A bid for legal personhood for Happy the Bronx Zoo elephant is rejected.

The rover Perseverance comes across a piece of its own landing gear. It may be the first piece of litter on Mars. 

Every hour, a large coal mine in Russia emits 95 tons of the powerful greenhouse-gas methane. By comparison, the catastrophic methane leak at Aliso Canyon, California, in 2015–16 was 60 tons per hour. 

Between the war in Ukraine and worldwide climate shocks, 49 million people face famine in the coming months.

Despite a US ban on imports of Russian oil, a new study says that it is still getting through after rerouting through India.

For the first time, gas prices top $5 a gallon nationally.

President Joe Biden accuses the major oil companies of profiteering from the high price of gasoline, saying that ExxonMobil “made more money than God” last year. Exxon’s profits are expected to nearly double this year, to $43 billion. 

Mexico City is buried in hail by a freak June storm.

Yellowstone National Park evacuates all visitors and nonresidents following extreme flooding in the park’s northern area precipitated by a climate-driven “atmospheric river.” Parts of the park may be closed all summer.

The tundra is burning in Alaska, threatening the Native village of St. Mary’s.

Sriracha announces a shortage of its hot sauce due to climatic conditions in Mexico affecting the supply of chile peppers. New Mexico’s famous Hatch green chiles are also threatened by rising heat.

In the midst of a heat wave, Texas is saved from blackouts because of strong performances by its wind and solar sectors. 

The William H. Zimmer coal-fired power plant in Moscow, Ohio, closes. It was originally intended to be a nuclear plant, and its owners are now considering repurposing it for renewables or grid-scale battery storage.

The Bureau of Land Management okays two large solar facilities in the Southern California desert in an area identified during the Obama administration as suitable for renewable energy projects.

 By 2030, Rhode Island will only allow the sale of renewable energy.

Australia’s new government promises to reduce carbon emissions by 43 percent (below 2005 levels) by 2030.

UNESCO designates 11 new biosphere reserves, in nine countries, including, for the first time, Chad, Georgia, and Zambia.

Two suspects are said to have confessed to the murders of Guardian journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, who had gone missing in the Amazon while researching a book on the area, home to the world’s largest number of uncontacted Indigenous people. Pereira had helped to stop illegal gold mining and poaching in the region.  

A shopper in South London unpacking his groceries finds a live Hispaniolan tree frog among his bananas, 4,000 miles from its home in the Dominican Republic.