environmental

A group of volunteers joined forces to help clean up different parts of Connecticut. It’s a part of the International Coastal Cleanup Day. People of all ages participated in picking up and documenting litter across the state. The goal is to keep all lands and waterways clean including the Long Island Sound. The effort also helps preserve the state’s...

The shutdown of one of the nation’s oldest nuclear power plants last year is having a surprising, stinging consequence for a New Jersey bay considered one of the nation’s most fragile.

From guitars to traditional medicines and from tusk to tail, mankind’s exploitation of the planet’s fauna and flora is putting some of them at risk of extinction. Representatives of some 180 nations are meeting in Geneva to agree on protections for vulnerable species, taking up issues including the trade in ivory and the demand for shark fin soup. The World...

President Donald Trump says he will not impose quotas on importing uranium, backing away from a possible trade confrontation and breaking with a Commerce Department assessment that America’s use of foreign uranium raises national security concerns. The decision is unusual for Trump, who has pointed to national security concerns in calling for restrictions on foreign metal and autos in trade...

A planned forum on climate change for Democratic presidential candidates lost several major sponsors on Saturday in the wake of the left-leaning magazine The New Republic publishing — and later retracting — a vulgar and homophobic story related to gay presidential contender Pete Buttigieg. The New Republic was slated as a chief sponsor of a September event designed to spark...

Mayor Pete Buttigieg says Republican Party members are hypocrites for saying they are Christian but still putting kids in cages at the border.

Climate activists delivered a court summons Friday to oil company Shell in a court case aimed at forcing it to do more to rein in carbon emissions. Friends of the Earth Netherlands, one of the groups involved, said it wants a court in The Hague to order Shell to reduce its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2010...

Authorities on Thursday lifted a shelter-in-place order issued Thursday after high levels of benzene were detected in the air near a petrochemical storage facility outside of Houston where a fire sent a black pillar of smoke into the air for days.

Loudoun County notified Trump National Gulf Club of violations for improperly removing trees from a floodplain without a permit.

An environmental group says the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, is putting boaters at risk with the trees it cut down and dumped in the Potomac River.

Plastic knives just won’t cut it any longer, if the European Union has its way. The 28-nation bloc moved closer to banning single-use straws, plates, cutlery and cotton swabs, after officials from EU member states and the European Parliament on Wednesday backed recommendations by its executive branch designed to reduce marine pollution. Environmental campaigners have been calling for curbs on...

The Trump administration on Friday authorized use of seismic air guns to find oil and gas formations deep underneath the Atlantic Ocean floor, reversing Obama administration policies and drawing outrage from critics who say the practice can disturb or injure whales, sea turtles and other marine life. The National Marine Fisheries Service said it has authorized permits under the Marine...

The United States is already feeling the heat from climate change — and the damage could cost hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century if more preventive measures aren’t taken now, a new federal report has found. Climate change has worldwide implications as well, which also means more trouble for the United States, NBC News reported....

Gray muck is flowing into the Cape Fear River from the site of a dam breach at a Wilmington power plant where an old coal ash dump had been covered over by Florence’s floodwaters. Forecasters predicted the water will continue to rise through the weekend at the L.V. Sutton Power Station. Duke Energy spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said the utility doesn’t...

A stinking trainload of human waste from New York City that was stranded in a tiny Alabama town for more than two months, spreading a stench like a giant backed-up toilet, has been hauled away.

A stinking trainload of human waste from New York City is stranded in a tiny Alabama town, spreading a stench like a giant backed-up toilet — and the “poop train” is just the latest example of the South being used as a dumping ground for other states’ waste. In Parrish, Alabama, population 982, the sludge-hauling train cars have sat idle...

Park rangers in the world’s top cocoa producer, Ivory Coast, are waging a campaign to protect national forests from the illegal farming of the raw ingredient in chocolate. Last year the governments of Ivory Coast and other top cocoa producer Ghana, along with food giants Nestle, Mars and Hershey, pledged to work together to end deforestation in the West African...

On the outskirts of a sprawling reserve of Kenyan grasslands where endangered animals roam wild, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lavished praise on an American-funded forensics lab that tracks down elephant-poachers for prosecution, and urged aggressive action in Africa on conservation. Yet earlier this month, the Trump administration quietly lifted the U.S. ban on importing African elephant trophies, to...

Almost the entire cohort of chicks from an Adelie penguin colony in the eastern Antarctic was wiped out by starvation last summer in what scientists say is only the second such incident in over 40 years. Researchers said Sunday the mass die-off occurred because unusually large amounts of sea ice forced penguin parents to travel farther in search of food...