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"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."
"Of more than 500 hurricanes that have hit the United States, the average storm led to up to 11,000 excess deaths, hundreds of times higher than official estimates."
"As people move away from flooding and heat, new research suggests that those who remain will be older, poorer and more vulnerable."
"JD Vance and Tim Walz on Tuesday both avoided talking about the main cause of global warming that is powering the kind of violent weather that struck the Southeast this week: the burning of fossil fuels."
"From his sickbed, eight-year-old Ukasha could see his siblings play with a ball in the courtyard. His head hurt and his body felt too heavy to move. Ukasha had typhoid fever – an illness he should have recovered from in days. It had been a month."
"Democrats are deploying climate arguments against Republican Rick Scott in the state’s contentious Senate race."
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