Disasters

"Ships crept down the middle of the Yangtze on Friday after China’s driest summer in six decades left one of the mightiest rivers barely half its normal width and set off a scramble to contain the damage to a weak economy in a politically sensitive year."

"On a tour of increasingly parched California on Thursday, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visited a water recycling project in Irvine to tout her department’s allocation of more than $310 million to combat a Western “megadrought” fueled largely by climate change."

"The Biden administration is proposing to restore chemical safety regulations that were loosened under the Trump administration.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to reimpose certain safety requirements that apply to facilities including agricultural supply distributors, chemical manufacturers and distributors, food and beverage manufacturers and oil refineries.

"The seven states using Colorado River water likely will avoid an epic legal showdown over the most severe water cuts amid the region’s megadrought—but legal analysts say California, Nevada, and Arizona in particular will face heavy burdens to conserve."

"Global decarbonisation scenarios envisioned by oil and gas majors are incompatible with the Paris climate deal temperature goals aimed at averting devastating heating, according to research published Tuesday."

"When the Federal Emergency Management Agency overhauled its flood insurance program last year, it wanted to encourage homeowners to buy coverage by showing them more precisely the risk that each property faces of being flooded. But instead, hundreds of thousands of people have dropped the flood policies they were buying through FEMA, raising concerns that an unprecedented number of households are financially exposed to flood damage."

"An 'extreme heat belt' will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds".

"Thirty years after Hurricane Andrew demolished Homestead, Fla., another disaster looms."

"The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Monday opened a two-month window for the public to comment on a plan to dig a tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac to house Enbridge's controversial Line 5 oil pipeline."

"More than 5 billion would die from starvation in the event of a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, a new study has found."