The Swiss-based operator of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany lays off all of its employees and is near bankruptcy.

A Russian assault on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine, the largest of its kind in Europe with six reactors, resulted in a fire at a training facility. According to US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, no radiation was released and the reactors were safely shut down.  

BP divests its 20 percent share in the giant Russian oil company Rosneft. ExxonMobil will abandon its last major joint project with Russia, an oil and gas development near Sakhalin Island. Shell too. 

France seizes the $600 million luxury yacht owned by Rosneft boss Igor Sechin, a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin. 

A high-level Gazprom official in St. Petersburg is found dead, said to be by suicide, the second such in as many months. 

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro cites the Russian war on Ukraine as justification for the extraction of potassium (for fertilizer) from Indigenous lands in the Amazon.

The IPCC releases a scathing new report, “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” It details the damage to people and ecosystems from climate change thus far and emphasizes the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions and keep temperature rise below 1.5°C. UN chief António Guterres: “Delay is death.”

The US Supreme Court hears arguments in a case challenging the Clean Power Plan, the EPA’s strongest tool for fighting climate change.

The San Diego, California, county board of supervisors votes to divest from fossil fuels.

Coal giant Peabody forms a renewable energy arm that will develop over 3.3 gigawatts of solar PV and 1.6 gigawatts of battery storage capacity on the sites of six former coal mines in Illinois and Indiana.

Like retiring Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe, his aide Luke Holland, who is running to succeed him, says that climate change is a hoax. 

The employees of the REI in Manhattan vote overwhelmingly to form a union.

At a United Nations meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, 175 nations say they will work toward a legally binding agreement by the end of 2024 to end plastic pollution.

A new orca calf is born to Puget Sound’s troubled Southern Resident orcas. Two other pregnancies in the whales’ J pod are known to have failed. 

Montana governor Greg Gianforte uses dogs to tree and kill a mountain lion on public land outside Yellowstone National Park. Like the wolf the governor killed under similar circumstances last year, the lion was radio collared and was being monitored by park personnel. 

FERC endorses the removal of four dams on the lower Klamath River, which could potentially open up 400 miles of free-flowing river and salmon habitat. 

Nearly half of the bald and golden eagles in the United States suffer from lead poisoning.  

The ship carrying 4,000 Porsches, Audis, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis that was flaming and adrift in the mid-Atlantic finally sinks.