"The first thing to know about Thermal, California, is: It’s really damn hot. Already, at this early date in our planetary crisis, 139 days a year are over 95 degrees Fahrenheit in Thermal. Over the next 30 years, temperatures will rise 4 to 5 degrees more, and by the end of the century, more than half the year there will be hotter than 95 and nearly a quarter will be hotter than 112."
"How much natural gas drilling to allow near the 1,000-year-old architectural ruins of Chaco Canyon, important to many Pueblo people, may not be Deb Haaland’s best-known oil and gas dilemma as Interior secretary. But it is likely her most personal one."
"The Senate took a major step early on Wednesday toward enacting a sweeping expansion of the nation’s social safety net, approving a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint along party lines that would allow Democrats to fund climate change, health care and education measures while increasing taxes on wealthy people and corporations."
For years, public information about some of the deadliest chemical security risks has been limited. But now that the Biden EPA is exploring the issue, our latest WatchDog opinion column explains why this is such an important open information issue for environmental reporters and other journalists.
A new science assessment released this week pinpoints more global warming risks, but also represents reporting challenges to environmental journalists working to cover climate change. Veteran climate journalist Bob Berwyn has the latest news from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and advice for reporters working the climate beat. Plus, links to other climate change reporting resources.
"There's a certain smell that reminds Dianna Cormier-Jackson of her childhood on Leila Street in Houston's Fifth Ward. When she was young in the early 1960s, she recalls the air there feeling "heavy," as if it was thick with oil and gasoline. Some days, the heavy smell would be so strong that her parents would make her and her siblings stay in the house. But on school days, they marched out into the rank air."
"The D.C. government is preparing to build a sprawling school-bus terminal in the historically Black enclave of Brentwood, where residents have long lived amid industrial sites that discharge pollution into their community."
"U.S. cities that have been forced to rely on nonprofit groups and corporations to drive tree-planting efforts and boosting their urban “canopy” could soon get a new ally—the federal government."
"Under orders from President Biden, EPA has taken its first overt step to revisit one of the Trump administration’s most bitterly contested air quality rollbacks."
"President Joe Biden has repeatedly bragged that the bipartisan infrastructure bill germinating in the U.S. Senate will spur the removal of America’s toxic drinking water pipes made of lead. ... But the bill does not require water utilities to replace lead pipes. Rather, it provides $15 billion to a revolving fund that utilities can use to replace lead pipes if they want ― something that’s only happened in a handful of cities to date."
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