A Michigan couple sued when their local township passed an ordinance to prevent them from opening a cemetery. This week, in a victory for property rights, a judge ruled in the couple's favor and threw out the ordinance entirely.

As Reason reported in January, Peter and Annica Quakenbush wanted to open a "green" cemetery, allowing people to bury their loved ones in a natural and environmentally friendly manner, free of chemicals like formaldehyde and coffins containing metal. They specifically intended to establish a conservation burial ground, in which decedents would be buried in biodegradable coverings like cotton shrouds or wooden caskets and the burial sites would be marked by natural landmarks like rocks or native trees. The site would otherwise remain an undisturbed forest.

The Quakenbushes bought a 20-acre plot near Brooks Township and started putting together the necessary paperwork. But local officials had other plans in mind, and in June 2023, the Brooks Township Board passed an ordinance prohibiting the establishment of all new cemeteries.

"In the past, cemeteries elsewhere have taken up large amounts of sometimes otherwise productive land," the ordinance declared. "Cemetery landscaping, grass cutting, monument repair and upkeep costs have increased dramatically over time. The problems associated with abandoned or 'orphan' cemeteries have increased throughout Michigan, and citizens look to the local municipal government…to take over abandoned or orphan cemeteries."

According to the Quakenbushes' lawsuit, after they first inquired about establishing their cemetery in February 2022, a zoning official emailed the township's legal counsel. "It is our general recommendation that new private cemeteries not be allowed within the Township except under certain very limited circumstances," the attorney replied. "Almost certainly, at some time in the future (whether in a few decades or the distance [sic] future), the family members of the deceased individuals will no longer own the parcel involved. What happens to the burials then? In all likelihood, it would devalue the  property and make it unmarketable or difficult to sell."

"My response to that is, what does it matter? It's not your property," Renée Flaherty, an attorney with the Institute for Justice who represented the Quakenbushes, told Reason in January.

Besides, there were numerous mechanisms in place to prevent that outcome: Establishing a conservation burial ground in accordance with the Green Burial Council's criteria, as is the Quakenbushes' intent, requires obtaining a conservation easement—preventing the land from being used for other purposes—and partnering with a land conservancy that can maintain the property in perpetuity.

Michigan state law also requires all private cemeteries to establish an "endowment and perpetual care trust fund," with $50,000 to start and monthly deposits of "not less than 15% of all proceeds received."

"Nearly 250 people had reserved a burial plot even while the ban was in place," a local FOX affiliate reported.

The Quakenbushes sued to overturn the ordinance as a violation of due process. The township filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. This week, after hearing oral arguments, Newaygo County Circuit Court Judge David Glancy not only dismissed the township's motion but found the ordinance unconstitutional.

A written order was not available at press time; a representative of the Newaygo County Circuit Court tells Reason that the court directed the plaintiffs' attorneys to prepare a ruling, which the judge will review in a later hearing.

"We're excited and feel vindicated by this ruling," the Quakenbushes said in a statement released by the Institute for Justice. "We are delighted that the judge understood that Brooks Township's ordinance violated our right to use our property and operate our cemetery."

"The Green Burial Council (GBC) is pleased to learn that Newaygo County, Michigan Circuit Judge David Glancy rejected Brooks Township's attempt to throw out a lawsuit against the 'cemetery ban' ordinance," the GBC said in a statement to Reason. "The Green Burial Council has stated before, that we believe Brooks Township's ordinance stood on a weak foundation of misinformation about green burial's negative impact on soil and water, and other similar fears. Though individuals may experience genuine trepidation about a naturally interred body's impact on their environment, local governments can easily find scientific evidence proving no such impact when burial practices are performed according to industry standards."*

UPDATE: This piece has been updated to include a statement from the Green Burial Council.

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Climate unintended consequences: The Olympic Games, which start at the end of this week in Paris, were supposed to be some of the most environmentally friendly in the organization's history. The organizers had opted out of supplying air conditioning for athletes' rooms in the Olympic Village as a means of reducing the event's environmental footprint. Just one issue: Nobody wanted that, and many of the teams will in fact be bringing their own A.C. units.

The event organizers had constructed an Olympic Village equipped with geothermal in-floor cooling systems. But highs in Paris at the end of July/beginning of August average about 79 degrees Fahrenheit during the day; most major competitors have decided the in-floor tech won't cut it and that their athletes need real A.C.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post compiled a list of the top 20 largest competing nations; of the eight that replied to this inquiry, all of them planned on bringing their own portable A.C. units for their athletes. One of the nations that has not responded yet—China—is likely to follow suit, as roughly half of the world's total A.C. units are used in China.

"According to the International Energy Agency, fewer than 1 in 10 households in Europe has air conditioning, and the numbers in Paris are lower than that," reports NBC News. "The study said that of the 1.6 billion AC units in use across the globe in 2016, more than half were in China (570 million) and the United States (375 million). The entire European Union had around 100 million." So it's a bit of a cultural difference. But it's still incredibly rich that the organizers' environmental efforts will be sabotaged to such a degree, and you have to wonder what the total environmental toll of shlepping massive A.C. units halfway across the globe to use temporarily in the Olympic Village will be (though some teams do intend to procure the units in France).

"It's a pity," said Georgina Grenon, the Paris 2024 director of environmental excellence, in response to The Washington Post's question about other countries making less environmentally conscious choices. Still, organizers touted their plan to transform the Olympic Village into apartments for some 6,000 Parisians following the games and say the geothermal cooling tech will be used for years to come.

Locked out of the debates: The first presidential debate will be this Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., despite high polling, will be excluded from the stage.

Normally, the Commission on Presidential Debates hosts the presidential showdowns (and chooses which candidates qualify for inclusion). This time, however, CNN is hosting, moderated by anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. As is tradition in American politics, which seems so frequently filled with antipathy toward non–major party candidates, the highly polling third candidate—RFK Jr.—will be excluded from the stage, per CNN's rules.

The network set a requirement that a candidate's name must appear on enough ballots nationwide to plausibly be able to win 270 electoral votes. The candidates must also reach 15 percent in four national polls selected by CNN in order to qualify.

RFK Jr. does not qualify for the first (having secured ballot access in just California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Utah so far, though another dozen states could also end up putting his name on the ballot) yet comes quite close to the second: He's been hovering at around 9 or 10 percent, even cracking 15 in some polls (including one of CNN's very own).

By keeping Kennedy off the debate stage, CNN is depriving viewers of the opportunity to see both Donald Trump and Joe Biden taken to task for the COVID-19 policies they supported—lockdowns that deprived kids of their educations, mask mandates that ended up being almost entirely pointless, funerals and weddings conducted via Zoom, padlocked playgrounds and skate parks filled in with sand, not to mention stunning levels of government spending that sank our economy into deep inflation from which we still haven't fully recovered. We need more people challenging the political duopoly, not fewer. But leave it to the major parties and major networks to fear competition; all incumbents fear competition when they can sense they're in decline.

Scenes from New York: The weed crackdown is underway. Unauthorized dispensaries and bodegas have, for the last year or so, outnumbered licensed shops 20 to one, but New York's law enforcement and regulators have now decided to take action. Signs like these are commonplace, and represent a stunning admission on the part of the pot regulators: They totally botched the legal weed rollout by doling out a paltry number of licenses to applicants on the basis of "diversity" and "equity" but disallowing the vast majority of shops to obtain legal licenses. (More from Reason's Jacob Sullum.)

QUICK HITS

• "New polling from Fox News shows a seven-point swing in President Joe Biden's favorability among independents: They prefer Biden by 9 points, a reversal from May, when they favored Trump by 2 points," reports Politico.
• "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said intense fighting with Hamas will soon be paused and some forces redeployed to the north of the country, where violence is escalating with Lebanon-based Hezbollah," reports Bloomberg.
• "Did anyone ever hear of Dana White?" Trump asked, referring to the UFC president, during a speech at a conference in Washington on Saturday. "I said, 'Dana, I have an idea. Why don't you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league—these are the greatest fighters in the world—fight the champion of the migrants.' I think the migrant guy might win; that's how tough they are. He didn't like that idea too much." He also talked up how he would "begin the largest deportation operation in American history" if elected to a second term.
• Over 1,300 people died this month while attempting to complete their hajj to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.

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In 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles (E.V.s) across the country in an effort to boost a switch to the use of clean energy.

As Reason reported in December, not one charger funded by the program had yet come online. Now, six months later, the number of functional charging stations has ticked up to eight.

That news comes from an Autoweek article earlier this month. In March, The Washington Post reported that only seven were built; a charging station in Bradford, Vermont, opened in April, containing four E.V. fast chargers. Public chargers are either Level 2, which use alternating current electricity and take several hours to fully charge an all-electric vehicle from empty, or Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC) superchargers, which use direct current and can charge in less than an hour.

Why so little progress? Alexander Laska of the center-left Third Way think tank told Autoweek's Jim Motavalli that the federal cash "comes with dozens of rules and requirements around everything from reliability to interoperability, to where stations can be located, to what certifications the workers installing the chargers need to have." Laska says the regulations "are largely a good thing—we want drivers to have a seamless, convenient, reliable charging experience—but navigating all of that does add to the timeline."

A spokesperson with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which administers $5 billion of the $7.5 billion total, further told Motavalli that the delay is because "we want to get it right."

Thankfully, federal grants aren't the only way to build out charging infrastructure.

"US drivers welcomed almost 1,100 new public, fast-charging stations in the second half of 2023, a 16% increase," Bloomberg's Kyle Stock reported in January. And not just in big cities or progressive enclaves: Deep-red Idaho "switched on 12 new [DCFCs] between July and December," while "Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee welcomed 56 new fast-charging stations in the second half of 2023, an infrastructure increase of one-third."

While Stock notes that $5 billion of federal money is expected to roll out soon, "the vast majority of chargers added in the US last year were bets by for-profit companies on the future of battery-powered driving."

The most prominent company by far is Tesla, whose network of Superchargers includes over 57,000 DCFC chargers around the world and generated an estimated $1.74 billion of revenue in 2023 alone. Just in the fourth quarter of 2023, the company built 357 new stations, accounting for 3,783 charging ports.

Around two-thirds of all public chargers in the U.S. are manufactured for Teslas, but the company has also expanded its network for its competitors to use: In the 2025 model year, most major automakers' E.V.s will use the same charge port as Teslas and be able to access the Supercharger network.

Rivian, a Tesla competitor, is also building out its own DCFC network: In February 2024, it counted 400 chargers in 67 locations, with plans to expand further, and just like with Tesla's Superchargers, Rivian plans to make its chargers accessible to other models.

In fairness, both Tesla and Rivian have benefited from government handouts: State and local governments in Georgia promised Rivian a raft of incentives worth up to $1.5 billion. And Tesla has received at least $2.8 billion in federal, state, and local subsidies over the years, despite CEO Elon Musk's professed distaste for government intervention in the economy. In fact, Politico found in February that Tesla was the single largest recipient of funds disbursed by the federal NEVI program, winning "almost 13 percent of all EV charging awards from the law, earning it a total of more than $17 million in infrastructure grants."

But those companies still provide the best template for expanding access to public chargers.

While proponents of the federal regulations may defend the amount of red tape involved in the federal program, with demands on where a charging station can be placed and the types of licenses people need to build one, the fact is that the private sector is already building out a nationwide E.V. charging network that will be available to most drivers.

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A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in January has been used for a media wave of scaremongering about plastic residue in bottled water. Its results are based on a system developed by researchers at Columbia University and Rutgers University that uses a "hyperspectral stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) imaging platform with an automated plastic identification algorithm that allows micro-nano plastic analysis." That sounds impressive, and it really is, relying on an immersive tank, lasers, and advanced computational techniques.

The study's major contribution to science was actually not in coming up with an estimate of the amount of plastic in bottled water, but in inventing a technique that could detect nanoplastics at all. Nanoplastics, as the name implies, are much smaller than already tiny microplastics. Microplastics can be as small as one micron in size, 1/83rd the width of a strand of hair.

The smallest-sized particles the researchers picked up measured 100 nanometers. This means we can now detect bits of plastic so small that 10 million of them would amount to a piece of microplastic a fraction of the width of a hair.

Just as a stronger telescope will discover more planets, or a better microscope might tell us there are more bacteria in a petri dish than we previously knew, so too did this impressive newfound ability to see infinitesimally small bits of plastic mean that they discovered a seemingly infinite amount of plastic.

Nearly every news outlet hit concerned thirsty Americans with headlines such as "Scientists Find About a Quarter Million Invisible Nanoplastic Particles in a Liter of Bottled Water" (Associated Press) and "Bottled water contains hundreds of thousands of potentially dangerous plastic fragments: Study" (The Hill), as if the 240,000 figure is directly meaningful to their readers.

The number of pieces of plastic, as opposed to the amount of plastic, is irrelevant to the danger (if there even is a danger), but the aim was to communicate dread at all of the tiny shards of toxicity loosed upon our water-gulping bodies. It's like pretending it is actually informative about our colorectal risk from eating beef to reveal we are consuming more than 30,000 grams of beef a year vs. the equivalent 66 pounds. The number of discrete units on any arbitrary scale is not what's important for our health risk; it's the total weight.

To be clear, the PNAS paper didn't just convert microplastic units to nanoplastic units. The techniques did allow for the detection of a greater amount of plastic in the water, but the implications of that were played up in the media in the most dire way possible. The Washington Post headline referenced "100 to 1000 times more plastics." The subhead of that article proclaims: "A new study finds that 'nanoplastics' are even more common than microplastics in bottled water." In that article we are told, "People are swallowing hundreds of thousands of microscopic pieces of plastic each time they drink a liter of bottled water, scientists have shown—a revelation that could have profound implications for human health."

Emphasis on "could." There are no good studies on what the effects of these particles are. Most of the media outlets that covered the nanoplastic discovery disclose that there's never been a documented effect on health from the particles, but they still can't resist framing the discovery with maximum alarm.

Every person breathes, and has breathed in since the dawn of time, nanoparticles. They are in decomposing skin, leaves, and ash. Plastic is different, to be sure, which is what the current studies are properly concerned with. We do know that bottled water contains small bits of plastic, the oceans contain small bits of plastic, and our tap water contains small bits of plastic.

What we don't know is how any of this plastic may, or may not, affect us. The panic thrust upon us by almost all the media framing is premature and in many cases antithetical to the actual processes of scientific inquiry. A headline such as Earth.com's "Over 240,000 cancer-causing nanoplastics found in bottled water" is not just quantitatively illegible, it's an assertion not based on any proof of carcinogenic effect. Likewise, a recent article in The New Yorker titled "How Plastics Are Poisoning Us" is interesting, taught me things I didn't know about small plastics and "nurdles," and excited my interest in further research, but what it didn't do was present any proof that plastics are poisoning us.

The scientists behind the study themselves said they've personally reduced the amount of water they drank out of bottles. Columbia's Wei Min claimed he cut his bottled water consumption in half.

In half? I doubt lung cancer researchers cut their smoking in half. Did Herbert Needleman, the researcher who proved the effects of lead on child development, react by painting his son's nursery walls with only one coat of lead paint instead of two? The nanoplastic chemists are showing proper caution, but their continued use of some level of bottled water rebuts the more fearmongering claims attached to their work.

One example of proper perspective appeared in an Associated Press article quoting Denise Hardesty, an Australian government oceanographer who studies plastic waste. She pointed out that the total weight of nanoplastics found in a bottle of water was the "equivalent to the weight of a single penny in the volume of two Olympic-sized swimming pools."

I once swallowed a penny. I lived. We all have swallowed lots of water—bottled, tap, and maybe even from swimming pools. All of this water will have infinitesimally small pieces of plastic in it which science is now able to detect and count. The numbers associated with these tiny bits of plastic will be quite large. The conclusions we should draw from the huge counts are not quite nil, but are many orders of magnitudes less significant than the media panic over nanoplastics we're swimming in.

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