At Pennsylvania’s current rate of spending, it will take the state thousands of years to cap its 200,000 methane-leaking abandoned oil and gas wells. 

The Senate passes the Great American Outdoors Act with a large bipartisan majority. The act will provide $9.5 billion for maintenance of the national parks and $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund from royalties from offshore oil and gas.  

Wind and rain deposit microparticles of plastic on even the most remote parks and wilderness areas of the United States. 

The American Thoracic Society says that the use of tear gas against demonstrators likely worsens the spread of COVID-19. 

Air pollution and heat from a warming climate makes it more likely that children—especially those born to African American mothers—will be premature, underweight, or stillborn. 

COVID-19 deaths in the United States surpass 118,000, more than the number of Americans who died in World War I. 

More than 100,000 oil and gas workers have lost their jobs since the start of the pandemic, and the number of working drilling rigs is the lowest on record.  

Three out of four Texas oil and gas executives say that a Joe Biden presidency is a greater threat to their economic well-being than oversupply, plummeting prices, the coronavirus pandemic, or an economic depression.  

May 2020 ties with May 2016 as the warmest on record.

Starting July 1, Swiss federal officials are required to travel to work meetings by train rather than plane when available. 

Rafiki, a 25-year-old mountain gorilla well known to tourists visiting Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, is killed. Four local men are arrested and face life imprisonment.  

The EPA declines to regulate perchlorate, a rocket fuel ingredient linked to fetal brain damage that contaminates some drinking-water supplies. 

Canada’s Trans Mountain pipeline spills more than 50,000 gallons of oil over the aquifer that the Sumas First Nation relies on for drinking water. 

The US Supreme Court rules that the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline can cross the Appalachian Trail. 

Pacific Gas & Electric pleads guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with California’s 2018 Camp Fire.  

US-raised, US Fish and Wildlife Service–approved beluga caviar is ready for market. Caviar from wild beluga sturgeon has been banned in the United States since 2005.  

A paper in the Astrophysical Journal concludes that the Milky Way galaxy contains 36 ongoing intelligent civilizations.  

Logitech is the first tech company to list the carbon footprint of its products on labels.  

A mountain lion prowls San Francisco for several days until it is captured and deported.