too, such as Virginia, Colorado, and Washington. Abroad, the London Fire Brigade says it has responded to one e-bike or e-scooter fire every two days so far this year.

E-bikes and e-scooters use lithium-ion batteries, which are everywhere—in our phones, in our laptops, in the Nintendo Switches we use to play Mario Kart. The vehicles are just the latest consumer products that use this technology to start spontaneously exploding. In 2006, Sony laptops were recalled after they started to combust. In 2017, it was Samsung Galaxy smartphones. In recent years, we’ve seen exploding hoverboards and vape pens and Teslas.

What makes the batteries so useful is also what can make them risky. “They put a lot of energy into a small little package,” Michael Pecht, a mechanical-engineering professor at the University of Maryland, told me. The batteries help us keep our smartphones powered for days without adding much bulk. They also can be strung together to power electric vehicles, letting us commute hundreds of miles on a single charge. Because they’re so energy dense, they’re also sensitive. Material between the positively charged “anode” and the negatively charged “cathode” keeps the energy separated. A small tear in the material can result in what Pecht termed “an explosive thermal runaway”—blistering heat in an instant, which can cause a battery to catch fire or blow up.

This sort of disaster scenario is not very common, to be clear. Reports of fires and explosions pale in comparison with how ubiquitous these batteries are. That’s because they can be—and frequently are—made well. Pecht told me that there are “very good” manufacturers and “very, very bad” ones. He has personally assessed facilities all over the world, everything from top-of-the-line businesses to low-quality “garage shops.” The southern part of China, he said, is home to a lot of the latter, though the country also has “some of the best manufacturing.” When it comes to battery sourcing, big, well-established companies such as Apple are going to use a reputable supplier.

Compared with other industries, the markets for e-bikes, e-scooters, and vapes are “more of the Wild West,” Pecht said, having so many manufacturers. Fancy e-bike companies might choose a best-in-the-business manufacturer for their products. But smaller or newer companies looking to make a quick buck may end up going with a sketchier manufacturer that isn’t producing batteries to industry safety standards (though the Consumer Product Safety Commission does not have mandatory requirements). For example, a low-quality manufacturer may go with a simple polymer separator; more expensive, high-performance batteries use a ceramic coating on top of the polymer to improve safety. And the fact that e-bikes are big puts them particularly at risk. “There are no other ‘cheap’ products with such large batteries, at least I cannot think of one,” Yushin told me over email. “The larger the battery size, the higher is the probability of something going wrong and causing a fire.”

Faulty batteries aren’t the only cause of e-bike or e-scooter fires. The device’s battery-management system—the hardware that connects to the battery, and the charger that plugs into it—also matters. “If you overcharge your battery, you can destroy it, effectively,” Gleb Yushin, an engineering professor at Georgia Tech, told me. A good battery and charger should prevent this from happening by shutting off when the battery reaches full power, but in some instances, it continues to fill with energy until it ignites. User error doesn’t help either. And e-bike owners may be unknowingly putting themselves at risk by using improper or cheap chargers, or by purchasing sketchy secondhand batteries. A Guardian investigation found inexpensive, unsafe chargers for sale on eBay, Amazon, and Wish.com.

Some simple precautions can go a long way. The National Fire Protection Association recommends buying only devices, batteries, and chargers that have been tested by an accredited lab; UL certification is the big one (look for the letters UL in a circle). People who have already purchased their bike can educate themselves on its specific hardware (actually read that manual). And be sure to charge it safely—using the charger that came with the battery—while it’s supervised. That means not leaving it plugged in overnight.

The obvious solution here would be for the CPSC to implement tougher standards. Wallace said that he would be “very disappointed and even more concerned than we already are if we didn’t see some sort of broad enforcement action this year.” It may not be that far off: The CPSC has called a meeting later this month to talk about lithium-ion-battery safety, with a focus on e-bikes, hoverboards, and e-scooters. A bill introduced in Congress would give the CPSC six months to create and implement such regulations. New York City, for its part, has already adopted a batch of new e-bike laws aimed at reducing risk, and late last month, the city announced that it will be adding safe e-bike chargers and storage to public-housing complexes around the city.

Still, no law can make the fire-prone e-bikes that have already been sold across the country suddenly disappear. And although standards help, they won’t prevent counterfeiting or the resale of used batteries. Eventually, Pecht thinks, we’ll shift to using different materials for high-density batteries, materials with less safety risk. But don’t hold your breath: Yushin said that he doesn’t think lithium ion will be supplanted anytime in the next 50 years. And the fact that so many types of devices caught fire before e-bikes likely means that e-bikes won’t be the last to ignite, either.

In the meantime, Pecht said that he’s fielding calls and emails almost every other day from the managers of apartment buildings whose residents are spooked about e-bikes. They wonder if such bikes are safe to store in a communal garage, for example. Pecht points out that the issue is bigger than just e-bikes: By that logic, you could argue, “Don’t have a vaping device in your apartment, because that could be a problem.” America’s battery challenges are complex. We want lots of power in a small package, and that involves some risk, whether the device is an electric scooter or a vape pen. Don’t be surprised if we’re stuck in battery purgatory for years to come.