"An estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the country’s population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening food insecurity this winter. Many are already on the brink of catastrophe."

"Mask mandates saved lives and prevented COVID-19 infections in Missouri’s biggest cities during the worst part of the delta variant wave, an analysis by the state Department of Health and Senior Services shows. But the analysis, conducted at the request of Gov. Mike Parson’s office in early November, was never made public and was only obtained by The Missouri Independent and the Documenting COVID-19 project after a Sunshine Law request to the department."

"A wastewater rule the Trump administration pushed through as a Hail Mary for struggling coal plants is now being cited as a reason some of those same units are opting to close."

"Janis Elliott started testing the private well water that comes out of the faucets in her home for nitrates after she attended an environmental meeting more than five years ago. Elliott lives in the small unincorporated town of Avon, Iowa not too far south of Des Moines."

"A community program tracks air pollution in real time. Burdened by polluting facilities, 86 percent of Bayview’s children developed severe asthma before kindergarten."

"Billions of these tiny plastic pellets are floating in the ocean, causing as much damage as oil spills, yet they are still not classified as hazardous".

"The EPA can shield some records regarding a former official’s role in pesticide policymaking from a conservation group, a divided Second Circuit ruled Monday. Messages between staff about how the agency should communicate its policies are protected by the deliberative process privilege, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit."

"At least a third of the scientists and staff at EPA’s specialized forensics lab have quit or retired over the past five years, an exodus that threatens the unit’s central role in solving some of the nation’s most difficult environmental crimes."

"The Biden administration’s oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico last week doesn’t just lock in decades of future drilling and greenhouse gas emissions, it also opens up more extraction in an area where chemical companies dumped tons of hazardous industrial waste."

"A smelting company has poisoned rivers, killed off boreal forest and belched out more sulfur dioxide than active volcanoes. Now it wants to produce more metal for the “green economy.”"