Disasters

"Alabama’s largest utility plans to bury a heap of toxic coal waste in one of North America’s most biodiverse river systems. Experts say it will put one of the nation’s most pristine wetlands at risk."

"An estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the country’s population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening food insecurity this winter. Many are already on the brink of catastrophe."

"Widespread poverty, lack of irrigation, deforestation and COVID-19 restrictions are having a bigger effect than global warming, scientists say".

"Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer abandoned a federal lawsuit Tuesday aimed at shutting down an oil pipeline that runs through part of the Great Lakes but said the state would continue pursuing a separate case with the same goal."

"When Lucas Zucker talks about sea level rise in California, his first thoughts aren’t about waves crashing onto fancy homes in Orange County, nor the state’s most iconic beaches shrinking year after year. What worries him most are the three power plants looming over the Oxnard coast, and the toxic waste site that has languished there for decades."

"Shrimpers see obstacles that will make their jobs tougher, more dangerous; regulators vow to listen"

"Offshore oil derricks dotting the California coastline continue pumping despite a history of catastrophic spills and vows from generations of politicians to send them to the scrapheap. They’ve even survived a modest attempt by state officials more than a decade ago to offer incentives to oil companies that chose to abandon their costly operations."

"Billions of these tiny plastic pellets are floating in the ocean, causing as much damage as oil spills, yet they are still not classified as hazardous".

"The Biden administration’s oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico last week doesn’t just lock in decades of future drilling and greenhouse gas emissions, it also opens up more extraction in an area where chemical companies dumped tons of hazardous industrial waste."

"A smelting company has poisoned rivers, killed off boreal forest and belched out more sulfur dioxide than active volcanoes. Now it wants to produce more metal for the “green economy.”"