California’s energy-storage capacity surpasses that of Australia, making it the largest in the world. At the start of 2020, the state had 136 megawatts of battery storage and is expected to have 923 megawatts by year’s end.

Sixty percent of US coal-fired power plants are now slated for retirement.

The number of US COVID-19 deaths nears 200,000.  

Smoke from fires on the West Coast covers most of the country, stretching from Canada to Hawai’i. 

Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of migratory songbirds are dying in New Mexico. Smoke from the wildfires and an early snowfall are blamed. 

The FBI refutes rumors on social media that people from Antifa are setting fires in Oregon. Another rumor accuses Antifa of training raccoons to attack hikers. 

The home of Frank Girod, one of the Oregon Republican state senators who fled the state last year to deny a quorum for a climate bill, burns to the ground in the Beachie Fire.  

With the fires still raging, President Donald Trump visits California and blames the blazes on poor forest management, not climate change. “It will start to get cooler,” Trump said. “Just you watch.” 

A man who started a wildfire in 2019 in Grand Canyon National Park when he burned his toilet paper is fined $53,000. 

For the first time in its 175-year history, Scientific American endorses a presidential candidate: Joe Biden. 

Hurricane Sally soaks the Gulf Coast with extreme rain. Rapidly intensifying, slow-moving storms like it are signatures of climate change. 

There are so many Atlantic hurricanes this year that forecasters are running out of names for them.

A chunk of ice the size of San Francisco breaks off from Greenland’s 79 N Glacier. 

The Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers in Antarctica are becoming increasingly unstable and unmoored, with the buffers that kept them from flowing into the sea disintegrating. 

The Arctic is rapidly transitioning from a “dominantly frozen state” to a new climate marked by rain and open water instead of snow and ice. 

The dramatic reduction in Arctic sea ice is leading to increased predation by orcas on endangered bowhead whales. 

The EPA postpones an internal speaker series about environmental justice and structural racism after Trump labels it a “divisive, un-American propaganda training session.”  

Wyoming Republican representative Liz Cheney asks the Justice Department to investigate whether anti-fracking efforts by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups are linked to Russia or China. 

The discovery of phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus suggests the presence of life.