Journalist
WASCO, Calif. — The long shadows cast here in the San Joaquin Valley come from oil derricks, not palm trees. Two hours inland from the Pacific Ocean, the arid terrain is peppered with petroleum and gas wells. The black gold that lies underground became the region’s lifeblood after it was discovered in 1899, and Kern […]
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Trump fought Californian environmental officials. The Biden team wants to learn from them. No state has weathered the brunt of the Trump administration’s climate skepticism like California. During the past four years, the president stripped the Golden State of its ability to regulate car emissions, threatened to withhold emergency wildfire funds due to supposed forest […]
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Halloween is going to look a bit different this year because of the pandemic, but there could be a green lining: an opportunity to develop a more sustainable outlook on a typically high-waste holiday. Need an example? Consider pumpkins. American farmers produced more than a billion pounds of them in 2018, according to the Department of Agriculture. Much of that total ends […]
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By Miranda Green The coronavirus has made face masks a fact of life, at least for now. So how do you choose one that will keep you safe without being too hard on the environment? There are basically four choices: N-95 respirators, surgical masks, reusable cloth face coverings and disposable paper masks. N-95 respirators, which create […]
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Even if Democrats win back the White House and the Senate, it will be a long struggle to restore the regulations the Republican-controlled EPA has erased. The Trump administration’s response to a pandemic that has killed more than 120,000 Americans and forced much of the country into a devastating economic slowdown has been a massive […]
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Obama’s top environmental official wanted nothing to do with politics after leaving the government. What did it take to bring her back? Washington legend has it that bureaucrats and political operatives overwhelmingly stay in issue advocacy or politics after their bosses leave office. But that notion is decades out-of-date. These days, many top officials who […]
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LOS ANGELES — Industry groups are pushing for California regulators to delay new environmental measures, including those meant to promote clean air. Their reason: the economic stress the COVID-19 pandemic is putting on their businesses. Groups have sent at least six letters to California officials in the past two weeks requesting delays or modifications to […]
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If you did dry January this year, you probably reduced your carbon footprint without knowing it. That’s because alcohol production and distribution can be quite energy intensive. So, what if you want to reduce your environmental footprint but you’re not quite ready to hop on the wagon and stay there? Whatever your poison, one of […]
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LA CONCHITA, Calif. — In the surfer’s paradise where Mike Bell has lived for four decades, talking about rain is blasphemy. “We have sprinkles, we have showers, we have mist, but we don’t use the ‘r’ word, because the ‘r’ word is what kills people,” he says. Fifteen years ago, after 18 inches of it […]
Continue ReadingRead the full story in The Hill» A federal judge late Tuesday temporarily blocked oil and gas drilling on thousands of acres of public land in Wyoming, ruling that the Trump administration failed to “sufficiently consider climate change.” The decision by Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that the U.S. […]
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