The Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, above the Arctic Circle, records a temperature of 100.4°F, which if verified would be the hottest ever recorded that far north. 

Norway wants to open 125 new offshore blocks to oil exploration in what critics call an “insanely irresponsible” expansion of its drilling efforts. Half of the blocks would be the northernmost offshore-drilling operations in the world.  

The US Interior Department wants to open nearly 19 million acres of Arctic Alaska to oil drilling. 

Alaska’s congressional delegation accuses major US banks that refuse to fund Arctic oil drilling of discrimination against Alaska Natives.  

A warmer Arctic allows wolf spiders to lay two egg clutches per summer rather than one.  

Under pressure from climate change deniers, Facebook has stopped fact-checking climate disinformation, deeming it “opinion.” 

Patagonia, REI, The North Face, and other major brands pledge not to buy ads on Facebook and Instagram in July as part of #StopHateForProfit. The campaign is organized by civil rights organizations including the NAACP and ADL, protesting the platforms’ refusal to take down hateful content and disinformation. 

More than 122,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19. On June 24, there were 45,557 new cases in the US, the highest single-day total thus far.  

Reduced traffic during stay-at-home orders in three states reduced wildlife fatalities by 21 to 56 percent. In California, mountain lion deaths were down by more than half.  

Lassen National Park returns to full operation, while Yosemite slows its reopening.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks remove mentions of Robert E. Lee from signage and other materials. (The General Robert E. Lee tree, the 11th-largest tree on Earth, located in Kings Canyon, can only be renamed by Congress or the National Park Service director.) 

US Park Police are involved in new violent clashes with protesters in Washington, DC’s Lafayette Square. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt wants to use the National Guard to protect the city’s monuments and statutes.  

The National Park Service is going ahead with President Trump’s planned Independence Day fireworks celebration at Mount Rushmore despite abnormally dry conditions and high fire risk in South Dakota’s Black Hills.

The abandoned school bus where Christopher McCandless lived in his Alaska wilderness ordeal is removed by officials. Pilgrims to the site, made famous by John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, have required 15 search-and-rescue operations; two of them perished. 

Sweden and Austria have stopped using coal power.  

The Vatican urges all Catholics to divest from armament makers and fossil fuel companies.  

Bayer says it will pay more than $10 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits from people alleging that their cancers were caused by Roundup, the company’s glyphosate-based herbicide.  

A massive cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert approaches the southeastern United States.

More US coal capacity has been retired under Donald Trump than in Barack Obama’s entire second term. 

Southeast Asia’s langur monkeys are found to belong to three separate species, not one, as previously believed. Two of those species are immediately ranked among the world’s most endangered primates. 

A whistleblower tells Congress that the Justice Department’s antitrust investigation of four automakers who agreed to meet California’s strict emission standards against Trump’s wishes “did not appear to be in good faith.”  

A federal judge rules that California Republican representative Devin Nunes cannot sue Twitter over mocking tweets by a fictional cow.