The increased frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation presents environmental reporters with challenging coverage of flooding, property damage, insurance shortfalls and risk to human life, as well as about the climate change driving the downpours. The latest TipSheet offers context, story ideas and resources to cover such big storms in your area.
"Texas officials claimed that no prisoners have been killed by heat. A new report shows they're wrong." "In the dozens of Texas prisons that don’t have air conditioning, new research shows that 13 percent of deaths during the six hottest months every year from 2001 through 2019 were likely due to extreme heat."
"The National Park Service dropped an unusual warning recently, urging visitors to stop licking toads."
"Five years ago, when ExxonMobil came calling, city officials eagerly signed over a large portion of their water supply so the oil giant could build a $10 billion plant to make plastics out of methane gas."
"Two culprits have pushed this keystone species to the brink in New Mexico."
"For at least two days before a pipe exploded at its Texas gas export terminal, Freeport LNG had been trying to figure out what was wrong, records show. The June 8 blast forced the plant to close and took almost a fifth of U.S. liquefied natural gas exports offline."
The lesser prairie-chicken is in dire need of protection, but a decision on listing it under the Endangered Species Act is months overdue. Environmental reporter Mike Smith looks at the causes and potential consequences of the bureaucratic delay and muses on whether this unique bird will go the way of its even more imperiled relative, the Attwater’s prairie-chicken.
"With a megadrought persisting in the Southwest, El Paso and other cities on the Rio Grande are scrambling to find alternative sources of water and are turning to innovative approaches — desalination, transporting water via pipelines, and “toilet-to-tap” wastewater recycling."
Concerns about seaborne plastic waste go back decades, but science writer Juli Berwald suggests that myths and disinformation about sources and solutions continue to cloud the waters. From lentil-sized nurdles to sprawling fishing nets, 200 million tons of plastic now fill the ocean and, for her, it has become evident that the ocean plastics story is really a land story. But will the newly signed international treaty on plastics offer relief?
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