Climate Change

"The Colorado River begins as melting snow, trickling from forested peaks and coursing in streams that gather in the meadows and valleys of the Rocky Mountains. Like arteries, its major tributaries take shape across Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, coming together in a great river like no other — a river that travels more than 1,400 miles and has defined the rise of the American Southwest over the last century."

"Puerto Rican authorities have hired a natural gas company to operate the island’s publicly-owned fleet of fossil fuel power plants, despite the commonwealth facing increasing pressure to rapidly transition its aging energy system to renewable sources."

"The Biden administration on Thursday said it will establish a 20-year moratorium on mining upstream from Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a vast preserve of lakes and woods that has been at the center of a fierce dispute over a proposed copper and nickel mine."

"In pointed language, federal regulators rebuffed a request Tuesday from the operator of California’s last nuclear power plant that could have smoothed its pathway to securing a longer operating life for its twin reactors."

"Pennsylvania’s environmental regulator says, over a five-year period, more than half of conventional oil and gas operators failed to report how much gas they pulled from the ground and whether their equipment is safe."

"A committee of the Virginia Senate on Tuesday defeated a bill backed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) that would withdraw the state from a regional carbon-trading initiative."

"The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it has banned logging and road-building on about nine million acres of the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska, aiming to settle a two-decade battle over the fate of North America’s largest temperate rainforest."

"Environmental groups asked the Fourth Circuit during oral arguments Tuesday to toss a key water permit for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would lead to even more delays for the $6.2 billion project that developers aim to resume constructing this summer."

"The gene bank can hold as many as 120,000 varieties of plants. Many of the seeds come from crops as old as agriculture itself. They're sown by farmers in the Fertile Crescent region, where cultivation began some 11,000 years ago. Other seeds were deposited by researchers who've hiked in the past four decades through forests and mountains in the Middle East, Asia and North Africa, searching for wild relatives of wheat, legumes and other crops that are important to the human diet."