"Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key centrist Democrat, announced on Wednesday that he had agreed to include hundreds of billions of dollars for climate and energy programs and tax increases in a package to subsidize health care and lower the cost of prescription drugs, less than two weeks after abruptly upending hopes for such an agreement this summer."
"The federal government is conducting a review of four dams on a Maine river that could result in a lifeline for the last wild Atlantic salmon in the U.S."
"The water that comes out of the tap for more than 900,000 Californians is unsafe to drink and the state isn’t acting fast enough to help clean it up, state auditors said in a report released Tuesday."
"The Midwest grid operator approved 18 new high-voltage transmission lines yesterday, setting the stage for adding 53 gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid. The decision marks the most U.S. power lines ever approved at once and was hailed by climate advocates as a model for the nation."
"More than 175 environmental organizations sent a letter Tuesday to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg urging him to adopt a federal rule that requires state and city transportation departments to measure and set standards for their greenhouse gas emissions."
"The American Wild Horse Campaign today released a report the group says shows that since 2019 at least 840 animals removed from federal rangelands, placed into holding pens and corrals, and adopted into private care were later sold at livestock auctions that included known buyers from slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico."
""It’s a green light for the conventional oil and gas industry to continue to do what they’ve done, which is abandon these wells whenever they feel like it.""
"The Justice Department opened an investigation against the city of Houston on Friday to determine whether complaints of illegal dumping — including dead bodies and animals — in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods amount to civil rights violations."
"If President Joe Biden declares a national climate emergency, the Pentagon is likely to get a sudden influx of money to start working on its long list of resilience and adaptation projects, observers say."
A new World Trade Organization agreement to limit global overfishing may yield important stories for environmental journalists, as billions of people around the world rely on already heavily exploited fish stocks as their main source of protein. This Backgrounder offers details on the pact and how it tries to address the problem, while providing resources for your reporting.
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