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
Category: News Archive
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
This summer was the hottest ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, according to US government scientists.
The new record surpassed the summers of 2016 and 2019. Last month was also the second-hottest August ever recorded for the globe. The numbers put 2020 on track to be one of the five warmest years, according to Noaa.
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Photo credit: Kimimasa Mayama | EPA
Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face.
The crisis in the nation’s most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other.
Photo credit: Jim Wilson | The New York Times
The Center for American Progress, or CAP, a progressive think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., released the report, “Building a Just Climate Future for North Carolina,” Wednesday. It also looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic has “highlighted the interconnection between systemic racism and injustice and environmental, public health, and economic disparities.”
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Story by Jennifer Allen
The Trump administration weakened a 2015 regulation that would have forced coal plants to treat wastewater with more modern, effective methods in order to curb toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury from contaminating lakes, rivers and streams near their facilities.
“The Trump administration is once again jeopardizing people’s health to give coal power industry lobbyists what they want,” Thom Cmar, an attorney with the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, said in a statement.
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Photo credit: J. David Ake | AP
A report commissioned by federal regulators overseeing the nation’s commodities markets has concluded that climate change threatens U.S. financial markets, as the costs of wildfires, storms, droughts and floods spread through insurance and mortgage markets, pension funds and other financial institutions.
Photo credit: Cindy Yamanaka | The Orange County Register
As the world heats up, cities with heat-trapping asphalt and little tree cover have left residents sweltering and breathing in more air pollution.
Asphalt is releasing hazardous air pollutants into communities, especially when hit with extreme heat and sunlight, according to research published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday. Researchers found that asphalt in California’s South Coast Air Basin emitted more secondary organic aerosols in the summer than gas and diesel motor vehicles combined.
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Photo credit David Becker | Reuters
People who live near the most toxic sites in America say they saw a level of attention they hadn’t seen in decades under Trump. But what happens now? Read more.
Photo by M. Scott Mahaskey / POLITICO