The Trump administration is proposing to slash restrictions on the oil and gas industry for methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that is a powerful driver of climate change.

Environmental groups are alarmed. “This would be a huge step backward,” said Ben Ratner, a senior director at the Environmental Defense Fund. “It would cause greatly increased pollution and a big missed opportunity to take cost effective immediate action to reduce the rate of warming right now.”

The Trump administration argues it would save the oil and gas industry $17 million to $19 million annually in compliance costs. But that’s “such a small fraction of the industry total cash flow that it’s just laughable,” says Harvard University’s Steven Wofsy, a professor of atmospheric and environmental science.

The Trump administration also says it does not anticipate an increase in the level of methane emissions if the proposal is implemented — but scientists disagree with that assumption.

Methane powerfully traps heat, and can warm the atmosphere at 25 times the rate of carbon dioxide. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the oil and gas industry is the largest source of methane emissions in the U.S.

In March 2017, Trump ordered agencies to “review existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources.” This proposal came out of that review.

In a statement describing the proposal, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler reiterated an argument against such regulations often used by the oil and gas industry: “The Trump Administration recognizes that methane is valuable, and the industry has an incentive to minimize leaks and maximize its use.”

Critics of that logic say that it doesn’t always make immediate economic sense for companies to upgrade old, leaky equipment for newer models, even if they could use the leaked methane.

Industry reaction was mixed. The American Petroleum Institute welcomed the rollback. “The oil and natural gas industry is laser-focused on cutting methane emissions through industry initiatives, smart regulations, new technologies, and best practices,” said Erik Milito, API’s Vice President of Upstream and Industry Operations.

But some oil and gas companies, including Shell, BP and Exxon, have actually supported the Obama-era regulations.

“Shell remains committed to achieving our target of maintaining methane emissions intensity below 0.2% by 2025 for all operated assets globally,” Shell U.S. President Gretchen Watkins said in a statement. “Despite the Administration’s proposal to no longer regulate methane, Shell’s U.S. assets will continue to contribute to that global target.”

The greenhouse gas methane is released at many points in the industry: “Methane is emitted to the atmosphere during the production, processing, storage, transmission, and distribution of natural gas and the production, refinement, transportation, and storage of crude oil,” the EPA has said.

The EPA’s main proposal on methane, released Thursday, would “remove sources [from regulation] in the transmission and storage segment of the oil and gas industry.” It would also rescind emissions limits on methane from the production and processing steps.

The Trump administration points out that U.S. methane emissions are on a downward trend, and argues that will continue, despite the rollback to regulations. In a phone call with reporters, EPA acting assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation Anne Idsal said that existing limits for ozone-forming volatile organic compounds will remain in place for the industry’s production and processing sectors.

“Frankly, the controls to reduce VOC emissions also reduce methane emissions at the same time, so we don’t believe that separate methane limitations for that segment of the industry are necessary – and quite frankly, are redundant,” Idsal said.

Stanford University’s Adam Brandt, an energy resources engineering professor who focuses on greenhouse gas emissions, does not agree.

“This proposal is likely to result in higher methane emissions and to stall progress the industry has made in detecting and fixing leaks,” he said. Brandt also said existing limits on VOCs will not reduce methane emissions as much as is needed to meet climate goals.

Harvard scientist Wofsy agreed that there’s no evidence the rollback won’t increase methane emissions. “I think it will have significant negative impact,” he says.

He said this proposal withdraws regulations from parts of the oil and gas industry notorious for emitting methane, such as storage tanks.

New York Attorney General Letitia James decried the plan as part of an “unconscionable assault on the environment,” and vowed to “use the full power of my office to fight back against this.”

The proposal will go through a 60 day public comment period, and the EPA will hold a hearing about it in Texas. If the change becomes final, it will likely face legal challenges. That means the proposal might not take effect before the 2020 election.

NPR’s Jeff Brady contributed to this report.

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It may have appeared that Anthony Levandowski was out of the legal hot seat after Google’s parent company, Alphabet, agreed to settled a corporate espionage lawsuit against Uber last year. But the controversial Silicon Valley executive is at the center of another case stemming from the same allegations — only this time it is federal prosecutors claiming that after years of spearheading Google’s autonomous vehicle division, he looted a trove of top-secret files before going to work with Google’s primary rival, Uber.

Levandowski was charged on Tuesday with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets for allegedly making off with about 14,000 files pertaining to the Google’s Waymo self-driving car project.

The criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Northern California alleges that in the months before he abruptly resigned from Google in January 2016, Levandowski downloaded and copied key files onto his laptop. He then used those trade secrets to create his own self-driving truck company called Otto, according to the documents. Months later that startup was acquired by Uber for roughly $680 million. Additionally, Uber named Levandowski as head of the ride-hailing company’s autonomous vehicle department, which was getting off the ground at the time.

“All of us have the right to change jobs, none of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door,” U.S. Attorney David Anderson said in a statement. “Theft is not innovation.”

Court documents say Levandowski made off with circuit board drawings and schematics as well as detailed designs for light sensor technology called Lidar that took “years of research and testing, and millions of dollars in investment” for Google to produce.

“The FBI will not tolerate the theft of trade secrets,” FBI Special Agent in Charge John Bennett, told NPR in an emailed statement. “These are the Crown Jewels of companies and this unlawful behavior has a real impact on our economy, local jobs, and consumers around the country and even the world. Silicon Valley is not the Wild West.”

Levandowski’s lawyers, Ismail Ramsey and Miles Ehrlich, say he’s an innovator in the self-driving technology field and “didn’t steal anything from anyone.”

“The downloads at issue occurred while Anthony was still working at Google — when he and his team were authorized to use the information. None of these supposedly secret files ever went to Uber or to any other company,” they said in a statement, adding that the latest charges rehash “claims already discredited in a civil case.”

The lawsuit between the two tech giants over the same issue was settled last year after a four-day trial in which Levandowski refused to cooperate with Uber’s defense attorneys, citing Fifth Amendment privileges. He was subsequently fired from Uber.

In the end, Uber, which at the time was planning to go public, agreed to pay Alphabet’s Waymo subsidiary $245 million to end the legal proceedings, and not to use its technology.

The judge who oversaw the lawsuit also recommended the case for criminal investigation, which is what led to the indictment against Levandowski.

“We have always believed competition should be fueled by innovation, and we appreciate the work of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI on this case,” a Waymo spokesperson told NPR in an emailed statement. Meanwhile, Uber said it has “cooperated with the government throughout their investigation and will continue to do so.”

If convicted, Levandowski faces up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 on each of the 33 counts of trade-secret theft.

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Today, the judge hearing the opioid case brought by Oklahoma against the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson awarded the state roughly $572 million.

The fact that the state won any money is significant — it’s the first ruling to hold a pharmaceutical company responsible for the opioid crisis.

But the state had asked for much more: around $17 billion. The judge found the drugmaker liable for only about 1/30 of that.

“The state did not present sufficient evidence of the amount of time and costs necessary, beyond year one, to abate the opioid crisis,” Judge Thad Balkman wrote in his ruling.

That’s the big reason for the discrepancy. The judge based his decision on one year of abatement. The state’s plan — and the basis of that $17 billion ask — was looking at abatement for the next three decades.

That 30-year plan was authored by Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia. He says you can easily get into the billions when you consider the costs of dealing with this epidemic in the long term.

“Take one example,” Ruhm says. “Addiction treatment services, which includes a variety of things — that includes inpatient services, outpatient services, residential care. You’re talking a cost there on the order of $230 million per year. And so if you take that over a 30-year period — and then you discount it to net present value and all the things economists do — you come up with a cost for treatment services of just under $6 billion.”

Just that cost gets you more than a third of the way to $17 billion. The rest comes from all sorts of things, he says: public and physician education programs; treatment for babies who are born to mothers who used opioids; data systems for pharmacists to better track prescriptions grief support groups and more. Ruhm added up all those costs over 30 years, and got more than $17 billion.

“Let’s be clear,” he says. “It is a lot of money. It’s also a major public health crisis.” Nationally, 130 people, on average, die every day from opioid-related overdoses, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Ruhm suggests one year of funding for abatement won’t be nearly enough. “Many currently addicted individuals are likely to need medication-assisted treatment for many years, or even for decades. The same is true for many other aspects of the crisis,” he says.

Today’s verdict does not mean Oklahoma is now going to spend the $572 million dollars it was awarded on any particular abatement plan, assuming, even that it sees any of that cash — Johnson & Johnson’s attorneys say they will appeal Monday’s court decision.

Ultimately, it will be up to state officials and lawmakers to decide how to actually use any money the state gets. And that will probably be nowhere near Ruhm’s projection of what’s needed in the long term.

Health economist Kosali Simon at Indiana University says the $17 billion figure didn’t seem outsize to her.

“In general these numbers tend to be large because we’re thinking over a long time period; we’re thinking about a 30-year horizon,” she says. “There isn’t a vaccine or a one-time dose of medication that would completely heal everybody.”

Simon compares Ruhm’s report to what economists did after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 — estimating what it would cost to return the environment as closely as possible to its pre-spill condition.

Except in this case, there isn’t a single oil spill. There is an opioid epidemic in every state.

“This report is going to be a very important and useful baseline against which other states can consider their own situation,” says Simon.

Nationally, she says, it would cost much more than taking Oklahoma’s numbers and scaling them up to solve the problem. The country needs to invest in research on what treatment options work best, develop better addiction treatment drugs, et cetera.

Then there’s the question — once you’ve fully accounted for all these costs — of who should pay?

“The economist’s job is to think, ‘How much money does it take now to abate the setting?’ ” Simon says. “Whose pocket that should come from is an entirely different and — I think — much more difficult question for society to answer.”

Today the judge said a drugmaker should pay at least some of the costs of abating the crisis — at least for one year.

There are hundreds of other opioid cases around the country, and those judges might come to different conclusions.

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A coterie of intimidating lawyers. A deployment of charm. An aura of invincibility. A five-figure donation to a New York Times reporter’s favored nonprofit. A bullet delivering a message. Even, it is alleged, a cat’s severed head in the front yard of the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair.

Such were the tools the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is said to have used to try to soften news coverage and at times stave off journalistic scrutiny altogether.

Before his death earlier this month, Epstein owned the largest townhouse in Manhattan, little more than a mile from many of the nation’s leading news organizations. He counted a former and a future president among his friends. He partied with royalty and supermodels. He was said to advise billionaires.

Epstein killed himself, authorities say, in federal prison as he faced criminal charges alleging sex trafficking of underage girls, some as young as 14, in his mansions in New York and Florida. And yet with a few notable exceptions, the national media infrequently covered Epstein’s behavior and rarely looked at the associates who helped him evade accountability for his actions — at least, not until the Miami Herald‘s Julie K. Brown’s investigative series late last year.

“We count on the press to uncover problems, not merely to report on when problems have been prosecuted and when people have been indicted, but to uncover problems before they reach that stage,” says David Boies, an attorney for several of Epstein’s accusers. “And here you had a terrible problem. A horrific series of abuses.”

Boies’ firm helped file lawsuits in 2015 and 2017 for clients alleging that Epstein and his associates had sexually trafficked underage girls, at his various homes. The suits were publicly available documents but received little attention in the press.

“We spread them out in two public complaints. We would go to the media to try to explain what was going on,” Boies tells NPR. “With the exception, really, of the Miami Herald and the Daily Beast, prior to the arrest [of Epstein this summer] there was almost no substantive coverage.”

In some cases, Epstein successfully scared off some accusers and struck confidential settlements with others, making it harder for reporters to get them to recount their experiences on the record.

Journalists who have tracked the story say attitudes in society at large and newsrooms themselves shifted with the #MeToo movement that burst forth in the fall of 2017. Some of those cases involved prominent actresses who command resources and media attention.

Some critics of the press’s performance say ruefully there may have been a class element at play. As described in court documents, Epstein and his associates recruited young women from working-class backgrounds and disrupted families.

“We need to look at ourselves, too,” the Miami Herald‘s Brown tells NPR. “We need to understand why this wasn’t scrutinized in this way before.”

Separate instructive episodes stretch from 2003 to 2018 and involve three major American media outlets — Vanity Fair, ABC News and The New York Times. And taken together, they may help illuminate Epstein’s drive to avoid tough journalistic scrutiny and the media’s reluctance to take the story on.

Vanity Fair

Early one morning in the winter of 2003, Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter arrived at his magazine’s offices to find an unexpected visitor standing alone in the reception area behind its glass doors. It was Jeffrey Epstein.

In 2002, Carter had read a gossip item in the New York Post‘s Page Six column and decided to assign a reporter to answer the pressing question: Who exactly was Epstein and why was he flying former President Bill Clinton and other celebrities around on his jets?

Under Carter, Vanity Fair was known for eagerly dissecting the nation’s elites and just as eagerly rubbing shoulders with them.

People had gossiped about Epstein’s influence and his sexual appetite. Also in 2002, future President Donald Trump told New York magazine: “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Carter assigned the reporter Vicky Ward to write the story. This summer, she told NPR’s Morning Edition she wanted to pinpoint the source of Epstein’s wealth and to figure out why very young women were always spotted around him.

Ward interviewed two sisters, Maria and Annie Farmer. They alleged Epstein and his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, lured them into his orbit for sexual exploitation. (Maxwell denies this and all related allegations.)

Maria, an aspiring artist, alleged Epstein and Maxwell sexually assaulted her together in an Ohio apartment. Annie was just 15 years old, the sisters allege, when Epstein sexually assaulted her at his vast New Mexico ranch. (Maria later detailed these allegations in an affidavit for a lawsuit filed in 2019.)

And so that morning when Epstein had materialized at the magazine’s offices, he was there to press Carter not to devote any attention to Epstein’s apparent interest in very young women.

“He was torturing Graydon,” says John Connolly, then a Vanity Fair contributing editor, who reported on crime and scandal.

Epstein beseeched Carter and berated him, Connolly says, that morning and subsequently, in a flood of phone calls. Epstein denied to Carter any misconduct and wanted him to steer away from the subject.

In March 2003, Vanity Fair did publish Ward’s piece. Titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein,” it took a tough look at Epstein’s lavish lifestyle and questioned the origins of his fortune.

It did not report the Farmers’ accusations of abuse.

In a statement, Carter says Vanity Fair takes its legal obligations seriously, especially when the subject is a private person rigorously protected under libel laws.

Carter previously told The Hollywood Reporter that Ward did not have three sources on the record, which he said he considered necessary for the story. This week, Carter amended that: He says Ward did not have three sources that met the magazine’s “legal threshold.”

For the first time, in comments to NPR, Maria and Annie Farmer are publicly confirming they gave interviews to Ward. They say they both spoke about their abuse on the record, by name, back in 2002. Their mother, Janice Farmer, tells NPR she did too. And she says they were crestfallen Vanity Fair didn’t report their allegations.

“We decided to share our story about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell with a writer for Vanity Fair in 2002 because telling other people what happened to us, as we had already done, did not lead to either of them being held accountable,” they wrote in a statement for this article. “We spoke on the record. Our mother spoke on the record.”

“It was terribly painful,” the Farmer sisters wrote in a statement for this article. “We hoped the story would put people on notice and they would be stopped from abusing other young girls and young women. That didn’t happen. In the end, the story that ran erased our voices.”

Boies, a lawyer for the Farmer sisters, says the omission made it more difficult to get victims and witnesses to speak out. “I think it helped create the impression among many of the victims that the media was under Epstein’s control, that Epstein had all this power,” he says.

Soon after publication, Connolly says, Carter called to share an ominous development: a bullet placed right outside his front door at his Manhattan home.

“That wasn’t a coincidence,” Connolly says.

Even in the absence of any evidence Epstein was involved, Connolly says, both Carter and he considered the bullet a clear warning from Epstein. Another former colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalls receiving an anguished call from Carter linking the bullet to Epstein. (NPR asked Carter repeatedly over the course of a week for his recollections of the bullet incident along with other elements presented here. After this story was broadcast and posted, his spokeswoman wrote to say Carter recalled the bullet appearing in 2004, not 2003.)

In 2006, federal authorities compiled accusations against Epstein in Florida. Connolly says he headed south to see if there was a story there for Vanity Fair.

As Connolly pursued interviews with women who had worked for Epstein, he says, Carter called him once more. The editor had found another intrusion, this time in the front yard of his Connecticut home: the severed head of a dead cat.

“It was done to intimidate,” Connolly tells NPR. “No question about it.” (Others who worked for Vanity Fair at the time said the cat’s head was the talk of the office.)

Connolly tells NPR he voluntarily decided to stop pursuing the subject for the magazine. He later wrote a nonfiction book about Epstein with the bestselling crime novelist James Patterson.

In statements to NPR, Carter says the magazine never held back on reporting on Epstein because of any sense of threat.

Although federal investigators had identified nearly three dozen victims, Epstein’s legal team was able to strike a controversial deal letting him plead guilty to reduced state charges of soliciting prostitution from a teenager.

After release from jail, Epstein was accepted back into society by many leading social figures in Manhattan and beyond. He donated generous amounts to top scientists and scholars at Harvard and MIT and became a philanthropist for leading institutions of art and music.

In 2010, a group of media heavyweights joined a dinner in honor of Britain’s Prince Andrew. It was arranged by a Hollywood publicist and hosted by Epstein at his Manhattan townhouse. Attendees included ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos and CBS anchors Katie Couric and Charlie Rose.

The next year, Ward posted an essay about Epstein and his circle. In that 2011 essay, she referred glancingly to Epstein’s “sexual peccadilloes.”

And Ward wrote about Maxwell in glowing terms as “always the most interesting, the most vivacious, the most unusual person in any room. I’ve spent hours talking to her about the Third World at a bar until two a.m. She is as passionate as she is knowledgeable. She is curious.”

Ward concluded: “In this city, money makes up for all sorts of blemishes.”

In March 2014, a society photographer captured a snap of Maxwell as a guest at a black-tie party held after the Academy Awards in Hollywood. The party was sponsored by Vanity Fair. It was hosted by Graydon Carter.

ABC News

In recent months, a photograph of Virginia Roberts Giuffre has ricocheted around the world. It shows a young woman with a broad smile on her face, and Prince Andrew’s hand rests on her hip next to her exposed midriff. The prince is smiling too.

Giuffre is about 17 in the photograph, taken in 2001 at Maxwell’s London home. Other pictures of Giuffre published by tabloids are from a party for the supermodel Naomi Campbell. Epstein and Maxwell stand just a few feet from Giuffre in pictures from that night.

Giuffre had become part of Epstein’s household. Her presence at Campbell’s party, Giuffre later testified, was part of a six-week trip Epstein took her on throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. After a later party she attended for Campbell, she said, Epstein told her to have sex with a businessman, and she said she performed a sexual act upon him. Epstein later procured her for sex with other associates as well, she said, Prince Andrew among them — a charge he and Buckingham Palace sharply reject.

Maxwell had come across Giuffre while the younger woman worked at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, according to allegations in court documents. Giuffre was a locker room attendant there. Maxwell spied her reading a book about anatomy and massage therapy as she happened by.

In May 2009, Giuffre sued Epstein and accused Maxwell of recruiting her to a life of being sexually trafficked while she was a minor. She alleged it took years to escape. (Maxwell rejects her allegations.)

In 2015, the ABC News team of Amy Robach and Jim Hill secured an interview with Giuffre. In a sequence of events confirmed by the network, producers paid for Giuffre and her family to fly from Colorado, where they lived, to New York City and put them up at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on Central Park South. Robach and her news crew interviewed Giuffre on tape for more than an hour about Epstein and his entourage.

“At the time, in 2015, Epstein was walking around a free man, comparing his criminal behavior to stealing a bagel,” Giuffre writes in an email to NPR. “I really wanted a spotlight shone on him and the others who acted with him and enabled his vile and shameless conduct against young girls and young women.”

“I viewed the ABC interview as a potential game-changer,” she writes. “Appearing on ABC with its wide viewership would have been the first time for me to speak out against the government for basically looking the other way and to describe the anger and betrayal victims felt.”

The story never aired. And Giuffre has said she was never directly told why.

ABC News would not detail its editorial choices.

One ABC News staffer with knowledge of events says the network received a call from one of Epstein’s top lawyers: Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. And Giuffre and her lawyers placed great significance on that call.

Dershowitz had been part of the powerhouse legal team that earlier kept Epstein from facing serious federal charges in Florida, which also included former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr and renowned Miami defense attorney Roy Black.

Dershowitz tells NPR he intervened after learning ABC was on the brink of broadcasting its interview with Giuffre. He says he believes he spoke with two producers and a lawyer within the same 24-hour period.

“I did not want to see [Giuffre’s] credibility enhanced by ABC,” Dershowitz says.

In a December 2014 court filing in another accuser’s lawsuit, Giuffre had alleged Dershowitz was among the prominent men Epstein had instructed her to have sex with when she was a teenager. In early 2015, Dershowitz had rejected her account out of hand in his own court filings. (The nature of his denials were such that Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation earlier this year. Dershowitz has asked the court to dismiss that lawsuit.)

By September 2015, ABC soon had another possible news hook. Giuffre filed a defamation lawsuit against Maxwell in which she alleged specifics of just how, in her account, she was recruited and abused by Epstein and Maxwell. (Maxwell, again, denies those claims.) Boies, who represents Giuffre, told the Miami Herald that case was settled in 2017.

ABC episodically covered the various lawsuits. Yet it did not broadcast the interview with Giuffre.

“I found [Giuffre] to be very truthful and credible,” says the Herald‘s Brown, who interviewed her several years later for the paper’s coverage. “There were other things in the record that supported her story. So I didn’t have any qualms about it.”

Brown said a fear of being sued was a constant for reporters on the Epstein story.

The network says its decision not to broadcast the interview four years ago reflected proper journalistic care.

“At the time, not all of our reporting met our standards to air, but we never stopped investigating the story,” ABC News spokeswoman Heather Riley said in a statement sent to NPR this week. “Over the past year we have put a whole team on this investigation, which will air in the coming months.”

The #MeToo movement has affected journalistic practices in handling such circumstances.

In October 2017, more than two years after the Giuffre interview, ABC’s Diane Sawyer interviewed the actor Ashley Judd about her accusations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

At that time, Judd had not yet filed a lawsuit against Weinstein and he did not yet face criminal charges. Yet ABC viewers heard Judd’s accusations in full.

Giuffre now lives in Australia with her husband and children.

“I was defeated, once again, by the very people I spoke out against and once again, my voice was silenced,” Giuffre tells NPR. “I could not believe that a formidable network like ABC had backed down and given in.”

The New York Times

Last August, reporters at The New York Times and other publications received word Tesla founder Elon Musk was relying on Epstein to advise him on whom to consider hiring as board chair or chief executive.

Editors at the Times sent business columnist James Stewart to talk to Epstein. “I wondered why would Musk, if this is true, be using a registered sex offender to recruit new members to the board,” Stewart recently told The Kicker, a podcast from the Columbia Journalism Review.

Given Epstein’s criminal history, the off-the-record conversation took a surprising turn. As Stewart wrote last week: “He said that criminalizing sex with teenage girls was a cultural aberration and that at times in history it was perfectly acceptable.”

Yet Stewart was not the editors’ first choice to interview Epstein further.

Initially, they had asked Landon Thomas Jr., a veteran financial correspondent who had been at the Times for 16 years.

Thomas knew Epstein fairly well — having first written about the financier, back in 2002, just before he joined the paper. Thomas had considered him a valued source ever since, even after Epstein’s release from jail for sex offenses. Just how valued turned out to be a problem for the reporter and the paper.

This account is based on interviews with five current and former New York Times staffers with knowledge of the episode. They spoke on condition they not be directly named; while the Times confirmed the contours of the incident, it declined to authorize its journalists to comment. Thomas also declined to comment for this story.

But Thomas flagged a problem. He told his editors Epstein had been a great source for years and had become something of a friend as well. How close? Thomas had solicited a $30,000 contribution from Epstein for a Harlem cultural center, he told them.

Thomas suggested Epstein was just a source of information, not someone he would report on or investigate. His editors were aghast. They rejected the distinction he was trying to make.

And his editors benched him instantly from any professional contact with Epstein.

“Soliciting a donation to a personal charity is a clear violation of the policy that governs Times journalists’ relationships with their sources,” said the Times Co.’s chief spokesperson, Eileen Murphy. “As soon as editors became aware of it, they took action.”

NPR found tax records that reflect a $30,000 donation in 2017 to a Montessori preschool called O’Gorman Garden in Harlem from a foundation based in the U.S. Virgin Islands that had previously been controlled by Epstein.

Colleagues pulled up his clippings. Thomas had not written frequently about Epstein. But several Times staffers say they were appalled by a piece they found.

For a 2008 profile, Thomas had traveled to Epstein’s private isle in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The piece ran just before Epstein submitted to authorities in Florida for incarceration.

It included this lyrical passage: “As his legal troubles deepened, Mr. Epstein gazed at the azure sea and the lush hills of St. Thomas in the distance, poked at a lunch of crab and rare steak prepared by his personal chef, and tried to explain how his life had taken such a turn,” Thomas wrote. “He likened himself to Gulliver shipwrecked among the diminutive denizens of Lilliput.”

The article largely presented Epstein as someone who solicited prostitutes, not committed sex crimes against minors. (Federal agents had by then identified several dozen possible victims.)

Rereading the story in August 2018, Thomas’ colleagues recalled the exclusives their paper broke that propelled the #MeToo awakening. This, they say, was an embarrassment.

By early January 2019, Thomas was gone from the Times, though the inspiration for his departure was not shared with the public.

Last weekend, the paper reported on a public apology by one of its corporate directors, Joichi Ito, who had landed millions of dollars from Epstein for the institute he leads, the MIT Media Lab. In a tweet, the paper’s media editor, Jim Windolf, said that Ito had sought funds from Epstein “a few years after Epstein got out of the Palm Beach County Jail.”

NPR’s Cat Schuknecht contributed reporting to this story.

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The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. But last year, China put the kibosh on imports of the world’s waste. The policy, called National Sword, freaked out people in the U.S. — a huge market for plastic waste had just dried up.

Where was it all going to go now?

In March, executives from big companies that make or package everything from water to toothpaste in plastic met in Washington, D.C. Recyclers and the people who collect and sort trash were there too. It was the whole chain that makes up the plastic pipeline. It was a time of reckoning.

John Caturano of Nestlé Waters North America, which makes bottled water, said plastic is getting a bad reputation. “The water bottle has in some ways become the mink coat or the pack of cigarettes. It’s socially not very acceptable to the young folks, and that scares me,” he said during a panel called Life After National Sword.

Sunil Bagaria, who runs recycling company GDB International, took his colleagues to task. “Forever, we have depended on shipping our scrap overseas,” he bemoaned. “Let’s stop that.” European countries, he added, “are recycling 35% to 40% [of their plastic waste]. The U.S. only recycles 10%. How tragic is that?”

After a couple of days of this, a woman named Kara Pochiro from the Association of Plastic Recyclers stood up and said not to panic. “Plastic recycling isn’t dead, and it works, and it’s important to protecting our environment, and it’s essential to the circular economy,” she reassured.

“Circular economy” is now a catchphrase that some say is a way out of the plastic mess. The idea is essentially this: Society needs plastic, but people need to recycle a lot more of it and use it again and again and again. That will eliminate a lot of waste and cut down on the avalanche of new plastic made every year.

So how does circularity actually work? A good place to find out is at a recycling company called TerraCycle in Trenton, N.J. The company’s global vice president for research and development is Ernie Simpson. A cheerful man with a Jamaican accent, he works out of a small lab at TerraCycle’s headquarters.

He’s also a physicist who’s part of a collaboration with Procter & Gamble to turn plastic trash into new products. In his lab, Simpson has an array of very sophisticated and expensive equipment — a Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer and a calorimeter, which use light or heat, respectively, to determine the chemistry of plastic. What goes into those devices is junk.

Simpson holds up a clear plastic bag. Inside, he says, “is the famous beach plastic from the ocean”: wrappers, caps, bottles. To recycle any of it, he has to know what kind of plastic each piece is made of.

How many kinds of plastic are there? “Ohhhh,” he sighs. “Indefinite, just about. There are about 20 different categories of material, but there are blends and there are hybrids.” Almost all possess their own characteristics, some easily recyclable, many not. Some can be melted down; others shredded mechanically or chemically broken down. They end up as pellets the size of small marbles. These go to fabricators that turn the material back into products.

“And so that’s how the famous Head & Shoulders shampoo bottle was created,” Simpson says, referring to what P&> calls the “world’s first recyclable shampoo bottle made from beach plastic.” That’s a form of circularity — pouring old plastic into new bottles.

There’s a catch though. “This particular one,” Simpson says of the beach plastic, “is probably three times as expensive as virgin” — virgin being brand-new plastic made straight from oil and gas out of the ground. This is one of the obstacles to circularity: It costs a lot. There’s not a lot of money to be made from recycling to begin with, and it’s tough for recycled plastic to compete with virgin plastic made cheap by the boom in U.S. oil and gas production. And there aren’t nearly enough recyclers in the U.S. to handle the tsunami of new plastic pouring out of the petrochemical industry.

“Recycling is the underdog,” says Keefe Harrison, CEO of the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit that seeks to boost the industry. “We’re fighting an uphill battle to make it cost competitive from day one.” One problem, she says, is the U.S. outsourced so much of its recycling to Asia that the domestic industry languished. And there’s the fact that plastic manufacturers keep making more and more of it, and consumer brands like Procter & Gamble, Nestlé and Walmart keep wrapping more consumer goods in it.

Harrison explains: “So we’ve got these companies producing this new packaging and new materials and new plastics in such a scientific- and business-driven way, and then [they] rely on the disjointed network that is recycling to get it back. And [recycling] is not robust.” That’s an assessment shared by others, such as global financial analysis company IHS Markit.

Several petrochemical companies have joined big consumer brands in pledging to make most of their plastic recyclable, reusable or compostable within the next decade or two. Their group, Alliance to End Plastic Waste, has promised to spend $1.5 billion over five years to do that.

But as environmental groups like Greenpeace and Break Free From Plastic point out, just because something can technically be recycled doesn’t mean it will be. There has to be an industry robust enough to do it — and a profit at the end of the day. And, they say, building up recycling allows plastic producers to keep making 300 million tons of new plastic every year (half of which is for single use) and to put the burden of cleaning up the waste on someone else.

Pochiro, of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, says recycling does need help — from consumers, for example. “We’re trying to make consumers understand that recycling isn’t just about putting your container in the bin,” she says. “You also need to buy recycled,” meaning products that contain recycled plastic.

There’s a growing market for such products, stuff like bottles, clothing, packaging or bags, for example. But it’s tough to compete against cheap virgin plastic. Recycling companies need huge investments, and to get that, they have to show they have a market for their products. And for that, Pochiro says, they need commitments — voluntary or mandated by law — by consumer goods companies to buy recycled plastic.

“If a recycler can’t be confident enough that they have a market for at least maybe six months to a year,” she says, “then they aren’t going to want to make that investment in their own facilities” to make more recycled plastic.

But there’s a disconnect underlying all this talk by the plastics industry to help recyclers and the circular economy of plastic.

A report from ICIS, a plastics market research company, says the petrochemical industry will likely double its plastic manufacturing capacity from 2016 to 2024. And the American Chemistry Council, which represents, among others, plastics manufacturers, says it expects industry to spend nearly $25 billion to build new plastic manufacturing capacity by 2025. (That compares with the $1.5 billion that the industry plans to spend on cleaning up plastic waste.) The World Economic Forum has issued a report on plastic that predicts a doubling of production in the next two decades.

One thing driving that growth is the belief that demand for petroleum-based fuels will decline — the oil and gas industry is looking to produce more plastics from petrochemicals to take up the slack.

So if a new circular plastics economy recycles — that is, reuses — more old plastic, why is the petrochemical industry spending billions of dollars for a boom in new plastic? Where is all that new plastic going to go? It seems the industry isn’t too worried. The American Chemistry Council’s analysis includes this statement about new plastic: “In a virtuous cycle, as the manufacturing renaissance accelerates, demand for plastic products will be generated, reinforcing resin [raw plastic] demand.”

Essentially, go ahead and make it, and people will find a way to use it.

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