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☀️Sunny and hot, with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 7:59 p.m.

Today we have a few different stories about how pollution — from diesel-burning ships and from a decommissioned nuclear power plant — are impacting the waters that surround Massachusetts’ coastlines. If you want to dig a little deeper, I recommend you spend some time with GBH investigative reporter Chris Burrell’s series Poisoned Ports. So much of our economy, environment and health are tied to the waters around us. Chris has been reporting on both the problems port pollution can bring, and on some potential solutions.

Four Things to Know

1. The last of about 100 hotels that had been operating as emergency shelters for families experiencing homelessness and new migrants to Massachusetts has closed, GBH’s Katie Lannan reported.

State officials have worked to transition people in emergency shelters into more stable housing — often by helping them pay rent — and have implemented stricter guidelines on who is eligible to stay at the state’s emergency shelters. Currently, about 3,000 families remain in shelters, down from approximately 7,500 last year.

2. One in ten American research and development jobs is based in Massachusetts, making the sector directly and indirectly responsible for about $16 billion in economic impact and 81,000 jobs in the state, according to a UMass Amherst study. Federal cuts to the sector will likely have massive impacts, both in halted scientific progress and across the economy. 

“For every $1 million that’s cut, we’re losing something like 9-10 jobs, so that adds up pretty quick,” said Rod Motamedi, UMass Donahue Institute assistant director of Economic and Public Policy Research.

3. Leaders of the Massachusetts Teachers Association are looking into funding a future ballot question that, if passed, would levee a tax on the wealth of the state’s richest residents (people who “hold tens of millions of dollars or more,” according to the union.) The tax would fund early education and provide debt-free public college for any Massachusetts resident who wants it.

“Our state constitution guarantees the right to an appropriate public education, which has been interpreted by the courts to mean kindergarten through grade 12,” MTA President Max Page said. “That right must be expanded to include pre-K and public college, to be meaningful in the 21st century.”

4. The company decommissioning the old Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station told state regulators last week about how its employees are treating radioactive water in the plant: with filters, charcoal and ion-exchange resin. 

That treatment can’t get rid of every pollutant in the water, so conversations about what to do are ongoing. 

Air pollution from Martha’s Vineyard ferry prompts concern

Pamela Stark lives in the Cape Cod community of Woods Hole, not far from the terminal where the Martha’s Vineyard ferry departs. And even when she can’t see or hear the ferries, their impacts are all around her.

“There are times when I can’t even breathe in my backyard,” Stark told GBH’s Chris Burrell. “I’m very sensitive to diesel particulate. I can be walking around the village four streets that way, southwest wind blowing, and that whole area is blanketed in the diesel exhaust. The impact is incredible.”

Burrell, with the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting, dug into the numbers and found more vessels are traveling between Woods Hole and Martha’s Vineyard: there were 16,586 such trips last year, up 8% from a decade ago, with a ferry departing or arriving every 19 minutes from dawn until 10:15 p.m. in the summer.

But the issue extends past the ferries themselves: last year the boats carried 62,000 trucks delivering goods to Martha’s Vineyard, an increase of 32% from 2014, according to Steamship Authority data.

So what can be done to mitigate the impacts on surrounding communities and ecosystems? Let’s take a look at the West Coast. In Washington State, they’re going electric.

“On Puget Sound for one, and within just the [department of transportation] network, we’re the largest polluters,” said Anders Hammersborg, who runs a project to electrify ferries and terminals there. “So that’s why the priority is given to the ferries here to electrify.”

One issue: converting the ship to electric power is expensive (the Washington State project, covering three ferries and their terminals, is expected to cost $1.2 billion) and the Steamship Authority just spent $81 million, which included $28 million in federal funding, on buying three 16-year-old freight boats and converting them into ferries.

“The Steamship has to come up with its own funding and is under constant pressure to keep fares down,” said Nat Trumbull, a co-founder of the Southeast MA Regional Transportation Citizens Task Force in Woods Hole. “Any innovation for cleaner engines, hybrid or electric really becomes an afterthought when the steamship’s trying to keep costs down at all steps.”

Read Chris Burrell’s full reporting here.

Jodi Picoult and Maia Kobabe: meet the authors who wrote two of the U.S.’s most banned books

Author Jodi Picoult says she received dozens of letters from teenagers who had thought about bringing a gun to school but changed their mind after reading her book, “Nineteen Minutes.” Yet, in the 2023-2024 school year, it was the country’s most banned book. “Gender Queer,” a memoir written by Maia Kobabe, also tops the country’s banned books list. Kobabe told GBH News’ “Under the Radar” Host Callie Crossley, “the people banning books are not readers.”

Kobabe and Picoult joined Crossley to talk about the impact of their books being banned, and how to counter the growing effort to censor books. This conversation is part of Unbound Pages, a year-long series examining the anti-book-banning movement in America.