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"Though utilities’ mission is to provide clean water, their trade groups for decades have often fiercely opposed initiatives to improve quality"
"False claims are adding to the chaos and confusion in many storm-battered communities. Social media platforms such as X have allowed the falsehoods to spread."
"In her first days as Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum made a point of distancing herself from the fossil fuel reliance promoted by her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and vowed to resume an energy transition that he halted."
"When he was just 18 years old, Emmanuel Akatire traveled about 500 miles from his home in Zorko, Ghana, to Accra, the nation’s capital, to find the only work he could — sifting through vast piles of discarded electronics to find valuable scrap metal. A week’s worth of painstaking, often dangerous work, earns him the equivalent of about 60 U.S. dollars."
"New research shows how toxic chemicals hitch a ride with seabirds flying from southern latitudes to the Arctic."
"As residents of western North Carolina piece together their lives following Hurricane Helene, few will be able to rely on federal flood insurance to help them rebuild."
"The amount of rain that Tropical Storm Helene unleashed over North Carolina was so intense, no amount of preparation could have entirely prevented the destruction that ensued. But decisions made by state officials in the years leading up to Helene most likely made some of that damage worse, according to experts in building standards and disaster resilience."
"In a novel lawsuit brought early last year, a trio of Louisiana challengers laid out a sweeping narrative that traced a direct line between the oppressive legacy of slavery and allegedly discriminatory air pollution exposure. But their bid to upend one parish’s land-use practices faltered when a federal judge threw out the suit eight months later on prosaic procedural grounds. Now, those plaintiffs are regrouping for a rematch before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals."
"The Biden administration this week restored Obama-era farmworker protections from pesticides that were rolled back under the Trump administration."
"The adoption of ship scrubbers—technology meant to clean up dirty fuel—has caused a surge in heavy metal pollution."
"On Sept. 13, Decatur, Illinois, city councilperson David Horn found out a monitoring well at a carbon capture and storage site in his community was leaking. He did not find out through an internal council meeting, nor an emergency phone call from the city manager or an alert from environmental regulators. He found out like most other people did, through an article in E&E News."
"The country’s most-visited national park site, the Blue Ridge Parkway, will remain closed indefinitely, the National Park Service (NPS) said Wednesday. The closure affects the entire length of the Blue Ridge Parkway, though some parts were hit harder than others by storm damage. It comes right as the region and scenic road typically see a boom in tourism, as weather cools and the leaves change colors."
"Russ Lewis has picked up some strange things along the coast of Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state over the years: Hot Wheels bicycle helmets with feather tufts, life-size plastic turkey decoys made for hunters, colorful squirt guns." ... "These items aren’t like the used fishing gear and beer cans that Lewis also finds tossed overboard by fishers or partygoers. They’re the detritus of commercial shipping containers lost in the open ocean."
"Federal regulators gave a huge, contentious offshore wind project the green light to start construction off the coast of New Jersey."
"Among the many pieces of critical infrastructure that Hurricane Helene knocked offline in Asheville, N.C., was a key federal office for monitoring the global climate. Work is underway to get the facility running again, but the outage is likely to delay some agencies’ monthly updates on global warming and other climate indicators."
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