When it comes to telling environment and energy stories, especially about place and scale, data visualizations can turn an average story into a standout. Reporter’s Toolbox takes a look at some recent examples of inspiring data-mapping projects that provide insight into everything from auto emissions and floods to vanishing rivers and whipping winds.
As U.S. coal’s comedown continues, our latest Issue Backgrounder takes a close look at the factors behind the industry’s decline and finds a combination of economics, competition and shifting global markets, along with aging technology, politics and environmental pushback. What’s in store for coal in 2020?
"Tens of millions of voracious purple sea urchins that have already chomped their way through towering underwater kelp forests in California are spreading north to Oregon, sending the delicate marine ecosystem off the shore into such disarray that other critical species are starving to death."
"The National Park Service announced Monday it is withdrawing a proposal that could have made protesters repay the federal government for the cost of security at demonstrations."
"William Perry Pendley, a top Trump administration official in charge of managing one-tenth of all land in the United States, is a past contributor to 21st Century Science & Technology, a fringe magazine of the late cult leader, convicted fraudster and paranoid conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche."
"If the timber industry in Alaska is looking to harvest more trees, the Trump administration's proposal to open roadless areas in Tongass National Forest to logging might not be the way to get there."
"A fast-growing backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests could both challenge and help justify new Interior Department measures billed as a means to increase efficiency and improve transparency."
"Breaking with some of their biggest rivals, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and Toyota said Monday they were intervening on the side of the Trump administration in an escalating battle with California over fuel economy standards for automobiles."
"Look up the next time you’re in a park — any park — in the Mid-Atlantic. You’re likely to see vines climbing toward the treetops. These invasive vines can be deadly — not just to the trees they are overtaking, but to the larger ecosystem."
"A group of scientists assembled by the EPA to advise it on air pollution standards couldn’t reach agreement on whether the standards should be tightened or remain the same, a development that may complicate ongoing effort to update them."
