Category: News Archive

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order Wednesday to end the sale of gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035.

The order aims to phase out cars with internal combustion engines within 15 years by requiring that all new passenger cars and trucks sold in the Golden State in 2035 be zero-emission vehicles.

Hurricanes, floods and wildfires imperil hundreds of hazardous waste sites. But the Trump administration won’t talk about the rising risks.
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Photo credit: Spike Johnson

There are many ways in which Americans are united.
Across party lines Americans reject the so-called revolving door. People in government and industry move back and forth working for companies when they are out of government and supposedly overseeing them when they are in government. Since the industry employers invariably pay more, which master do they serve while they are in government?
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Photo credit: Carolyn Kaster, STF / Associated Press

This summer’s Arctic sea-ice shrank to its second lowest ever extent in the era of satellite observation.

The floes withdrew to just under 3.74 million sq km (1.44 million sq miles) last week, preliminary data indicates.
The only time this minimum has been beaten in the 42-year spacecraft record was 2012 when the pack ice was reduced to 3.41 million sq km.
Shorter autumn days and encroaching cold mean the floes are now starting to regrow.
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Photo credit: MOSAIC/AWI/STEFFEN GRAUPNER

She tended to the health of poor workers and was at the forefront of a 1950s national grape boycott that brought his agricultural union triumph.
Marion Moses, who as a trusted aide to the farm workers’ leader Cesar Chavez promoted a nationwide boycott of table grapes and helped create a health care system for impoverished grape pickers, died on Aug. 28 in San Francisco. She was 84.
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Photo credit: Bob Fitch | Stanford University

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday at age 87, helped establish critical Supreme Court precedent that empowered EPA to address the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change.

The landmark ruling she joined in 2007 that affirmed EPA’s power set up the Obama administration to issue rules limiting carbon pollution from cars, power plants and other sources — and set up a contentious legal battle over the extent of federal authority still being waged today.

 
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Photo credit: Nicholas Kamm |AFP | Getty Images

COVID-19 can make the air more deadly. So can industrial emissions. Combined, they’re likely a recipe for disaster.

According to a new study published last week in the Journal of Environmental Research Letters, regions with a certain kind of industrial emission can make COVID-19 increasingly fatal.

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Photo credit: V. Kreinacke

Just one orphaned site in California could have emitted more than 30 tons of methane. There are millions more like it.

The story of gas well No. 095-20708 begins on Nov. 10, 1984, when a drill bit broke the Earth’s surface 4 miles north of Rio Vista, Calif. Wells don’t have birthdays, so this was its “spud date.”

The drill chewed through the dirt at a rate of 80 ½ feet per hour, reaching 846 feet below ground that first day. By Thanksgiving it had gotten a mile down, finally stopping 49 days later, having laid 2.2 miles of steel pipe and cement on its way to the “pay zone,” an underground field containing millions of dollars’ worth of natural gas.

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Photo credit: Lisa Vielstädte

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will postpone training on environmental inequity faced by communities of color and low-income communities following a White House order calling for agencies to stop training involving what it described as “anti-American propaganda.”
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Photo credit: Getty Images