"L.A. County’s Chiquita Canyon Landfill has spewed high levels of toxic gases and climate super-pollutants for years. Yet local residents’ pleas for help from state officials remain unanswered."
"A highly anticipated White House report on the health of American children would stop short of proposing direct restrictions on ultraprocessed foods and pesticides that the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has called major threats, according to a draft of the document that was reviewed by The New York Times."
"The plastics contaminating every corner of the Earth contain thousands of unregulated toxic chemicals. As global plastic talks end without a treaty, health experts say negotiators must consider their toxic cargo."
Public databases — a boon to good environmental reporting — have long been a priority for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as evidenced in its just-published “open data plan.” But as an analysis in the latest Reporter’s Toolbox notes, that pioneering approach may succumb to Trump 2.0 policies. What’s at stake and what’s already being lost.
"EPA expressed alarm at contamination in a creek near a predominantly Black neighborhood. Then the agency eliminated its civil-rights office and has taken no further action."
"The Trump admin’s scheme to keep old fossil-fuel plants running could saddle utility customers with nearly $6 billion a year in unnecessary costs, a report finds."
"As the Trump administration aims to bolster fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy expansion, new research shows the oil and gas sector has so far failed to become a major jobs creator for heavily fracked areas of northern Appalachia."
"Debbie Blankenship’s wheelchair carved perfect lines in the grass as she rolled into her backyard garden, passing a wooden arch filled with small grapes, a bush with plump blueberries and yellow crates filled with sprouting potatoes. She stopped at a dirt patch with a burial marker for her beagle — the latest of her dogs to die of cancer."
The Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is anything but, especially in its unraveling of efforts to weave environmental and climate justice into American society, argues the new Voices of Environmental Justice. In her latest column, writer Yessenia Funes calls on journalists to report its ramifications not just for the planet but for the most vulnerable people living on it. Here are key stories to start with.
"Syngenta is another step closer to potentially putting an end to thousands of lawsuits brought by people blaming the company’s paraquat weed killer for causing Parkinson’s disease."
