Southwest (AZ NM OK TX)

"Backers of the Green New Deal are going head-to-head with the right-wing billionaire who bankrolled the modern climate denial movement on the oil industry’s home turf this weekend."

"The amount of natural gas that oil companies burn off in Texas as a waste product could power every home in the state. It’s an industry practice known as flaring, and as it grows, so do pollution and waste associated with oil extraction. So last week, a top state oil and gas regulator produced a report on it."

"Construction of a wall on the Arizona border is endangering sacred Indigenous sites — including an oasis that has supported human beings for the last 16,000 years."

"Sunrise Movement is taking the fight to Big Oil’s home turf, endorsing another insurgent Democrat and going all in on three House races in the Lone Star State."

"In the Texas Panhandle, which produces a fifth of the U.S. beef supply, communities are being choked by fecal dust from nearby feedlots. The state’s regulatory agency isn’t doing anything about it—and it’s about to get a whole lot worse."

"In the Permian Basin, now the most prolific oil field in the world, hundreds of miles of plastic pipelines snake along dirt roads, drilling pads and the edges of farm fields. But they are not carrying oil. They’re transporting an another precious commodity in this arid region on the New Mexico-Texas border: water."

"For more than six months, twin brothers Ronald and Donald Schweitzer have watched large amounts of salty wastewater bubble up from the ground in their wheat field. The “saltwater purge” has killed three trees and several acres of crops on their northwest Oklahoma farm."