Grist

The Supreme Court on Friday threw into question the future of climate and environmental regulation in the United States, scrapping a decades-old legal precedent that gave federal agencies leeway to interpret laws according to their expertise and scientific evidence. The impact of the decision to scrap the so-called Chevron deference will take years to become clear, but it could allow for far more legal challenges against regulations by agencies like the EPA and the Department of the Interior that have a huge role in the climate fight.

The Supreme Court overturns Chevron doctrine, gutting federal environmental protections

Georgia State

Across America, millions of tons of toxic waste are sitting in pits next to coal plants. But whether they will get cleaned up has come down to a legal debate over the definitions of words. In 2015, following a pair of disastrous spills at coal plants in North Carolina and...

What is a liquid? Utilities sue to avoid coal ash cleanup — and lose

California State

This story was originally published by CalMatters. California’s oil industry says it is withdrawing its controversial ballot measure challenging a state law that would have imposed new restrictions on oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes and schools. The oil industry, which spent $20 million collecting signatures...

Controversial measure overturning oil well restrictions won’t be on California ballot

Chicago, IL

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Foodie in Chicago

Shortly before 3 AM, people in the Chicago area may have felt their houses shake as a 3.4-magnitude earthquake occurred about 60 miles west of the city. (CHICAGO) The United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported a 3.4-magnitude earthquake around Somonauk, IL. Somonauk is in DeKalb and LaSalle Counties, 64 miles west of Chicago.

Did You Feel the Earthquake?

Hawaii State

Honolulu, HI

In 1895, Queen Liliʻuokalani spent nearly eight months imprisoned in an upstairs bedroom in Iolani Palace in Honolulu. She had been put there by American businessmen backed by the United States military, which had overthrown the Hawaiian Kingdom, an internationally recognized sovereign nation. She spent her days in confinement...

How the last queen of Hawaiʻi is influencing the debate over deep-sea mining

Albuquerque, NM

Mark Garcia can see that there’s no shortage of water in the Rio Grande this year. The river flows past his farm in central New Mexico, about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. The rush of springtime water is a welcome change after years of drought, but he knows the good times won’t last.

Albuquerque made itself drought-proof. Then its dam started leaking.

Just a few months before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration appears to be accelerating its timeline to finalize a regulation that could protect 36 million workers from the harmful effects of exposure to extreme heat. On Tuesday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, released the...

Biden admin unveils first-ever heat protections for workers. Here’s what to know.

After a decade of work, the Tule River Tribe has released nine beavers into the nation’s reservation in the foothills of California’s southern Sierra Nevada mountains. The beavers are expected to make the landscape more fire and drought resistant. Beaver dams trap water in pools, making the flow of water slower so the surrounding ecosystem can reap the benefits of the moisture while making it more difficult for forest fires to start. They can also help a forest heal after a fire by rehydrating the area.

The Tule River Tribe of California recruits an old ally in its fight against wildfires: Beavers

This is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about everything from raising electricity bills to developing renewable energy. The Georgia Public Service Commission, or PSC, votes on energy issues multiple times...

Timeline: The Georgia Public Service Commission’s key decisions

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WyoFile

The woman who shot a video of a hydrothermal explosion in Yellowstone National Park on Tuesday morning told WyoFile she and her family were terrified as the blast sent boiling water and rocks skyward, destroying parts of a boardwalk, its guardrail and a nearby bench.

Yellowstone hydrothermal explosion: ‘We were terrified’

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Modern Farmer. Standing knee-deep in an emerald expanse, a row of trees offering respite from the sweltering heat, Rosa Morales diligently relocates chipilín, a Central American legume, from one bed of soil to another. The 34-year-old has been coming to the Campesinos’ Garden run by the Farmworker Association of Florida in Apopka for the last six months, taking home a bit of produce each time she visits. The small plot that hugs a soccer field and community center is an increasingly vital source of food to feed her family.

The people who feed America are going hungry

Three million years ago, the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide levels weren’t so different from those of today, but sea levels were dozens of meters higher. Looking that far back presents a foreboding peek into the future, as satellite records show that melting Antarctic ice sheets are on their way to bulking up this epoch’s oceans, too. The puzzle for scientists is that the climate models they create can’t seem to match what they see with their own eyes.

Scientists just got closer to solving a major Antarctic puzzle

New York City, NY

Mone Choy is 68 and lives in the New York City neighborhood of Inwood, at the northern tip of Manhattan, on a fixed disability income of $1,901 per month. Her rent is frozen at $1,928. She lives with chronic health issues that render her unable to work. In addition to a few other intermittent gigs, Choy covers the rest of her expenses by collecting bottles from her building’s recycling and taking them to a nearby redemption center.

How to survive a heat wave on a fixed income

Washington State

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Timothy A Gruver

Washington state Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler announced on Monday that he has fined Unite Health Share Ministries $300,000 for illegally selling insurance in Washington.

Unite Health Fined $300K for Unauthorized Insurance Sales

This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2006, a group of preeminent scientists met for a two-day conference at the NASA Ames Research Center in California to discuss cooling the Earth by injecting particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight into space.

Inside the University of Chicago’s controversial solar geoengineering initiative

The 2023 hurricane season was the fourth-most active since 1950, with 20 named storms forming and tearing across the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean’s water ran far hotter than usual for much of the summer, smashing through previous temperature records and fueling the rapid development of several large cyclones. Somehow,...

Hurricane Beryl makes landfall, fueled by record-breaking ocean heat

Colorado State

Skiing, hiking, and other outdoor recreational pastimes have lent Colorado a woodsy — and environmentally friendly — reputation. This image is at odds with the state’s first and biggest industry: mineral extraction. From 1858 to 2022, mineral extraction in Colorado has amounted to a $546 billion dollar industry. The state remains one of the leaders in coal and gold, but the state is also home to oil, natural gas, limestone, and helium mining.

Colorado’s dirty secret: A $500 billion mining industry built on Indigenous land

This story is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about everything from raising electricity bills to developing renewable energy. Georgia may not have a state-level office or agency that addresses climate...

The people who control Georgia’s climate and energy plans

Nantucket, MA

A preliminary analysis of the Vineyard Wind turbine that failed has found that, although the fundamental design of the machine’s 351-foot blades is sound, a manufacturing flaw caused one of them to snap as it spun over the Atlantic Ocean earlier this month. The July 13 accident, which prompted...

Wind turbines rarely fail. So why did Vineyard Wind’s fall apart?

In the time it takes you to read this sentence — say, four seconds — the world produces nearly 60 metric tons of plastic, almost entirely out of fossil fuels. That’s about 53,000 metric tons an hour, 1.3 million metric tons a day, or 460 million metric tons a year. Those numbers are fueling widespread and growing contamination of Earth’s oceans, rivers, and the terrestrial environment with plastic trash.

How to create a ‘world without waste’? Here are the plastic industry’s ideas.

NewsBreak

Occidental Petroleum’s net-zero strategy is a ‘license to pollute,’ critics say

More so than any other fossil fuel company, Occidental Petroleum — known as Oxy — has built its climate strategy around innovations that capture carbon before...

Occidental Petroleum’s net-zero strategy is a ‘license to pollute,’ critics say

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