U.S. — In an effort to expand the global market for American football, the National Football League announced on Tuesday that next year's Super Bowl halftime show would be performed entirely in Sindarin Elvish.

The Trump administration will overturn the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) 2009 Endangerment Finding, according to The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA found that greenhouse gas emissions "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." The threat stems from the fact that greenhouse gas emissions, largely from burning coal, oil, and natural gas, are contributing to rising average global temperatures. (As of this article's publication, the original finding is still up at the EPA's website.)

Based on this finding, the EPA under the Obama administration and the Biden administration adopted various regulations aiming to reduce those emissions, including the imposition of strict and costly automobile and power plant emissions reduction requirements.

Even the Department of Energy's handpicked Climate Working Group acknowledged in a 2025 report that "carbon dioxide also acts as a greenhouse gas, exerting a warming influence on climate and weather." American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. argues that acknowledgment is sufficient to meet the highly precautionary legal threshold for an endangerment finding under the Clean Air Act. That legal standard was set by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision. The majority of the court declared, "Under the Act's clear terms, EPA can avoid promulgating regulations only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do." (Emphasis added.)

As legal scholar and Volokh Conspiracy contributor Jonathan Adler has observed, whether the Trump administration can find a winning legal argument for why the 2007 decision is wrong is yet to be determined. However, it is worth noting that the Supreme Court as currently constituted has not been shy about overturning prior decisions, and that three of the four justices who dissented in the Massachusetts case are still sitting on the court's bench.

The post The Trump Administration Plans To Repeal EPA Finding That Greenhouse Gas Emissions 'Threaten' Public Health appeared first on Reason.com.

“Spanish is clearly now the world’s coolest language. So why do we push children to learn French?”, asks Gary Nunn in the Guardian.

His argument for pushing children to learn Spanish rather than French is something about Bad Bunny, whoever that is, singing at the Superbowl, whatever that is, plus a slightly less childish argument about how more people worldwide speak Spanish than French. So they do, but that does not rescue the entire article from having the air of being written by una rata en un saco. Mr Nunn may well get his wish that Spanish should dislodge French as the main language taught in British schools, but the triumph will be spoilt by whispers that there is increasingly little practical point in teaching any foreign language to children who already speak English, the language the whole world wants to learn. Mr Nunn says that his Spanish has allowed him to “remote-work my way across Latin America and learn to salsa with guapo men in nightclubs” which is nice for him, but the number of current pupils likely to dance in his footsteps is low.

Fate played a cruel trick on British teachers of modern languages. When I was a girl, they had just fought a successful campaign to dethrone Latin and Greek. In vain did the teachers of dead languages bleat about widening cultural perspectives and indefinable cognitive benefits. Teachers of French and German and Spanish talked better, stronger, more manly talk about how many tens of millions of living humans spoke their favoured languages; about exports and global relevance and earning potential. They quoted Willy Brandt, “You may buy from me in your own language, but sell to me in mine”, and they won.

But now the German for “job” is “der job” and the Spanish for “marketing” is “el marketing” and it turns out that Germans and Spaniards will not just buy in English but conduct their international business in it. And the teachers and enthusiasts for modern languages are reduced to fighting over which of them will grab the largest share of the shrinking number of English-speaking pupils willing to put the effort in to learn any of them, while dredging up from memory all that benthic detritus about “seeing the world in with different eyes” that they mocked so mercilessly when it came out of the mouths of the classicists half a century ago.

As I have been saying for more than a decade, my feelings about the triumph of English are not particularly triumphant. Not only do I mourn the beigeificiation of the world, I fear that when we are down to just Mandarin, English and Spanish the state will find it even easier to control us than it does now. There have been many times in history when minority languages served as a literal speakeasy for minority opinions and where dead languages helped keep free thought alive.

I know yesterday I said there was no evidence of an Epstein blackmail operation but I'm going to exercise the Democrat Denialist Maneuver of declaring "I never said that nor held that position." If you contradict me I will call...