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Page Updated:
April 7, 2023

• • Black Residents Want This Company Gone From Africatown

  Will Alabama’s Environmental Agency Approve a New Permit?
  
  

  Apr. 4, 2024 -In the historic Africatown community, residents say an asphalt plant has turned life on Chin Street into a living hell for 25 years. When the state’s Department of Environmental Management held a hearing in February to consider a permit renewal, they saw an opportunity.

  Click now to read on.

• • The Nation’s First ‘Green Bank’ Network

  White House Awards
  $20 Billion to It
  
  

  Apr. 4, 2024 -At least 70 percent of the funds will go to disadvantaged communities, the administration said, while 20 percent will go to rural communities and more than 5 percent will go to tribal communities.

  Click now for the rest of the story.

• • Helping Marginalized Communities Go Solar

  How Big-Box Stores
  and Schools Can Assist
  
  

  Apr. 3, 2024 -Across the nation, strip malls, schools, factories, and other big, nonresidential buildings bask in the sun — a powerful, and too often wasted, source of electricity that could serve the neighborhoods that surround them.

  Installing solar panels on these vast rooftops could provide one-fifth of the power that disadvantaged communities need, bringing renewable energy to people who can least afford it,

• • Reducing Oil and Gas Waste on Public and Tribal Lands

  Interior Department Finalizes
  Rule to Get That Done

  (U.S. Department of the Interior), Mar. 27, 2024, The Department of the Interior today announced a final rule from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that will curb the waste of natural gas during the production of oil and gas on federal and Tribal lands. This final rule modernizes regulations that are more than 40 years old and will hold oil and gas companies accountable by requiring measures to avoid wasteful practices and find and fix leaks, while ensuring that American taxpayers and Tribal mineral owners are fairly compensated through royalty payments.

  By building on technological advances and best management practices to help reduce waste, the rule is expected to generate more than $50 million in additional natural gas royalty payments each year to the federal taxpayer and Tribal mineral owners, while conserving billions of cubic feet of gas that might otherwise have been vented, flared, or leaked from oil and gas operations. This conserved gas will be available to power American homes and industries.

• • White House: Good-paying Clean Energy Jobs Are on the Rise

  Biden Administration Touts Climate Policy Investments and Achievements
  
  

  Mar. 12, 2024 -With November’s presidential election looming large, the Biden Administration is highlighting the successes of its climate policy. In a sprawling fact sheet, the White House says “President Biden has delivered on the most ambitious climate, conservation, and environmental justice agenda in history—taking bold action to reduce climate pollution across every sector of the economy, protecting more than 26 million acres of lands and waters, and restoring the vital role of science in guiding federal decision-making.”

  Click now to read on.

• • Uranium Mining Gets Pushback From Tribes
  

  Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Describe Harms Uranium Mining Has Had on Them
  
  

  Mar. 10, 2024 - As spiking uranium prices drive a surge of proposals for new mines, the Navajo Nation joined the Ute Mountain Ute, Havasupai, Northern Arapaho and Oglala Sioux tribes in a commission hearing with federal officials to push back against mining on and near their lands.

  Click now for the rest of the story.

• • Global Warming Is Particularly Bad for Women-Led Families

  But There Are Ways to Fix It
  
  

  Mar. 5, 2024 -Extreme heat is making some of the world’s poorest women poorer.

  That is the stark conclusion of a report, released Tuesday, by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, based on weather and income data in 24 low- and middle-income countries.

  The report adds to a body of work that shows how global warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, can magnify and worsen existing social disparities.

• • Ramped Up Green New Deal Lands in Pittsburgh

  A National Tour is Calling For It
  
  

  Feb. 28, 2024 -At stops across the country, environmental groups are joining local activists and politicians pushing for investments in union climate jobs to boost communities suffering from decades of environmental injustice.

  About 130 people rallied under a tent in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Plaza on Thursday afternoon, sheltering from rain on what Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), a progressive elected last year, described as a “quintessential Pittsburgh day.”

• • N.Y. State Sues JBS, the Brazilian Beef Giant

  The Suit is Over Climate Concerns
  
  

  Feb. 28, 2024 -The New York attorney general, Letitia James, on Wednesday sued JBS USA, the American arm of the world’s largest meatpacker, accusing the company of making misleading statements about its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The lawsuit is a major setback for JBS, which is based in Brazil, as it pursues a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

  The lawsuit alleges that JBS has made a series of deceptive statements about its record on climate change, including claims that it will achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.

• • Environmental Justice Activist Wants Immediate
  Help for Two Historically Black Alabama Communities
  

  Robert Bullard is Committed to Justice for the Shiloh community
  
  

  Feb. 27, 2024 -As federal officials continue their civil rights investigation of the Alabama Department of Transportation, a White House environmental advisor says more could be done for Black Alabamians.

  Bullard, a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, traveled to Washington on Wednesday with residents from the unincorporated community of Shiloh in Coffee County to push for a more “rapid response.”

• • 2024 Is the Year of Environmental
  Justice for an Inundated Shiloh, Alabama
  

  Environmental Justice Scholar Dr. Robert Bullard Speaks At the Hip Hop Caucus' Inaugural
  
  

  Feb. 24, 2024 -Back in 1979, Robert Bullard was a freshly minted Ph.D. sociologist at Texas Southern University, researching segregated residential housing.

  One day, his then-wife Linda McKeever Bullard came home to announce she had sued the state of Texas, Harris County and the City of Houston. Her case cited civil rights laws to fight the siting of a municipal waste dump in the middle of a predominantly Black middle-class neighborhood.

• • California Pesticide Regulators’ Lax
  Oversight Violates Civil Rights Laws
  

  A “People’s Tribunal” Urged California’s Attorney General to Investigate
  
  

  Feb. 20, 2024 -A broad coalition of pesticide-reform groups representing California farmworkers and their families called on the state attorney general to investigate systematic civil rights violations last week at a press briefing in Watsonville, a strawberry-growing stronghold about 90 miles south of San Francisco.

  Click now for the rest of the story.

• • Overturning a Tribal Land in
  Northern Wisconsin Shutdown Order
  

  A “Hail Mary” Legal Tactic By the Pipeline Company Invokes A 1977 Treaty Between the U.S. and Canada
  
  

  Feb. 20, 2024 -Eleven years after easements for a pipeline buried beneath the Bad River reservation in northern Wisconsin expired, five years after the tribe first sounded alarms over the risk of an imminent oil spill into their namesake river and eight months after a federal judge ordered a shutdown, Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge was back in federal court last week arguing that the flow of oil through its 71-year-old Line 5 pipeline be allowed to continue.

  Click now for the rest of the story.

• • Some Americans Can’t Flush Their Toilets
  

  A Federal Program Aimed at Helping Solve That Problem Is Expanding
  
  

  Feb. 14, 2024 -Catherine Coleman Flowers has seen it all firsthand.

  She’s been to homes across the state where Alabamians can’t flush their toilets, the result of failing or nonexistent wastewater infrastructure.

  She can tell you about the families in the state’s Black Belt whose children suffer from increased risk of pathogenic E. coli due to exposure through well water to raw sewage from failing wastewater systems nearby.

• • 30 Years of U.S. Environmental
  Justice in Port Arthur, Texas
  

  A Dream Deferred
  
  

  Feb. 11, 2024 -Downtown Port Arthur has the feel of a ghost town, until you look to the horizon.

  Boarded-up buildings stand next to vacant lots, like missing teeth in a smile that faded decades ago. There are few people on the sidewalks, and 10 minutes can pass before a single car drives by on Proctor Street, where parades once drew crowds celebrating a float boasting, “Port Arthur Oils The World.”

  Click now to learn all about it.

• • $1 Million Defamation Verdict Resonates
  in a Still-Contentious Climate Science World

  A D.C. Jury Hands a Win to the Climate Scientist Behind the ‘Hockey Stick’ Graph, But...
  
  

  Feb. 9, 2024 -In winning a $1 million verdict against a pair of right-wing bloggers on Thursday, climate scientist Michael Mann scored a victory that is reverberating through a world of climate discourse that many say is no less disputatious than when the bloggers penned their attacks 12 years ago.

  Click now for the rest of the story.

• • Green Cooling and Heating for Boston Public Housing

  The Milestones Include Advancements in the Company’s Hydrogen-Enabling Technologies,
  
  

  Feb. 9, 2024 -To help address the climate crisis the city of Boston is piloting the replacement of natural gas with ground-source heat pumps in a public housing project. The technology brings fossil-free cooling and heating as well as cleaner air to historically disadvantaged tenants. Host Jenni Doering speaks with Kenzie Bok, the Administrator of the Boston Housing Authority.

  Click now to read or listen to the story.

• • Environmental Regulators Rush to Aid Disinvested Communities
  

  A Year Before Biden’s
  First Term Ends
  
  

  Feb. 6, 2024 -The EPA wants to get the funds to environmental justice communities before the election in keeping with President Biden’s promise to address historic injustices.

  Click now for the rest of the story.

• • Bayer Ordered to Pay $2.25 Billion in Damages

  Their Shares Fall Nearly 6%
  
  

  Jan. 29, 2024 -Shares in Bayer (BAYGn.DE), opens new tab dropped as much as 5.7% on Monday after the embattled German company was ordered to pay $2.25 billion in damages, the highest amount yet in its ongoing litigation linked to an alleged carcinogenic effect of its Roundup weedkiller.

  A jury in a Philadelphia court on Friday ordered Bayer to pay $2.25 billion to a Pennsylvania man who said he developed cancer from exposure to the Roundup weedkiller, based on the chemical glyphosate.

• • El Paso Challenges Oil Refinery Permit

  Marathon Petroleum Is the Culprit
  
  

  Jan. 19, 2024 -Fred Borrego wants Marathon Petroleum to test the soil in his neighborhood, a district of small homes, churches and businesses around the company’s 97-year-old refinery in south-central El Paso.

  Click now for the rest of the story.

• • Indigenous Solutions to the Carbon Divide

  ‘It is All About Listening and Sharing’
  
  

  Jan. 15, 2024 -Like most climate heroes, Francy Baniwa does not consider herself anything of the sort. A writer and activist of the Baniwa people from the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous territory in the Brazilian Amazon, she is part of a community of 25,000 people which protects an area of rainforest the size of Scotland.

  Click now for more.

• • Low-Income Americans
  Struggle for Access to Clean Energy

  Utility Bills Keep on Rising
  
  

  Jan. 11, 2024 -The Biden administration has deployed various programs to try to increase access to clean energy. But systems that could help lower bills are still out of reach for many low-income households.

  Click now to read on.

• • Selby Gardens New Energy-Efficient Campus

  First Phase Has Been Launched
  
  

  Jan. 10, 2024 -After years of controversy, neighborhood protests, negotiations with the city of Sarasota, revised plans and delays caused by the COVID pandemic, Selby Botanical Gardens opened the first phase of its remodeled downtown Sarasota campus Tuesday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, tours and toasts led by garden leaders, major donors and Sarasota city officials.

  The opening, which board of trustees chair Joel Morganroth called a “momentous day in the history of Selby Gardens,” came two and a half years after a groundbreaking in June 2021