Environmental News ICYMI

A weekly roundup for busy people

By Paul Rauber

June 2, 2017

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ILLUSTRATION BY PETER ARKLE 

The U.S. Department of Energy removes references to “clean energy” from its websites. 

President Donald Trump withdraws the United States from the Paris climate accord, despite pleas to the contrary from BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell.

Major financial firms join a shareholder rebellion against the management of ExxonMobil, forcing the company to report about the financial impact of climate change on the oil giant.

Asked about climate change, Representative Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) replies that, “If there’s a real problem, He [God] can take care of it.” 

Three Mile Island, the Pennsylvania nuclear power plant that suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, will close for good in 2019. A new study links specific cases of thyroid cancer to the 1979 accident. 

Mosses in Antarctica are growing three times as fast as normal. 

Maryland outlaws the routine use of agricultural antibiotics.

The Dakota Access Pipeline begins shipping oil. The Guardian reports that a spill of drilling fluids into an Ohio wetland by Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind DAPL, may have been twice as large as the reported 2 million gallons. The company is also being fined for numerous other oil leaks from its pipelines. 

Swiss company Climeworks AG opens a facility that captures carbon from the air and uses it in greenhouses to fertilize cucumbers for pickles

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