"The walls and ceiling of the Nanshan mine shimmer black, carved straight into a 200 million-year-old coal seam running 1,300 feet underground. Black veins of Jurassic-era coal deposits still thread Shanxi province in China's north, enriching public coffers and keeping generations of miners steadily employed."
"A federal judge in Louisiana has blocked the Biden administration’s suspension of new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters, in the first major legal roadblock for President Biden’s quest to cut fossil fuel pollution and conserve public lands."
"Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) says he will convene a meeting with all 11 Democratic members of the Senate Budget Committee on Wednesday to begin the process for passing a budget resolution, paving the way for Democrats to pass a major infrastructure bill on a party-line vote."
"A massive fire broke out at a suburban chemical plant on Monday morning, sending a towering plume of smoke into the air and forcing evacuations of residents who live near the plant."
"In Houston and Corpus Christi, the impacted communities are predominantly Black and Latino. Scientists say the dangers of benzene, a carcinogen, are not well understood."
"Capturing and burying CO2 is heralded as the technological fix to mitigate climate change. But many oil and gas majors are using the technology to produce more fossil fuels."
"The Electric Reliability Council of Texas says a large number of power plants are offline, but it could not provide details as to what may be causing the “very concerning” number of outages. At the same time, the state is experiencing near-record demand for electricity in June."
"A heatwave already punishing parts of the U.S. Southwest on Monday was expected to move into California this week, prompting the forecasters to warn of health and fire dangers."
"The Minnesota Court of Appeals on Monday affirmed state regulators’ key approvals of Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 oil pipeline replacement project, in a dispute that drew over 1,000 protesters to northern Minnesota last week."
For a clean energy transition to succeed, it almost certainly will have to bring along displaced workers and communities. To help journalists understand the challenges underlying that shift, BookShelf’s Jenny Weeks reviews two volumes. The first is a new memoir of working in North Dakota’s booming Bakken oil fields, the second an earlier account of decline in a working-class community in Oregon.
