"The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act required Texas’ transportation agency to create a carbon reduction strategy to get $641 million federal dollars. Critics say the plan is unlikely to meaningfully cut greenhouse gasses from the state’s massive transportation sector."
"Drainage has exposed the fertile soils of the Everglades Agricultural Area, a region responsible for much of the nation’s sugar cane."
"ORLANDO, Fla. — It used to be the water spilled over Lake Okeechobee’s southern shore, flowing eventually into the sawgrass prairies of the Florida Everglades. For thousands of years the marsh vegetation flourished and died here in an endless cycle, the plant remains falling beneath the slow-coursing water to form a rich layer of organic soil called peat.
"In what was once a proud and neighborly community where residents sat on their porches and looked after kids playing in the streets, the noxious smell and degraded air quality attributable to the Covanta waste incinerator — the largest in the country, burning as much as 3,500 tons of trash a day — have driven residents indoors or out of town."
"With UN climate negotiations set for next month, a growing number of nations and business leaders are calling for a phaseout of fossil fuels. But with major fossil fuel expansion projects moving ahead around the globe, advocates of strong action face a daunting challenge."
Freelance food systems reporter Thin Lei Win believes that if the world doesn’t change the way it produces, processes, transports, consumes and discards food, climate change will worsen and hunger levels will spike. But she also worries that powerful interests want to keep the status quo and cites parallels with the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. More in Freelance Files, including places for freelancers to pitch climate-food stories.
Reporting on interconnected ecosystems lends itself to better environmental stories, and so tracing how water moves across landscapes, communities, industries and regulatory schemes can help the public connect the dots. That’s how Annie Ropeik, who helps run the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, sees the watershed beat. She shares expert views and offers insights for environment journalists to use in their reporting.
The mining of the ocean floor has stirred up significant debate, much of which clouds the realities of whether and to what degree it would cause ecological harm to one of the world’s greatest resources. This week’s TipSheet looks more closely at the controversy, which may well come to a head in the coming year. The latest entry in SEJournal’s 2024 Journalists’ Guide to Environment and Energy.
"It’s a billion-dollar decision. Probably many billions. And people all around Alabama are waiting anxiously for the feds to decide what happens next. Can Alabama leave its 100 million tons of coal ash where the utilities dumped it, in unlined ditches along the rivers across the state?"
"The open-cast crater seems ready to swallow the city whole. Mud-brick houses with corrugated iron roofs teeter on the edge of the massive Raúl Rojas mining pit, now lined with razor wire, which stretches nearly 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) across and is 300 meters, or more than a quarter of a mile, deep. This is the center of Cerro de Pasco, a city in central Peru, sitting at an elevation of more than 4,300 m (14,100 feet) above sea level."
"A federal appeals court on Thursday is tossing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ban on a pesticide that has been linked to brain damage in children."
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