Japan will start releasing wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean in 2023.

China’s persecution of the Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang threatens the expansion of solar power in the United States, as the province is also a major hub of solar cell production.  

Russia is making territorial claims on the continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean, including portions already claimed by Canada and Denmark. 

As much as a third of the Antarctic ice shelf could collapse, should global temperatures increase by 4°C over preindustrial norms.

Muldrow Glacier on Mt. Denali, which has been static for more than 60 years, is surging at 100 times its normal speed.

A man gets three months in prison for shooting and killing an elephant seal on California’s Central Coast.

Giant leatherback sea turtles have declined by 80 percent or more on the US Pacific Coast, where they come to forage for jellyfish.  

Industrial noise—such as that from the compressors at gas-drilling sites—can affect the diversity and seedling recruitment of trees, even long after the noise has stopped. 

The California state senate kills a bill to outlaw fracking and to require health and safety buffers around oil and gas wells when two Democrats on a key committee abstain.  

Backers pull the plug on a proposed 415-megawatt gas-fired power plant in Umatilla County, Oregon. 

Bernie Sanders, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, invites the CEOs of BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil to testify on climate change. None agree to appear.

An oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico “many times that of the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo blowout” was narrowly avoided in the fall of 2020.

Seven men are charged in a recycling scam that involved trucking tons of cans and bottles from Las Vegas casinos to recycling centers in Southern California. 

Severe thunderstorms in Texas’s Hill Country drop grapefruit-size “gorilla hail.” 

More than 100 EPA employees have responded to administrator Michael Regan’s plea for volunteers to help care for unaccompanied children at the Mexican border.