"Lovers often carve their initials in the smooth gray bark of beech trees. Now those beloved trees—which can reach nearly 40 meters tall, live up to 400 years and are among the most abundant forest trees in the Northeast and Midwestern U.S.—are increasingly threatened by beech leaf disease."

"Down beneath the tourist lodges and shops selling keychains and incense, past windswept arroyos and brown valleys speckled with agave, juniper and sagebrush, the rocks of the Grand Canyon seem untethered from time. The oldest ones date back 1.8 billion years, not just eons before humans laid eyes on them, but eons before evolution endowed any organism on this planet with eyes."

"Parts of the U.S. territory reached a “life-threatening” heat index of 125 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, driven by a combination of an intense heat dome, El Niño and climate change."

"A Virginia regulatory board on Wednesday voted to withdraw the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, fulfilling a directive from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin but triggering the threat of legal action from environmental groups who say the board overstepped its authority."

"The release of cancer-causing benzene and other toxic gases from sites in Pennsylvania raises concerns about millions of other abandoned wells across the U.S."

"The United Arab Emirates’ state oil company has been able to read emails to and from the Cop28 climate summit office and was consulted on how to respond to a media inquiry, the Guardian can reveal."

"Like the tobacco industry before it, the chemical industry managed to keep PFAS’s health risks hidden from the public for decades. A new peer-reviewed study dissecting PFAS producers’ public relations strategies provides a smoking gun timeline composed of industry studies and comments from DuPont and 3M officials showing they knew the dangers, but publicly insisted the chemicals were safe."

"One of the world’s wealthiest oil states is engaged in a wide-ranging public relations and lobbying campaign to cast itself as an environmental leader before it hosts the United Nations’ next climate talks in November. But the United Arab Emirates’ efforts are colliding with a barrage of criticism from lawmakers and environmentalists in both the U.S. and Europe, who scoff at the idea that the oil-flush nation is committed to helping shift the world off planet-heating fossil fuels.

"Hazy skies, the fiery, red sun, and the smell of smoke caught the attention of residents from Maryland to New England on Tuesday. The air quality spiked to very unhealthy levels across the Northeast on Wednesday morning as wildfire smoke from Canada poured into the region."

"Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva unveiled a plan on Monday to end illegal deforestation in the Amazon, a major campaign pledge that is a critical step in addressing the country’s significant carbon emissions from the region."