(AL AR FL GA KY LA MS NC PR SC TN)
"High winds drove a wildfire into an eastern Washington neighborhood, forcing the evacuation of about 1,500 people and destroying at least 15 homes, officials said Wednesday."
"There’s an increasingly narrow strip of New Orleans marshland that hardly anyone lives on, but without it, hundreds of thousands of people will face far greater risks from storms and floods."
"The Trump administration urged a federal court on Monday to dismiss an environmental lawsuit against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, saying the company’s Grok government model and the data centers that power it are crucial to national security. The NAACP alleges that xAI has rushed to build and continue expanding its Colossus Gas Plant in vulnerable and heavily Black communities near the Tennessee-Mississippi border without legally required permits or pollution controls."
"The Orlando plant had been scheduled for retirement in 2025. The order cited an energy emergency related to a shortage of facilities and proliferation of data centers."
"In the days after Hurricane Helene devastated the southern Appalachians in late September 2024, Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent Tracy Swartout went up in a helicopter to survey the damage. What she saw was deeply troubling. 'When Helene happened, we ended up with 58 landslides spread across 200 linear miles of the parkway,' Swartout says."
"In this rural Alabama community, some residents can’t flush their toilets. Developers want to build a state-of-the-art data center next door."
“The carmaker will follow Tesla in making components for large batteries used by electric utilities, data centers and other businesses to handle fluctuations in power supply and demand.”
The growing disconnect between climate risk and risk insurance for homeowners is leaving millions on the knife-edge of economic disaster. But the latest TipSheet suggests that reality offers environmental journalists an opportunity to navigate the morass, community by community. Get more than a dozen story ideas and reporting resources in the latest column.
“Necropsy reports from sloths imported by a planned Orlando tourist attraction document stressed animals riddled with bacteria, parasites and viruses. Scientists say the situation is a warning about the threat the booming wildlife trade poses to human health.”
"A developing El Nino that is forecast to get quite strong will likely dampen the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season, but it won’t make the potentially deadly storms disappear, federal and outside meteorologists predict."
