Category: News Archive

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

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.

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Photo credit: Jim Wilson | The New York Times