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"It was just before sunrise in July when the botanists Naomi Fraga and Maria Jesus threw on backpacks and crunched their way across a brittle alkaline flat in the hottest corner of the Mojave Desert. Their mission: to rescue a tiny plant teetering on the brink of extinction."
"A federal judge on Monday struck down a Trump-era environmental rule that drastically limited federal restrictions against pollution of millions of streams, wetlands and marshes across the country."
"Hospitals in Southeast Louisiana, already burdened with extremely high numbers of covid patients, took a beating from Hurricane Ida, with roofs ripped off or damaged, leaving water pouring inside and forcing three bayou-country hospitals ravaged by the eye of the storm to evacuate their patients. Patients at a fourth hospital were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard."
"By the time Hurricane Ida made landfall in Port Fourchon, La., on Sunday, it was the poster child for a climate change-driven disaster."
"Amid deadly heat waves and new evidence showing that wildfire smoke may contribute to premature births, the Biden administration is creating a new federal office to address the health consequences of climate change and their disproportionate effects on poor communities."
"Whistleblowers say the US Environmental Protection Agency has been falsifying dangerous new chemicals’ risk assessments in an effort to make the compounds appear safe and quickly approve them for commercial use."
"On a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground. There, at the bottom, amid pooling water and dripping rock, was an enormous machine driving a cone-shaped drill bit into the earth."
"A popular vacation haven normally filled with tens of thousands of summer tourists was clogged with fleeing vehicles Monday after the entire resort city of South Lake Tahoe was ordered to leave as a ferocious wildfire raced toward Lake Tahoe, a sparkling gem on the California-Nevada state line."
"On Sept. 2, an area north of downtown Juneau will hear a loud, discordant siren. Juneau’s power company will be testing a disaster plan for a scenario where the 168-foot Salmon Creek hydroelectric dam fails and floods a largely commercial district near the regional hospital."
"U.S. climate envoy John Kerry met in Tokyo on Tuesday with Japan’s top diplomat to push efforts to fight climate change ahead of a United Nations conference in November. Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi highlighted what he said was the importance of getting other major carbon emitters, especially China, to cooperate."
"Despite a few high-profile conservation success stories – like the dramatic comeback of bald eagle populations in North America – birds of prey are in decline worldwide."
"Hurricane Ida was on course to smash ashore in southeastern Louisiana at midday Sunday as a monster with top winds of 155 mph, and pushing a life-threatening storm surge of 16 feet topped by devastating waves.
Two feet of expected rainfall began to dump early Sunday along the coast, with the first sprays reaching nearly empty New Orleans streets before dawn.
"EPA senior scientists say they were shoved aside last year by Trump appointees racing to revive a massive Mississippi flood control project vetoed in 2008 by the George W. Bush administration, according to documents obtained by E&E News under the Freedom of Information Act."
"The EPA says it will fully investigate allegations from a public interest group that it illegally destroys the original versions of its internal communications and draft documents once they’re edited, according to an agency spokesman."
"Many Pennsylvania school districts have detected lead and other contaminants in their drinking water and documented problems with mold and radon in school buildings—but not all of them removed the hazards, according to a new report."
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