"Millions of people around the world are having their lives upended by floods, storms and heatwaves worsened by the climate crisis. Those forced to flee their home countries, however, are finding that the door to the US is more firmly shut than ever."
When the Supreme Court further hollowed out the Voting Rights Act this spring, it augured a historic loss of civic power for Black communities. And with that comes a further blow — to progress on the environment. For as Voices of Environmental Justice columnist Yessenia Funes explains, key to climate policy are Black voters, and the Black legislators they bring into office.
"A mass of showers and thunderstorms that has been sprawling across Texas and northern Mexico in recent days over South Texas consolidated into Tropical Storm Arthur on Wednesday. Life-threatening flooding, property damage and disruptions to commerce and travel may unfold as inches of rain pour down over a portion of the southeastern United States into Friday."
"High winds drove a wildfire into an eastern Washington neighborhood, forcing the evacuation of about 1,500 people and destroying at least 15 homes, officials said Wednesday."
"There’s an increasingly narrow strip of New Orleans marshland that hardly anyone lives on, but without it, hundreds of thousands of people will face far greater risks from storms and floods."
"Some day in the next 12 months – maybe in late-August, maybe not until next spring – Lake Mead will drop below the critical threshold of 1,035 feet above sea level. That is the water-level elevation at which hydropower generating capacity at Hoover Dam, the largest in the Colorado River basin, will be cut by 70 percent."
"In the days after Hurricane Helene devastated the southern Appalachians in late September 2024, Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent Tracy Swartout went up in a helicopter to survey the damage. What she saw was deeply troubling. 'When Helene happened, we ended up with 58 landslides spread across 200 linear miles of the parkway,' Swartout says."
"Few public universities get more federal research funding than the University of Washington."
"Ten of the 11 plant workers killed at a Longview, Wash., paper mill last month died from alkaline chemical burns, the result of caustic liquid that flooded out of a failed holding tank and through the plant."
"If the blob persists for years, it could eventually cool the climate around Greenland, Iceland and northern Europe."
