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"When faced with testimony that Zug Island’s EES Coke Battery is one of Michigan’s worst sulfur dioxide polluters, an attorney for the facility said Monday: “So what?” The DTE Energy-owned facility was “permitted to do so,” said Michael Hindelang, attorney for the utility and its subsidiaries that are defendants in the EPA’s Clean Air Act lawsuit over the emissions."
"For much of the 20th century, a sprawling complex in the desert of southeastern Washington state turned out most of the plutonium used in the nation’s nuclear arsenal, from the first atomic bomb to the arms race that fueled the Cold War. Now, after decades of planning and billions of dollars of investment, the site is turning liquid nuclear and chemical waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation into a much safer substance: glass."
"The Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this month that it would stop making polluting companies report their greenhouse gas emissions to it, eliminating a crucial tool the US uses to track emissions and form climate policy. Climate NGOs say their work could help plug some of the data gap, but they and other experts fear the EPA’s work can’t be fully matched."
"Nearly 85% of the 13.1 million acres the Trump administration is opening to coal leasing is private or state-owned and unlikely to be mined anytime soon, except for land adjacent to existing coal mines, analysts say."
"On March 1, under a clear sky, hundreds of people flocked to Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park—not to picnic but to protest. Two weeks earlier, the National Park Service had fired roughly 1,000 employees."
"Federal agents grabbed and shoved journalists in a hallway outside a New York City immigration court on Tuesday, sending one to the hospital in the latest clash between authorities enforcing President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and members of the public seeking to observe and document their actions."
"Researchers across the United States and the world who raced to protect climate data, public reports and other information from the Trump administration’s budget cuts, firings and scrubbing of federal websites are launching their own climate information portals."
"Brazil's president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a $1 billion investment in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) to support forest conservation this week at a United Nations event in New York."
"On Tuesday evening, with the federal government on the brink of a shutdown, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took to social media to tout the agency’s deployment of autonomous lawnmowers on the National Mall and at several other National Park sites."
"The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it planned to relax a Biden-era rule that requires grocery stores, air-conditioning companies, semiconductor plants and others to sharply and rapidly reduce some powerful greenhouse gases used in cooling equipment."
"In recent years, Pennsylvania regulators have tried to clamp down on roadway spreading of tens of millions of gallons of oil and gas “brines,” high-salt liquids that can be laced with toxic metals and radioactive material. The industry is pushing back."
"New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has sued Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Honeywell and several real estate companies over a site in Morris Plains where toxic waste remained from a now-shuttered pharmaceutical plant."
"With sizzling temperatures and a parched climate, it can be hard to survive in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. But some species have evolved to thrive in this extreme environment, including the iconic saguaro cactus. Part of the reason for this prickly plant’s success is its intimate relationship with a smaller—but similarly mighty—desert player: fungi."
"Pope Leo XIV took aim Wednesday at skeptics who “ridicule those who speak of global warming,” as he strongly embraced Pope Francis’ environmental legacy and made it his own in some of his strongest and most extensive comments to date."
"Jane Goodall, a scientist whose studies of wild chimpanzees made her a household name, has died at the age of 91, according to an announcement posted by the Jane Goodall Institute."
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