"What do you get when you combine record-breaking heat, wildfire smoke and sunlight? Ground-level ozone in amounts high enough to cause health problems in both Baton Rouge and New Orleans on Friday and Saturday, according to the federal/state Air Quality Index."
"The number of suicide watch incidents in Louisiana prisons increased by 30 percent on extreme heat days, a recently published study in the JAMA Journal found."
"A coalition of environmental groups filed a lawsuit Monday in Virginia that challenges Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s move to pull the state out of a regional carbon cap-and-trade initiative."
"Oil companies including Sunoco LP, Chevron Corp., and Exxon Mobil Corp. urged justices to dismiss a climate lawsuit they say falls outside of the scope of local law during oral arguments Thursday at the Hawaii Supreme Court."
"EPA is restarting review of a high-stakes decision on ground-level ozone standards in a step that short-circuits the prospects for any imminent action to tighten limits on the lung-damaging pollutant."
"A total of 850 people remain missing following the devastating wildfires in Maui, the Hawaiian county’s mayor said Monday, with this latest count coming ahead of President Joe Biden’s visit to the island."
"Ecuadorean referendums to ban oil drilling in a part of the Amazon and mining in a forest outside Quito easily passed, drawing cheers on Monday from Indigenous leaders and environmentalists despite warnings from oil and mining groups about billions of dollars in lost income."
"[I]t’s not often that a tropical storm from the Eastern Pacific moves through Southern California on the same weekend that three tropical storms erupt in the Atlantic. That’s where things stood on Sunday, Aug. 20, 2023."
"Tropical Storm Hilary drenched the American Southwest before fading Monday to a mere rainstorm, leaving communities from the Pacific Coast to inland Nevada with a substantial cleanup effort but no reported deaths in the United States."
Long-growing concern over dangerous “forever” chemicals has drawn the attention of federal and state policymakers, local communities and the utilities that provide their drinking water. But little about regulating PFAS will be quick or easy, making it a major environmental and public health story for years to come. Issue Backgrounder unfolds the regulatory moves, the politics and the larger implications of PFAS policy.
