"In 2015, the United States agreed to slash its greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris climate accord. Then it elected Donald Trump as president. That experience raises the question of whether the U.S. can follow through on President Biden's ambitious pledge to halve emissions in the next decade."

"Disease-carrying ticks, commonly associated with wooded areas, are also abundant near beaches in Northern California, according to a study. They weren’t found on beaches themselves, but in the brush and vegetation beachgoers may walk through to get to the sand."

"Industry’s congressional allies defeated nearly all PFAS legislation while the Trump EPA killed, watered down or slowalked new rules".

"A report published by the Biden administration on Friday made the case that a failure to adopt clean energy technologies and reduce carbon emissions will contribute to rising economic costs, and warns that the United States has fallen behind in its efforts to develop strategies to combat the effects of climate change."

"President Joe Biden is exploring the idea of a border adjustment tax that would slap a levy on imports from countries with weaker climate policies, John Kerry, the White House’s special envoy for climate said Friday."

"President Joe Biden nominated former tribal chairman Bryan Newland for assistant secretary for Indian Affairs of the Interior Thursday."

"In the decades before the Civil War, one of the South’s largest slave enterprises held sway on the northern outskirts of Durham, North Carolina. At its peak, about 900 enslaved people were compelled to grow tobacco, corn, and other crops on the Stagville Plantation, 30,000 acres of rolling piedmont that had been taken from the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. Today, the area has a transitional feel: Old farmhouses, open fields, and pine forests cede ground to subdivisions, as one of America’s hottest real estate markets sprawls outward."

"At a hearing on Thursday, 17-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg offered [Biden] some advice on a way to do so: ending all subsidies to the dirty energy sector."

"Seventy miles off the coast of Louisiana, among a maze of drilling platforms and seafloor pipelines, thousands of 55-gallon drums containing hazardous industrial chemicals litter a vast, dark swath of the ocean floor. They’ve been sitting there for nearly 50 years."