After observing her human caretakers, an orangutan named Sandra at the Center for Great Apes animal sanctuary in Florida has started washing her hands. 

There are more than 1 million COVID-19 cases worldwide, with more than 50,000 deaths. The United States nears a quarter million cases, with 5,784 deaths. 

Airplanes are disappearing from the skies. 

For the first time, a large hole in the ozone layer has opened up over the Arctic. Past ozone holes have been confined to the Antarctic. 

The COP26 climate conference, scheduled to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November, has been pushed back to 2021. The venue for the meeting has been converted into a field hospital for COVID-19 patients. 

Ammon Bundy, the anti-government militia leader who took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, is organizing against Idaho governor Brad Little's shelter-in-place order to slow the coronavirus.  

The Trump administration is rolling back the Obama-era clean car standards, the country's largest effort to address the climate crisis. The move will allow cars and trucks to emit an extra billion tons of greenhouse gases.  

US gasoline prices drop to around $2 a gallon, but motorists have nowhere to go. The CEOs of the largest oil and gas companies will meet with President Trump to seek relief. Trump orders the Department of Energy to buy 30 million barrels of domestic crude oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to prop up the domestic industry. Trump talks to "my friend" Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Russian leader Vladimir Putin and says they agreed to cut production and raise oil prices.

Despite the impossibility of public hearings on ConocoPhillip's massive Willow project in far northern Alaska, the Bureau of Land Management goes forward with the licensing process.  

For the second month in a row and only the third month ever, US energy production from renewables surpasses that from coal. 

New York's 675-megawatt Somerset coal-fired power plant, the last of its kind in the state, shuts down.

Trump declares coal a "critical industry," required to remain open during the pandemic. 

The USDA grants a waiver to a massive Foster Farms chicken plant in Kelso, Washington, allowing it to speed up its chicken-slaughtering line to 175 birds per minute and to decrease the number of federal inspectors to one. 

Despite the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration is speeding up construction of the wall on the US-Mexico border. 

After resisting for a week, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt orders the complete closure of Grand Canyon National Park.

The Interior Department revokes reservation status for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts. The tribe had sought to build a casino, which was opposed by allies of President Trump connected to other casinos in nearby Rhode Island.