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States Are Scrambling to Prepare As a Prolonged Heat Wave Spreads in the Midwest and Northeast
More than 70 million people are currently under heat alerts as a heat wave spreads across the Midwest and Northeastern U.S. From Indiana all the way to Maine, states could be trapped under a heat dome for a week or longer, with high humidity and temperatures set to reach the upper 90s in many areas. Forecasters say the heat wave will be particularly risky for communities in major cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Indianapolis.
Billions of Gallons of Freshwater Are Dumped at Florida’s Coasts. Environmentalists Want That Water in the Everglades
Scattered between the vast sugar cane and vegetable fields of Florida’s heartland and the fragile marshes of the Everglades are a series of wetlands, resembling nature but hardly natural, that together represent the largest experiment of its kind in the world. The wetlands were built over the last 30...
Midwest States Have Approved Hundreds of Renewable Energy Projects. So Why Aren’t They Online?
ST. PAUL, Minn.—Wisconsin’s Saratoga Solar Project appeared to have every box checked when state regulators issued their final approval of the 150-megawatt solar farm last spring. Wood County, where the project is set to be built, will garner $600,000 each year in state funding. Public comments showed residents...
New Research Finds Most of the World’s Largest Marine Protected Areas Have Inadequate Protections
Many existing marine protected areas might be something like screen doors on a submarine, at least as far as their impact on ocean conservation. A new study finds that only a third of the world’s largest marine protected areas (MPAs) currently implement meaningful conservation measures. Increasingly, marine conservation is...
Q&A: The U.N.’s New Special Rapporteur for Human Rights and Environment Previously Won a Landmark Case in Peru
Just weeks before Astrid Puentes Riaño took over as the United Nations’ top expert on human rights and the environment, she reached a different kind of professional apex. For over 20 years, Puentes Riaño, a Mexico-city based lawyer, had represented communities in La Oroya, Peru, a city known as one of the most polluted places on Earth.
Can the Greater Sage-Grouse Be Kept Off the Endangered Species List?
OWYHEE CANYONLANDS, Ore.—Peering through a spotting scope in this remote section of eastern Oregon, Skyler Vold quietly muttered “Oh man” over and over. In his sight was an open clearing surrounded by rolling hills of sagebrush where 22 greater sage-grouse males performed their famed and elaborate mating rituals. Every year, the sage-grouse come to locations like these, called leks. In these communal breeding grounds, males waddle around and pop their inflatable white neck pouches to reveal their inner yellowish-brown air sacs while making a cooing sound audible from a distance, all in an attempt to court a mate. It was too late in the mating season for the dancers to have much luck that morning, with most females already laying eggs, and by 8 a.m., they had returned to their homes among the brush from which they derive their name.
New Mexico Debates What to Do With Oil and Gas Wastewater
The question of what to do with the vast quantities of toxic wastewater from oil and gas drilling in New Mexico is up for debate. At stake are billions of gallons of wastewater generated annually in New Mexico, an arid state facing water shortages in the coming decades. Injecting the wastewater, known as produced water, underground has been linked to earthquakes.
Q&A: Choked by Diesel Pollution From Generators, Cancer Rates in Beirut Surge by 30 Percent
From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by executive producer and host Steve Curwood with Najat Saliba, a chemistry professor and member of Lebanon’s parliament. Clouds of diesel fumes constantly clog the air in Beirut, where the noise of...
A ‘Rights of Nature’ Tribunal Puts the Mountain Valley Pipeline on Trial
In a sunlight-filled conference center at the Haw River State Park in Guilford County, North Carolina, Russell Chisholm stood and clicked through a PowerPoint presentation with photographs of broken streambeds and construction equipment, mud-brown water and flooding. “Some of these images are distressing,” the environmental activist told about 100 observers...
Outrunning the Heat? This Climate Activist is Running Seven Marathons in Seven Days
Last year, Kenny Moll was preparing for his fourth marathon in four days when an ominous haze settled over Chicago. The 23-year-old activist was on a mission to complete seven marathons in one week to raise awareness for the impacts of climate change. But he couldn’t outrun the one that was actively unfolding around him as smoke from unprecedented wildfires in Canada descended across the U.S.
Foes of New York Packaging Bill Used Threats of Empty Grocery Shelves to Defeat Plastics Bill
In the end, it may have been fears that Kraft Heinz would remove plastic tubs of Cool Whip or individually wrapped processed cheese slices from grocery store shelves that defeated an ambitious packaging reduction and recycling bill in the New York State Legislature. Or perhaps it was the newspaper advertisements...
Climate Protesters Take to the Field at the Congressional Baseball Game
WASHINGTON—Eight climate activists arrested after storming the field at the annual Congressional Baseball Game at Nationals Park and held overnight were released from jail Thursday afternoon and face federal charges. Under blue skies in a light breeze Wednesday evening, the activists from the direct-action group Climate Defiance jumped from...
Hurricane Winds Can Destroy Solar Panels, But Developers Are Working to Fortify Them
During hurricanes, blackouts can be as life-threatening as the heavy rains and gale-force winds that cause them. Perhaps the most clear evidence of this was during Hurricane Maria in 2017, which devastated Puerto Rico’s aging electrical grid and cut power to many homes, schools and hospitals for more than 100 days, depriving many of critical medical care. Since then, the U.S. territory—as well as other coastal regions and islands—have been beefing up their solar infrastructure to fortify grids and help keep the lights on during hurricanes, a strategy that proved effective for some Puerto Rican communities during Hurricane Fiona in 2022.
Blue Cross of North Carolina Decided Against an Employee Screening of a Documentary That Links the State’s Massive Hog Farms to Public Health Ills
René Miller rests in a recliner in a darkened room, gasping through a nebulizer to ease her asthma. On days like this, the air smells so acrid it feels like her lungs are filled with shards of glass. Miller lives across the road from a factory farm in rural...
Navajo Summit Looks at History and Future of Tribe’s Relationship With Energy
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico—The Navajo Nation’s transition from producing fossil fuels to generating renewable energy is going through some growing pains. Tribal and chapter government officials, energy companies, nonprofit organizations and others attended a three-day conference last week to discuss the tribe’s history with energy production, and the challenges of redefining that relationship, including how to best take advantage of financial incentives rolled out by the Biden administration for developing renewable energy sources.
Biofuel Refineries Are Releasing Toxic Air Pollutants in Farm Communities Across the US
For decades, American farm policy has funneled tens of billions of taxpayer dollars toward renewable, crop-based fuels, with elected leaders and the biofuels industry lauding them as cleaner, greener alternatives to petroleum. But a new review of industry data published Wednesday finds that the country’s biofuel refineries, mostly located in...
South Baltimore Communities Press City, State Regulators for Stricter Pollution Controls on Coal Export Operations
As a 75-year-old asthmatic, Bernice Ramos was not supposed to be out walking in blistering heat, let alone going around her neighborhood to protest the windblown coal dust from the open-air export terminal in Curtis Bay that blankets everything, every day. “I’ve been in this neighborhood for 22 years. And...
Keeping Stormwater at Bay: a Brooklyn Green Roof Offers a Look at a Climate Resilient Future
NEW YORK—Every Friday afternoon, the Kingsland Wildflower Green Roof opens its doors to the local community. Tall grass and brightly-colored flowers greet visitors after their four-floor trek to the top of the building—a green oasis in Brooklyn, surrounded on all sides by heavy industrial activity. Just across the...
As the Country Heats Up, ERs May See an Influx of Young Patients Struggling With Mental Health
Researchers are now connecting the dots between the climate crisis and the havoc heat can wreak on developing minds. Extreme heat and other climate calamities “impact our first and worst, our most vulnerable,” said Jennifer Runkle, an environmental epidemiologist at the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies. She is the lead author of a recent study which found that during periods of intense drought and heat, children and young adults showing signs of mood disorders and suicide risks visited emergency rooms at alarming rates. The risk soared in the hardest-hit parts of the state, especially in lower-income areas and densely-populated cities.
Cemeteries Can Be Damaged by Climate Change—and Provide Climate Refuge
In 2016, an unexpectedly catastrophic flood inundated communities across Louisiana. The skies dropped more than three times the amount of rain that fell during Hurricane Katrina, killing at least 13 people and damaging an estimated 146,000 homes. The living were not the only ones affected: Hundreds of gravesites were disturbed...
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