Edward Lotterman

The issue of whether, when and how government should take actions within an economy goes back some 400 years, yet remains a hot one today. Indeed, there are few news articles not involving it. So a quick historical review is helpful.

From the mid-1600s, the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a French prime minister, dominated economic views: Economies needed government action to grow and produce prosperity.

Then in 1776, Adam Smith, a Scottish philosopher, argued the exact opposite: Spontaneous economic interactions between people, each pursuing their own self-interest, created incentives that led to resources being allocated efficiently. Smith’s ideas dominated economics for 150 years. Their core remains powerful today.

It became clear, however, that there are exceptions. Free private markets might lead to optimal production of buggies and beef roasts, but not of bridges or schools. Moreover, without government actions, polluting industries harm others and waste resources.

Bridges and schools have “external” or “spillover” benefits to society in a way that their costs cannot be captured entirely by tolls or tuition. Not enough bridges are built or schools opened to meet our needs without government action. Pollution and other negative side effects of some economic activities impose real damage to society, the costs of which polluters would never have to pay. Without government, people will face too many of these external costs without having been responsible for their cause.

So consensus wisdom now is that government must act to produce “public goods,” such as education, transportation and health, whose benefits spill over to all in society. Government should limit activities with external costs like pollution. If regulation to stop polluting activity is not practicable, government rather should subsidize activities that mitigate harms.

That leads to a discussion specifically of U.S. agricultural policies and government-supported scientific research.

The “dust bowl” days in the 1930s showed soil erosion was an environmental problem. Blowing soil from farms harmed millions downwind. Congress set up a Soil Conservation Service within USDA and appropriated money annually to subsidize conservation measures.

The 1996 farm bill authorized and funded a new Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) that, among other measures, paid 75% of the cost of improvements needed for farmers and ranchers to implement rotation grazing systems.

Such grazing reduces erosion, slows water runoff and creates habitat for wildlife and varieties of endangered native plant species. This benefits society as a whole. Rotation grazing also produces more forage for livestock, a direct benefit to farmers and ranchers. But this practice requires fences to subdivide pastures and piped water systems so these paddocks need access streams.

Farmers contract to implement rotational grazing in return for USDA reimbursing part of their infrastructure costs. Once the contract is signed, a farmer carries out construction and then presents invoices for the partial reimbursement.

The 1996 Farm Bill establishing EQIP had been a GOP-written and sponsored bill. It passed with overwhelming Republican majorities in both houses of Congress plus a majority of House Democrats and nearly half of Senate Democrats.

Admittedly, EQIP was only one program in a complex bill. The GOP wanted continued crop subsidies with fewer controls. Many Democrats more money for food assistance to the poor than the bill provided. But EQIP itself was strongly supported by both parties. It has been re-funded in every farm bill since.

Based on those appropriations, in 2024 farmers signed contracts with USDA and paid for construction, spending as much as $200,000 on large ranches. All with the expectation that the government would keep its side of the deal. Yet now, several thousand of them are not getting payment for work already done because the newly created Department of Government Efficiency repudiated the contracts.

A parallel problem has arisen in scientific research.

Government-funded research has been important historically in developing almost all new technologies — from integrated circuits to heart valves to lasers to CRISPR gene-splicing to robots to the internet. Corporations do some applied research on their own. They and autonomous nonprofit laboratories also do government-funded research, but most takes place in laboratories at public and private universities. The economy, and myriad private industries, benefit.

Lab equipment, materials and components are expensive. So are lab facilities. Federal grants through the National Institutes of Health, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and other agencies pay for fixed and operating expenses. Such federal “grants” for research are not freebies. They are contracts to perform work much like contracts with construction firms to move earth or lay pavement on federal highway projects.

Of course, measuring progress in pathbreaking scientific research is not as easy as tracking cubic yards of concrete poured rebuilding 20 miles of Interstate 90. But grant funds are disbursed in tranches as work is actually done. Labs must report on activities and achievements. Labs that produce little in the way of scientific results get fewer new grants. Competition can be intense.

Educating graduate students and post-doctoral fellows is understood as a spillover benefit of a grant. It is also understood that a university doing much research with private as well as public funding has administrative overhead costs. A portion of any grant contract goes to cover that. Moreover, while no promises are made in grant contracts and although government priorities do wax and wane over time, there is a general understanding that the federal government will continue to fund scientific research.

Yet now, abruptly, with a new administration, thousands of grant contracts involving hundreds of millions of dollars have been canceled. Laboratories have purchased expensive equipment, hired skilled people, built expensive labs and test facilities. Some of this was paid for with funds already received. Yet a great deal remained to be paid with funds expected after the submission of satisfactory progress reports. Now that all is up in the air. Bio-medical research dependent on continued maintenance of lab animals or cultures is in an especially hard bind.

There are at least three issues for both the soil conservation and scientific research dilemmas:

• Should the federal government pay private entities for soil conservation or scientific research?

• If Congress authorizes such programs and appropriates money for them, can the executive branch simply refuse to carry out what Congress mandated?

• If an executive branch agency signs a contract that is binding on a private sector farmer or university, can it unilaterally refuse to pay for services received?

Looking back over U.S. history, the answers are yes, no and no.

Yes: The programs DOGE is repudiating meet justifications for government economic activity. They are long established, some dating back more than a century. They have broad bi-partisan support. They have never been challenged constitutionally.

No: In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have a right of “recission.” He could not refuse to spend money that Congress had appropriated in bills that he had signed.

Finally, no: Legal experts agree that farmers who have laid out their own money on EQIP facilities will win if they are forced to sue the government for reimbursement. The situation for university and autonomous research labs is more complicated. Most work already done on existing grant contracts eventually will be paid for, but future funding is up in the air. Abruptly ceasing established research will create tremendous financial problems for the institutions affected.

And applied generally, these alternatives also pertain to the age-old question of what role government can and should play in fostering “spillover” economic benefits, and mitigating external costs, vis-à-vis the private sector. Some in the current administration might say no role, even though past Congresses would have disagreed. Some in the current administration might also say that tort law, Supreme Court rulings, separation of powers or even the moral obligations of promises made don’t apply anymore, but all that must be subjects of another column.

Yes, there certainly are legitimate questions raised by DOGE of which activities funded by the federal government may involve “corruption, waste or abuse.” There are tools to deal with that, from congressional hearings to the Congressional Research Service, General Accounting Office and other agencies. Do these need overhaul? Well, if so, it is up to Congress to do it.

The U.S. Constitution has long provided us with a just and efficient government. It can again if we want it to. But the haphazard, scatter-shot cancellation of useful programs that foster benefits and mitigate damage is bad economics, and will only hurt us in the long run.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

By August Brown, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — In November, Bob Bryar, the 44-year-old former drummer for the emo band My Chemical Romance, was found dead in his Tennessee home.

Months later, Bryar’s autopsy raised a possible contributing factor in his death — three canisters of nitrous oxide found next to his corpse, with tubing for inhalation still attached.

Nitrous oxide is a common product with medical, industrial and culinary uses, but it’s also used as a recreational drug when inhaled. The Bedford County Medical Examiner’s office in Tennessee said the nitrous oxide equipment found with Bryar raised questions of an “intentional or accidental overdose,” though Bryar’s cause of death was “undetermined” due to the state of decomposition.

The circumstances of Bryar’s death unnerved fans of My Chemical Romance albums like “The Black Parade.” But they also raised new worries about nitrous oxide abuse in music communities today.

The compound is known colloquially among recreational drug users as “whippets,” “balloons,” “hippie crack” or “Galaxy Gas,” after one popular brand. Several prominent rap and R&B artists have recently spoken out the negative impacts of nitrous oxide within their scenes.

While opioids like fentanyl are a much more acute threat to drug users, this old and often misunderstood substance might be a renewed concern for festival-goers as well. The Los Angeles City Council has proposed banning its sale, but is that the most effective strategy to keep users safe?

“I think we’re clearly seeing another wave of nitrous oxide having rising popularity,” said Mitchell Gomez, the executive director of the drug harm reduction organization DanceSafe, which works to keep music fans safe at festivals and concerts. “There are lots of people entering this market with different flavorings, different sizes, different delivery nozzles. But there’s a balancing act. If we lived in a world where you could pass a law and suddenly nobody could get it, a ban would make sense. But we don’t live in that world.”

Nitrous oxide was first synthesized in the late 18th century, by dampening iron filings with nitric acid and heating it to create a gas. It interrupts the ways neurotransmitters communicate in the brain for a brief period — usually less than a minute unless inhaled continuously. Its effects, including a languid euphoria with light hallucinations, were quickly noted. For decades, it was a popular party drug among the English aristocracy, who reveled in “laughing gas parties” before it was first used as an anesthetic and analgesic in medical settings.

Nitrous oxide also has industrial uses to increase the power of internal combustion engines, and as an aerosol propellant for foods like whipped cream. The brand Galaxy Gas comes in a variety of flavors like mango smoothie and vanilla cupcake for such purposes. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Metal canisters are easily purchasable in local vape shops and online, even though mass retailers like Amazon and Walmart have pulled listings more recently.

This month, the Food and Drug Administration issued a new warning against inhaling nitrous oxide: “These products are marketed as both unflavored and flavored nitrous oxide canisters and are sold as a food processing propellant for whipped cream and culinary food use. Intentional misuse or inhalation of contents can lead to serious adverse health events, including death.”

“The prevalence of N2O use is difficult to quantify but appears to be increasing,” cited one International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health study in 2022. “Research on N2O harms and application of harm reduction strategies are limited,” but “recreational nitrous oxide use is popular with young people.”

Inhaling nitrous oxide has long- and short-term risks that are worth considering, said Dr. Brian Hurley, medical director of the bureau of substance abuse prevention and control at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

While inhaling it, nitrous oxide can cause “dizziness and dissociation, where people feel essentially that they’re not in their bodies,” Hurley said. “People might lose track of where they are, blurred vision, loss of balance. There’s nausea, chest tightness, headache, vomiting and impaired memory.”

Long-term use can also cause a deficiency of vitamin B-12, which leads to reduced white blood cell count and anemia. The more immediate risk comes when users, often alone, attach tubing equipment to inhale the gas in larger amounts.

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“If somebody straps on nitrous oxide with a mask and loses consciousness, their oxygen level isn’t being monitored,” Hurley said. “People can actually die from suffocation because they’re not getting any oxygen. They’re breathing, but they’re breathing nitrous oxide, and now they’re anesthetized, so they’re not in a position to respond to take the mask off. So we see deaths from nitrous oxide, not like if they took an opioid and their respiratory drive was suppressed, but because they were anesthetized and didn’t have a path of their airway to oxygen.”

Purchasing nitrous oxide with the intent to inhale is a misdemeanor in California — users face six months in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

Nonetheless, nitrous oxide has been popular in music and festival communities for decades. Fans sucking on balloons of nitrous oxide are a common sight outside jam band concerts. Major festivals like Glastonbury banned the substance years ago, and Coachella bans both aerosol products and drug paraphernalia. But the substance has earned new fans on social media platforms like TikTok, where influencers sell nitrous equipment or show off its euphoric, dissociative effects.

The Black music community in particular, has started to push back on the substance’s popularity.

“Sorry to be old n annoying but… Is no one gonna talk about how galaxy gas came out of no where and is being MASS marketed to black children?” the singer SZA wrote on X in September, linking to a study from Yale’s school of medicine. “The government is doing NOTHING ? .. since when are we selling whip its at the store ???? Somebody protect the children.”

That same month, the rapper Lil Gnar posted a video with a caption “How to use Galaxy Gas.” He opened the nozzle and chucked the canister into a gas station dumpster.

Kanye West speaks onstage during the 2022 BET Awards: “I was at the dentist office the other day, I was taking a nitrous oxide, I suggest it if anybody is, like, stressed out.” (Leon Bennett/Getty Images/TNS)

In 2022, at a BET tribute to the disgraced rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, rapper Kanye West (now known as Ye) said that “I was at the dentist office the other day, I was taking a nitrous oxide, I suggest it if anybody is, like, stressed out.” Last year, Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur and West’s former chief of staff, said in an affidavit to the FBI and the California Dental Board that “employees at all levels of the company were worrying about Ye’s dependence on the gas and speaking openly about it. Ye talked about it non-stop in meetings. He seemed to be in and out of the inhaler mask on a near-constant basis.”

Other fans have artists like Lil Uzi Vert, who appeared in a video using nitrous oxide on social media. (“They said I was lost,” Uzi rapped on their recent track “We Good,” which addressed their nitrous use. “They thought I was a dead guy / I was on that NOS.”)

For those who work in harm reduction within drug and music scenes, it’s hard to tell if nitrous oxide is more popular or just more visible. “I’m not sure if this is a new wave, but we do know that the new party drugs have been changing,” said Laura Guzman, executive director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition. “There’s a shift in the way young adults are partying. There’s less alcohol and cocaine, and more use of ketamine and psychedelics like mushrooms.”

For concert promoters who have rightly focused on preventing opioid overdoses, fans’ nitrous use may call for fresh attention. “What we would love is that in any party scene, there are actual conversations about health,” Guzman said. “Avoid using alone or in dangerous or isolated places. Never put plastic bags over the head or block breathing. Avoid using it in closed spaces without ventilation. Try to avoid drinking alcohol or taking other drugs with it. Give yourself time to breathe fresh air.”

Local governments have explored a blanket ban on retail sales in Los Angeles.

In a 14-0 vote late last year, the Los Angeles City Council asked the city attorney to make recommendations for implementing a ban on the retail sale of nitrous oxide in Los Angeles, following similar regulations in Rialto.

“Nitrous oxide is a trending drug that is extremely addictive, harmful, and now more than ever, easily accessible at smoke and tobacco shops across the city,” Councilmember Imelda Padilla said last year.

“California law allows individuals 18 years and older to purchase nitrous oxide, as long as it is not inhaled after purchase,” Padilla continued. “This makes the law difficult to enforce and allows vendors, such as smoke shops and liquor stores, to sell nitrous oxide products. Studies have shown that adding flavors and colorful packaging to drug products play a key role in youth initiation and continued use.”

Experts in harm reduction have doubts that a retail ban will do much to prevent abuse though, and might lead nitrous users to buy from unsafe sources and get high in more dangerous environments. Rather than purchasing a flavored food product sold at a retail outlet, they might look for industrial alternatives full of toxic heavy metals, or use it in private with greater suffocation risks.

“This idea that you’re going to ban it in an effective way seems really unlikely,” Gomez said. “You can probably make it a little more expensive for consumers and constrict access. But if you’ve made it illegal, the people selling it are [by definition] criminals. Whereas now, if there’s a problem with a particular batch, you could recall it. If a company was intentionally advertising towards minors, you could go after those bad actors.

“There’s a reason this drug was in heavy use by the 1800s,” he continued. “I just don’t really think that there’s a way of effectively banning a substance when that substance exists in such massive quantities within perfectly valid industrial uses. Diversion is just too easy.”

While nitrous oxide may not pose the same public health risk as opioids, it’s been an established part of contemporary party culture for centuries. Celebrity deaths and concern from other artists may be an opportunity for more effective public health messaging, said Hurley.

“I think what we do see now is waves of awareness,” he said. “When there are high profile deaths, there’s a rush of awareness around inhalant use as a factor impacting the health and wellness of our community.

“I don’t think that people think inhaling nitrous oxide from a canister intended for charging food products mistakes that for a healthy behavior,” he continued. “But I do think there is the perception that the risk is small. We want to help make sure the community is well aware of the risks associated with nitrous oxide, so that people can make informed decisions.”

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Shalina Chatlani, Stateline.org

Health insurance companies are under increasing scrutiny for allegedly using artificial intelligence bots and algorithms to swiftly deny patients routine or lifesaving care — without a human actually reviewing their claims.

The high-profile killing late last year of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has focused even more attention on so-called prior authorization, the process by which patients and doctors must ask health insurers to approve medical procedures or drugs before proceeding. There had been protests and outrage over the company’s practices for months before Thompson’s death, and UnitedHealthcare has been accused in a class-action lawsuit of using AI to wrongfully deny claims.

As more patients and doctors voice their frustrations, states are responding with legislation designed to regulate prior authorization and claims reviews. So far this year, lawmakers in more than a dozen states are considering measures that would, for example, limit the use of AI in reviewing claims; exclude certain prescription medications from prior authorization rules; ensure that emergency mental health care is not delayed for more than 48 hours; and require that insurers’ review boards include licensed physicians, dentists or pharmacists with clinical experience.

Insurers have long required doctors to obtain their approval before they’ll pay for certain drugs, treatments and procedures. They argue it is necessary to rein in health care costs and limit unnecessary services. But many doctors and patients say the practice has gotten out of hand, causing delays and denials of care that are harming and even killing people.

In a survey last year by the American Medical Association, 93% of doctors said that insurers’ prior authorization practices delayed “necessary care” for their patients. Twenty-nine percent said such delays had led to a “serious adverse event,” such as hospitalization, permanent injury or death.

In 2023, insurers selling plans on the marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act denied a combined average of 20% of all claims. Of the 73 million in-network claims they denied, only 1% were appealed, according to KFF, a health policy research group.

The federal role

Under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice took a firmer hand against health care corporations alleged to be engaging in behavior resulting in limited and more expensive care for patients. The administration also approved rules requiring that beginning in 2026, Medicare and Medicaid plans create a streamlined electronic process for reviewing claims, making decisions more quickly and providing specific reasons for denying care.

But it’s difficult to hold insurers accountable, according to Timothy McBride, a health policy analyst and co-director of a program at the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Each part of the health care industry — hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurers — they all have a lot of concentrated power,” McBride said in a phone interview. “And unless somebody actually takes it on directly, it’s going to stay that way. I think the Biden administration tried to take it on, but didn’t make a lot of progress.”

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It’s unclear whether the Trump administration and Congress will reverse course. During his confirmation hearing on March 14, Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, defended the use of artificial intelligence in reviewing claims.

“AI can be used for good or for evil, and it to a large extent depends on who’s using it and for what purpose,” Oz told members of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. “I think AI could play a vital role in accelerating preauthorization.”

In the past, Trump has supported measures to help patients, such as increasing hospital price transparency and lowering prescription drug prices, McBride noted. But “Republicans and conservatives generally are anti-regulation,” he said. “My gut feeling would be that they back off on the Biden push on this.”

States have limited power to act on their own. They have authority only over state-regulated health plans, which include Medicaid, plans for state workers and policies residents purchase from the ACA marketplaces. About 90 million people are covered that way. State laws do not apply to the 156 million workers, retirees and dependents who get their coverage through employer-sponsored health plans, which are regulated through a federal law known as ERISA.

Furthermore, health insurance companies are large and have deep pockets, allowing them to easily absorb state fines.

But Kaye Pestaina, the director of the program on patient and consumer protection at KFF, said states have an important role to play.

“Much of the focus around prior authorization at the federal level has kind of originated from state protections, so I imagine there will be continual activity by state legislatures to come at the problem,” Pestaina told Stateline.

What states are doing

Pestaina said states are trying a number of solutions. For example, states such as Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania have given their insurance regulators more authority to directly access claims denial information, in order to overturn decisions or potentially enforce state rules. And these efforts have largely had bipartisan support.

In Pennsylvania, Republican state Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill pushed through bipartisan legislation in 2022 to streamline prior authorization practices for state-regulated health plans after hearing numerous complaints from patients and doctors.

The legislation created an Independent External Review organization that allows Pennsylvanians to submit an online form to request a review if their insurer denies a service or treatment. If the review organization decides the service should be covered, the insurer must do so. Before then, patients could turn only to a federal review process, which may have been more challenging to navigate and taken more time.

“Our reforms created clear rules, clear timelines for the prior authorization process, and it removed ambiguity or uncertainty from the system that at times, insurers could exploit and providers could be confused over,” Phillips-Hill told Stateline. “Prior to that reform, if you had a denial from your insurer, you had very little recourse.”

The program began in January 2024, and in its first year the Pennsylvania Insurance Department overturned half of 517 denials, which amounted to claims from 259 people.

Jonathan Greer, president and CEO of the Insurance Federation of Pennsylvania, said his trade group worked with lawmakers to come to an agreement on how to change the prior authorization process in a way that worked for insurers and patient advocates. Greer says he thinks Pennsylvania could be a model for other states.

“Prior authorization, I think unfairly, has been characterized as a reason to say ‘no’ by insurers,” Greer said. “The purpose of prior authorization is to make sure that you know the care that you get is consistent with the care that you need.”

In North Carolina, Republican state Rep. Timothy Reeder is hopeful that his prior authorization bill will make it across the finish line this year. Reeder’s bill would set tight deadlines on insurers’ claim decisions and require companies to have licensed practitioners on their claim review boards. Insurers would also have to publicize a list of services they require authorization for.

“I’m not saying that we need to get rid of it completely,” Reeder told Stateline. “There is a role for some oversight to make sure that things are covered. But right now, I think the system is out of balance.”

But some state laws have proven to be less effective than advertised.

In 2021, Texas enacted a first-of-its-kind law creating a “ gold card” standard, under which physicians whose care recommendations are approved by insurers at least 90% of the time are exempt from the prior authorization process. But as of the end of 2023, only 3% of Texas physicians had earned gold card status, according to the Texas Medical Association.

That’s why the group is pushing legislation that would require insurers to report which preauthorization exemptions they granted and denied and how many claims went to independent review. Dr. Zeke Silva of the Texas Medical Association’s legislative council said it would be “in the same spirit” as what Pennsylvania has done.

“Our focus with the [Texas Medical Association] is our physicians being able to provide the best care possible. And we want that to be free of burden,” Silva told Stateline. “We want to minimize third parties coming in and inappropriately denying care that our physicians and our patients think is in their best interest.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Ashley Miznazi, Miami Herald

They call it range anxiety, the fear that an electric vehicle could run out of juice, say somewhere south of Yeehaw Junction on the way to Disney World with three cranky kids aboard.

Such scenarios are one of the big hesitations for many people pondering the purchase of an EV.

Research going on at Florida International University could go a long way toward curing that concern. The work is focused on a new type of battery, made of lithium-sulfur, that could potentially triple an EV’s range and also be cheaper, lighter and better for the environment.

But lithium-sulfur batteries have long had fatal flaws: they don’t recharge well and lose their juice after a year or two of use. Now, Professor Bilal El-Zahab, who runs FIU’s state-of-the-art battery lab, and a team of researchers have developed a promising breakthrough in battery composition detailed in a recent science journal paper.

“We’ve been working on this solution for at least ten years,” El-Zahab said “This battery will definitely last for more time than a typical battery.”

Dr. Bilal El-Zahab poses during a tour of the Battery Research Laboratory on Thursday, March 20, 2025, at the FIU Engineering Center in Miami. Dr. El-Zahab’s laboratory has created a Lithium-sulfur battery that could replace Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. (Alie Skowronski/Miami Herald/TNS)

While still likely years from commercial development, he estimated that FIU’s change in battery chemistry could take an EV range from 300 miles to about 1000. That would certainly all but eliminate range anxiety on long trips and potentially transform the multibillion-dollar EV battery industry. For many everyday commuters, for instance, such improved performance could be the difference in charging every other week or every several weeks, instead of weekly, El-Zahab said.

Without trying to explain the complicated chemistry that makes batteries work, FIU’s team found that adding a metal catalyst, platinum, made lithium-sulfur last for more charging cycles. El-Zahab said to think about power flowing through battery pathways like a five-lane highway that suddenly slows to one open lane.

“So likelihood of accidents, likelihoods of losses, likelihood of anything wrong to happen, increases,” he said. “So what does platinum do? It acts like a traffic officer. It just goes in and guides people where to go and helps open up more lanes,” El-Zahab said.

Dr. Bilal El-Zahab holds a Lithium-Sulfur battery during a tour of the Battery Research Laboratory on Thursday, March 20, 2025, at the FIU Engineering Center in Miami. Dr. El-Zahab’s laboratory has created a Lithium-sulfur battery that could replace Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. (Alie Skowronski/Miami Herald/TNS)

The work was conducted in FIU’s battery lab — filled with flashing chargers, humming fans, pumps cycling the air, temperature controllers and other gear — has everything needed to make batteries from scratch. The researchers use large, black neoprene gloves that look something out of a sci-fi movie to work in oxygen and humidity-free chambers to assemble the batteries. They start by making a small battery, about the size of an AirTag, and scale their experimental versions from there.

Weighs and costs less

Since the early 90’s the battery of choice to power everything from our phones to satellites to EVs has been lithium-ion. But lithium-ion, El-Zahab said, is at “theoretical capacity” which means they can only produce so much energy — at least not without substantially raising the price.

El-Zahab says there are numerous other advantages to lithium-sulfur.

Dr. Bilal El-Zahab, left, supervises a demonstration of one of his PhD students, Saeme Motevalian, cutting a piece of sulfur at the Battery Research Laboratory on Thursday, March 20, 2025, at the FIU Engineering Center in Miami. (Alie Skowronski/Miami Herald/TNS)

Today, EV cars are expected to run at least 200,000 miles and a typical EV vehicle might need a replacement battery to make it to the cars grave. The lithium-sulfur battery would eliminate the need for a replacement battery, which creates less waste in the environment. While gas cars batteries are typically recycled, the massive packs EVs use need special dismantling and could explode if done wrong. That doesn’t necessary mean they’ll end up at the landfill, but many sit in storage awaiting a recycling date.

Lithium-sulfur also offers another option — a much smaller battery which would enhance the safety of the car and cost, El-Zahab said. The sulfur batteries in the FIU battery lab can be made two to three times lighter than the ion batteries, he said.

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Lithium-sulfur also costs much less to produce than lithium-ion. A typical lithium-ion battery is made for $100 per kilowatt hour, so a mid-range EV’s 75 kilowatt per hour battery would cost $7,500. Lithium-sulfur would cost $4,500 for a battery with the same capacity. The heavier lithium-ion batteries also wear down tires faster.

“The lithium-sulfur will make electric vehicles cheaper, and possibly will increase the adoption of these vehicles for people who cannot really nowadays afford the average electric vehicle cost,” El-Zahab said. “The battery is the single most expensive part or component in an electric vehicle today.”

Published studies including in IEEE and Science Direct suggest lithium-sulfur is the most environmentally and climate-friendly battery option. Sulfur is our 10th most abundant element and is already a byproduct of oil and gas processing.

“Regulations force us to remove the sulfur from natural gas, so we produce literally mountains of it,” El-Zahab said.

Some of those key materials used in the lithium-ion batteries — like nickel and cobalt — are not abundant, he said. And increasing competition for them will continue to drive up costs and extracting them comes at an environmental cost.

Business & Human Rights Resource Centre conducted a report that looked at how the biggest EV manufacturers — Including Toyota, Volvo, Tesla and Audi — sourced their batteries from Indonesia which led to deforestation and other issues.

“We are overburdening the mining industry in the supply chain by using so much. Based on existing battery technologies, if everyone wants a piece of the pie we won’t have enough — or the prices will be insane,” El-Zahab said.

PhD student, Saeme Motevalian, left, explains something about batteries to another student Georgina Jahan, right, at the Battery Research Laboratory on Thursday, March 20, 2025, at the FIU Engineering Center in Miami. (Alie Skowronski/Miami Herald/TNS)

FIU, of course, is far from the only player in the game looking for new ways to make the car charge faster and run longer. Researchers at Purdue University found using recycled plastic could advance sulfur’s battery life. Monash University researchers in Australia said they cracked the challenge too by using a different catalyst, “polyvinylpyrrolidone complex” (a chemical compound commonly used as an antiseptic) in their batteries.

Estimates of the market value of the EV battery industry range widely, from $40 to $80 billion and financial analysts expect that to double or more in coming decades. Global automakers are planning to spend more than half a trillion dollars on EVs and their batteries through 2030, according to a Reuters analysis. El-Zahab’s work is funded with $4 million from Canada-based Lion Battery Technologies, which plans to commercialize the technology over the next several years.

“We’re looking forward to take our technology and bring it to the world,” El-Zahab said. “It may be available by 2030, maybe a couple of years later than that would be more realistic. But eventually, I do believe lithium-sulfur is going to be a viable technology.”

Ashley Miznazi is a climate change reporter for the Miami Herald funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners.

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