By Emma Foehringer Merchant

In recent decades, as water has grown increasingly precious, Californians have tried countless ways to find more of it and make it last longer, including covering agricultural canals with solar panels to prevent evaporation, building costly desalination plants and pulling out tracts of water-hungry grass. 

By Victoria St. Martin

Dereliction of Beauty: First in a series on how lax regulation of beauty care products victimizes women of color.

By Phil McKenna and Peter Aldhous

Preliminary atmospheric monitoring data from a remote South Korean island off China’s east coast shows elevated concentrations of hydrofluorocarbon-23 (HFC-23), a greenhouse gas 14,700 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a pound-for-pound basis, according to the World Meteorological Association. 

By Bob Berwyn

Research released this week raises new questions about how much more Earth may warm, or cool, if and when human carbon dioxide emissions zero out. Best estimates to date suggest that the global surface temperature would stabilize within a few decades, but the new paper in the journal Frontiers in Science examines the uncertainties around that conclusion, including how the planet’s key carbon dioxide-absorbing systems, like forests and oceans, will respond. 

Interview by Steve Curwood, "Living on Earth"

From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Host Steve Curwood with Penn State geologist Richard Alley.

By Amy Green

ORLANDO, Fla.—It used to be the water spilled over Lake Okeechobee’s southern shore, flowing eventually into the sawgrass prairies of the Florida Everglades. For thousands of years the marsh vegetation flourished and died here in an endless cycle, the plant remains falling beneath the slow-coursing water to form a rich layer of organic soil called peat.

By Kristoffer Tigue

After half a decade of failed attempts, Kathleen Campbell thought 2021 would finally be the year she retired. That is—until she received a letter in December from Navigator CO2 Ventures.

By Liza Gross

Young children go to schools within just 200 feet of farms where pesticides are likely to be sprayed, a new analysis of farms across the country has found. Although most states have laws restricting how and when pesticides can be applied near schools, pesticide companies and their allies in Congress are trying to preempt such laws, the report warned.

By Bob Berwyn

During the past year, the needles on the climate dashboard for global ice melt, heatwaves, ocean temperatures, coral die-offs, floods and droughts all tilted far into the red warning zone. In summer and fall, monthly global temperature anomalies spiked beyond most projections, helping to drive those extremes, and they may not level off anytime soon, said James Hansen, lead author of a study published today in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change that projects a big jump in the rate of warming in the next few decades.

By Dan Gearino and Aydali Campa

The shift to electric vehicles is looking better today for U.S. auto workers than it did before a strike against the three major Detroit automakers, thanks to agreements that expand the reach of the United Auto Workers to include battery manufacturing plants.