By Seth Borenstein, Suman Naishadham, Sibi Arasu, and Fabiano Maisonnave 7 May 2024 (AP News) – In sweltering Brazil, flooding killed dozens of people and paralyzed a city of about 4 million people. Voters and politicians in India, amid national elections, are fainting in heat that hit as high as 115 degrees (46.3 degrees Celsius). […]
By Rosanna Xia 6 May 2024 (Los Angeles Times) – For several years now, one question has held the key to understanding just how much we should worry about the hundreds of tons of DDT that had been dumped off the coast of Los Angeles: How, exactly, has this decades-old pesticide — a toxic chemical spread across […]
By Sheri Walsh 16 May 2024 (UPI) – With summer’s extreme heat and this year’s hurricane season rolling into Florida next month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation Wednesday that will erase climate change from state policy effective 1 July 2024. The new law will erase the words “climate change” from state statutes and make energy […]
By Dharna Noor 1 May 2024 (The Guardian) – The fossil fuel industry spent decades sowing doubt about the dangers of burning oil and gas, experts and Democratic lawmakers testified on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The Senate budget committee held a hearing to review a report published on Tuesday with the House oversight and accountability […]
9 January 2024 (Munich Re) – Worldwide, natural disasters in 2023 resulted in losses of around US$ 250bn (previous year US$ 250bn), with insured losses of US$ 95bn (previous year US$ 125bn). Overall losses tally with the five-year average, while insured losses were slightly below the average figure of US$ 105bn. Unlike in previous years, […]
By Ian James 23 April 2024 (Los Angeles Times) – Southern California’s rivers and creeks once teemed with large, silvery fish that arrived from the ocean and swam upstream to spawn. But today, these fish are seldom seen. Southern California steelhead trout have been pushed to the brink of extinction as their river habitats have […]
By Berenice Garcia 18 April 2024 MERCEDES, TEXAS (The Texas Tribune) – Across the street from a red barn, a 40-acre field once covered by a sea of green sugar cane leaves now sits dry and thirsty. Irrigation water is dangerously elusive for the fields of the Rio Grande Valley. Mike England, who owns England […]
By Matthew Rozsa 24 January 2024 (Salon) – Humans rely on groundwater for many things, but especially our food. Roughly 30 percent of all the planet’s available freshwater comes from groundwater, or water that is found underground in the spaces between rocks, soil and sand. It is primarily used for agriculture and billions of humans are dependent […]
By Dorany Pineda 2 February 2024 LOS ANGELES (AP) – Extreme heat and wildfire smoke are independently harmful to the human body, but together their impact on cardiovascular and respiratory systems is more dangerous and affects some communities more than others. A study published Friday in the journal Science Advances said climate change is increasing the frequency […]
By Brad Plumer 17 March 2024 (The New York Times) – Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge. Over the past year, electric utilities have nearly doubled their forecasts of how much additional power they’ll need by 2028 as they confront […]
![Effect of political contributions from oil and gas companies on U.S. legislators that vote against the environment. Coefficients and 95 percent CIs for tests of investment (Left) and influence (Right) hypotheses and their corresponding metaanalytic effects for the years 1992 to 2018. In 13 out of 14 analyses, lower LCV scores (i.e., more antienvironmental votes) in one election cycle predicted significantly increased contributions in the following election cycle. For example, the strongest result was observed for the 2016 election: For every additional 10 percent of congressional votes against the environment in 2014, a legislator would receive an additional $5,400 in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies in 2016 (b = −0.54, SE = 0.12; P < 0.001; 95 percent CI [−0.77, −0.31]). This is an especially strong relationship considering that many elected officials vote against environmental policies nearly 100 percent of the time, thereby compounding the cycle of antienvironmentalism and increasing rewards in the form of contributions. Graphic: Goldberg, et al., 2020 / PNAS](https://desdemonadespair.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-8.png)
