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
A national environmental organization on Monday threatened to sue Gov. Gavin Newsom to halt all new permits for gas and oil wells in the state, saying the governor has failed to protect Californians and the environment from hazards and pollutants released by the state’s billion-dollar petroleum industry.
In a letter sent to Newsom on Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity accused his administration of being friendly to California’s oil industry and issuing new permits without proper environmental reviews. The organization plans to take legal action unless the Democratic governor “promptly direct[s] your regulators to halt permitting.”
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Photo Credit: Brian van der Brug | Los Angeles Times
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.
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
Our office burned down last Tuesday. The little green and white rented bungalow along Route 99 was filled with art, houseplants, laughter, and sometimes tears. It was a meeting place for Latinx youth to have coffee and organize climate justice events in their community. We built folding desks so we could fill the space with volunteers while campaigning against the fracked gas pipeline a Canadian company is trying to ram through Oregon’s forests. Now those walls and desks are all rubble, still hot to the touch.
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Photo credit: Rob Schumacher | AFP | Getty Images
The dust and stench of rotten eggs and chemicals are so nauseating that Pamela McWilliams often dons a mask and shuts the windows of her home on Detroit’s east side.
The asthmatic 57-year-old has trouble sleeping at night because of heavy truck traffic coming to and from nearby industrial plants. She and other neighbors say they’re sometimes aroused awake by explosions and vibrations that have shaken the shingles off McWilliams’ roof and cracked her windows. The value of her home has plummeted, and her brother moved away because “he couldn’t take it anymore,” she tells Metro Times.
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Photo credit: Steve Neavling | Metro Times
Millions will be displaced. Where will they go?
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air-conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By mid month, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth – 130 degrees in Death Valley – and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky.
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Photo credit: Meridith Kohut | The New York Times