By Dani Anguiano 24 May 2023 LOS ANGELES (The Guardian) – Overdoses involving fentanyl were behind one in five deaths of people ages 15-24 in California, the latest indicator of an emergency that shows no signs of slowing. Drug overdoses now kill two to three times as many people in the state as car accidents, […]
By Nina Lakhani 24 May 2023 NEW YORK (The Guardian) – A new investigation into Chevron’s climate pledge has found the fossil-fuel company relies on “junk” carbon offsets and “unviable” technologies, which do little to offset its vast greenhouse gas emissions and, in some cases, may actually be causing communities harm. Chevron, which reported $35.5bn […]
By James Pasley 8 June 2023 (Insider) – Don’t let the soft, sepia tones fool you. The United States used to be dangerously polluted. Before President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the environment and its well-being was not a federal priority. In the early 1970s, the EPA launched the “The Documerica […]
By Morgan Mobley 5 June 2023 (KCTV) – Kansas has been called the country’s breadbasket. Now, wheat farmers in the state will reap their smallest harvest in more than 60 years. This will go directly down the chain, from farmers to consumers at the grocery store. Kansas flour mills will likely have to buy wheat […]
By Ryan Mac 4 June 2023 (The New York Times) – California property owners hoping to open new insurance policies are no longer able to do so with one of the nation’s largest homeowner insurance companies. Allstate, the state’s fourth-largest property and casualty insurance provider, has stopped selling new home, condominium or commercial insurance policies in California, […]
By Mike Ives and Liam Stack 7 June 2023 (The New York Times) – The sky in New York City rapidly darkened on Wednesday afternoon, as a plume of smoke from Canadian wildfires approached the nation’s largest city and sent the air quality index soaring past 324, the worst since the Environmental Protection Agency began […]
By Olivia Trani 1 June 2023 (VCU) – When it comes to public health, the United States is at a disadvantage compared with other developed countries. Americans experience more illness, have less access to health care and pay more for health services than citizens in other high-income countries. Americans also die earlier – and have been doing so […]
By Kasha Patel 30 May 2023 (The Washington Post) – Imagine Earth’s surface is like a stack of pancakes. The pancakes, or layers of soil and rocks, may appear fairly evenly stacked and fluffy. Over time though, the stack can become compressed, thinner and shorter. Scientists observe this downward motion of land, called land subsidence, […]
By Jess Thomson 30 May 2023 (Newsweek) – The massive blob of seaweed creeping across the Atlantic Ocean toward Florida may contain deadly flesh-eating bacteria. The 5,000-mile wide clump of seaweed is made up of sargassum seaweed, which has bloomed massively to form the “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.” A study from Florida Atlantic University published […]
By Nicolas Rivero 21 May 2023 (WUSF) – Brace for a few years of flood insurance rate hikes, South Florida. And they’re going to be steep — doubling, even tripling for thousands of homeowners. FEMA has changed the way it calculates flood insurance prices. Instead of relying on old flood zone maps covering broad areas, […]