Consumer

"After more than a century, these shellfish have reappeared along the Damariscotta River. Their return is a boon — and a warning of climate change."

"The water isn’t always brown, but Scarlet Weathers lives like it is. Not once has she drank the tap water from her kitchen sink in her house in Sweeny, Texas. She knows, like everyone else in the town, that it can’t be trusted. Even her small grandchildren have noticed it during bathtime. Why is the water brown?"

"For as long as 55-year-old Hopi Chairman Tim Nuvangyaoma has been alive, high-voltage power lines have cut across Hopi lands in northeast Arizona, carrying vast amounts of power long distances throughout the Southwest. But residents of the Hopi Reservation have never been connected to that grid."

"Arizona’s lax water laws let corporate farms pump unlimited groundwater to grow alfalfa for cattle overseas, even as local families spend their savings drilling new wells."

"Millions of women and children are at risk of losing food benefits during the shutdown. The USDA just killed the long-running survey that would track the fallout."

"For seven years N.C. activists overcame political and scientific hurdles to convince the EPA to enact PFAS regulations in drinking water. Now they’re confronting a Trump administration intent on quashing their success."

"The chair of stalled UN plastics treaty talks, Luis Vayas Valdivieso, is preparing to step down, after accounts of behind-the-scenes pressure from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep)." "In August, global talks at the UN headquarters in Geneva to agree on a treaty to deal with accelerating plastic pollution collapsed after three years of negotiations. There is currently no deal and the future of the agreement is unclear."

"A Navajo tribe-owned company bid $186,000 to lease 167 million tons of coal on federal lands in southeastern Montana on Monday in the biggest U.S. coal sale in more than a decade. The offer from the Navajo Transitional Energy Co. (NTEC) equates to one-tenth of a penny per ton, underscoring coal’s diminished value even as President Donald Trump pushes to mine and burn more of the heavily polluting fuel."

"Worldwide solar and wind power generation has outpaced electricity demand this year, and for the first time on record, renewable energies combined generated more power than coal, according to a new analysis."

"Several groups and nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit Monday against the Environmental Protection Agency over the canceling of a $7 billion Solar for All program intended to make solar power accessible to more than 900,000 lower-income Americans."