"Pandemics will emerge more often, spread faster, cost more and kill more people than COVID-19 without bold action to halt the habitat destruction that helps viruses hop from wildlife to humans, according to a study published on Thursday."
"When the Trump administration finalized a key Clean Water Act rule last year, it slammed media outlets for citing federal data showing it would erase protections for more than half the nation's wetlands and 18% of streams."
"Conservation groups sued the Trump administration Wednesday, arguing it failed to fully consider the effects on endangered species when reviewing the environmental damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill."
"A shuffle to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) independent board of science advisers will add a longtime consultant who has worked for the tobacco and chemicals industries while promoting a member listed as someone “not to pick” by the Union of Concerned Scientists to be the panel's chair."
"Mountain Valley Pipeline was given another two years Friday to complete a natural gas pipeline already marked by six years of community opposition, environmental damage, legal fights and delays."
"This has been the 2020 pattern: Politics has thoroughly contaminated the scientific process. The result has been an epidemic of distrust, which further undermines the nation’s already chaotic and ineffective response to the coronavirus."
The narrative around the ocean should become a more hopeful one, argues former NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco. As evidence at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ recent virtual conference, Lubchenco cites a top-level international analysis that suggests the ocean can play a positive role in everything from reducing climate change to securing the future of food. Find out more.
"The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Eastern black rail a threatened species on Wednesday, but stopped short of the stronger protections some environmentalists were seeking for the elusive bird, now imperiled by habitat destruction, sea level rise, and the increasing frequency and intensity of storms with climate change."
"After stalling for months, a top Trump official released a polar bear study by government scientists Friday that highlights the endangered animals’ vulnerability to climate change and the fact that proposed oil drilling in Alaska would probably encroach on their habitat, causing more stress."
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