California

"Efforts in Congress are heating up to bring some relief to California’s historic drought, just as the dry summer season is starting."

"California’s fire marshal has launched an investigation into an oil pipeline rupture that spilled at least 20,000 gallons of crude near Tracy over the weekend — eight months after the same pipeline had a break in a similar location."

"A Houston-based pipeline company has been indicted in California on 46 criminal charges stemming from a major oil spill last year that forced beach closures and fouled miles of shoreline near Santa Barbara, prosecutors said on Tuesday."

"Young starfish are staging a comeback in Oregon and Northern California, after a virus that melts the animal devastated adult populations along the northern West Coast starting in 2013."

"The future of the Newport Banning Ranch site, where developers want to build a hotel and hundreds of homes, now rests with the California Coastal Commission — which is engaged in its own struggle for identity."

"Healthy forests are especially important at a time of climate change — they’re an incredible tool to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Dead forests, on the other hand, can light the spark for wildfires, which are already showing a long-predicted uptick in activity."

"Right now, and in the coming weeks, from Northern California to Alaska, commercial and amateur mushroom hunters will be scouring hills that were ravaged by fires last summer and fall. Their prey? Morel mushrooms."

"San Francisco today became the first major city in the country to approve legislation requiring solar panels on new buildings."

"A still-controversial 1992 law intended to boost California’s striped-bass population can be scaled back, the Obama administration now believes."