Two Louisiana activists face felony charges of “terrorizing” a lobbyist for the state’s oil and gas industry after they dropped off a package of plastic “nurdles” on his doorstep. 

Yosemite National Park concessionaire Aramark fires its VP of operations after he films himself hitting golf balls into Ahwahnee Meadow.  

A bison in Yellowstone National Park gores a 72-year-old California woman after she repeatedly approaches within 10 feet of it to take a photo. 

The white-throated sparrow changes its song.  

Tesla overtakes Toyota to become the world’s most valuable automaker.  

California mandates electric trucks and vans beginning in 2024. 

Most food waste is now banned from trash and landfills in Vermont. Residents are expected to compost their scraps or take them to transfer stations.  

Chesapeake Energy, once the second-largest oil and gas producer in the US, files for bankruptcy. 

Coronavirus cases skyrocket across the US after many states reopen prematurely; more than 128,000 people have died. Globally, COVID-19 deaths top half a million.  

Amtrak ridership during the COVID-19 pandemic is down 97 percent.  

A new strain of flu emerging in China that is carried by swine and is unrelated to SARS-CoV-2 has “pandemic potential.” 

President Trump’s nomination of radical property-rights attorney William Perry Pendley to lead the Bureau of Land Management is imperiled by Pendley’s description of the Black Lives Matter movement (“a lie that spread like cancer through inner cities”). 

A Nevada judge orders rancher Cliven Bundy to pay $92,000 in attorneys’ fees to the Center for Biological Diversity, which intervened in Bundy’s “simply delusional” lawsuit to force the federal government to relinquish ownership of 56 million acres of public lands. In a separate action, a federal appeals court ends a “malicious prosecution” lawsuit brought by Cliven’s son Ryan Bundy against federal officials in connection with their attempt to get the Bundys to pay outstanding fees for grazing their cattle on federal land.  

Geologists find that a period of extreme cold following the eruption of the Okmok volcano in the Aleutian Islands in 43 B.C. may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Republic and the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt.  

In Siberia, 2.85 million acres of forest are burning. 

The South Pole is warming three times faster than the rest of the planet.  

Amazon owner Jeff Bezos renames Seattle’s hockey stadium “Climate Pledge Arena.”

The Department of Energy offers $122 million for “novel uses of coal.”