The Trump Administration Is Pushing to Sell Offshore Drilling Leases, and It’s Tanking Profits for Taxpayers
Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement/Flickr Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. The largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in US history, which included all available areas in the Gulf of Mexico, garnered only tepid interest from oil and gas companies on Wednesday. Industry and government representatives called the results encouraging and consistent. Critics…
Scientists May Have Found the Secret Environmental Factor Behind Your Personality
This story was originally published by CityLab and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 1748, the French philosopher Montesquieu published The Spirit of the Laws, a survey of political systems that argued for the separation of powers and citizens’ rights to due process. It was quickly translated into multiple languages, and Montesquieu’s ideas about liberty…
How America’s Brutal 15-Year War in Iraq Changed Its Environment Forever
For decades, Iraq has struggled with water reductions as a result of dams in neighboring Turkey. But the Ilisu dam, a controversial new hydropower station set to begin operations in the coming months on the Tigris in southeast Turkey, could reduce the river’s flow into Iraq by 56 percent, according to an Iranian official who…
Columbia River Tribes Step Up Battle Against Fossil Fuels
Hundreds of protesters blockade Puget Sound Energy’s liquefied natural gas facility under construction at the Port of Tacoma, Washington, in December 2017. This protest followed a non-guilty ruling of two protesters who chained themselves to equipment at the site on May 17. They were acquitted since it could not be determined whether they were on…
Industry Kills Nearly 40 Million Birds Per Year. The Trump Administration Doesn’t Think That’s Enough.
Louisiana Governors Office/Planet Pix/ZUMA Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. This story was originally published by Reveal and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. From the cockpit of a Cessna airplane, Gary Mowad, a special agent for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, spotted what looked like a dried-out pond in rural…
This is What a West Without Water Will Look Like
Kevin E. Schmidt/Zuma Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. The Southwest United States is wrapping up an abnormally dry winter. Nearly all of Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California are facing drought conditions in 2018. About a quarter of the West’s drinking water relies on melting snow, which has been in short…