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California Phasing out Herbicide Linked to Parkinson’s Disease
Pesticide manufacturers have voluntarily cancelled registrations for products containing paraquat in California — kickstarting a statewide phase-out of the controversial herbicide linked to Parkinson’s disease, according to a California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) announcement on Monday.
Paraquat has been under scrutiny for the last few years due to mounting scientific evidence connecting chronic exposure to the herbicide to Parkinson’s disease and other health problems. It is one of the most widely used herbicides in the US — largely as a tool to kill broadleaf weeds and grasses — and is used in growing soybeans, cotton, and corn as well as in growing grapes, pistachios, peanuts and other crops.
The California DPR began re-evaluating paraquat in 2024 and the department’s preliminary reports found negative impacts to the thyroid system, links to birth defects, and that the herbicide is harmful to wildlife, especially birds. The findings prompted the DPR to require additional studies from pesticide makers on these impacts, and, instead of providing that data, companies began cancelling their registrations beginning in April.
New Amazon Data Center Stokes Worry It Would Be the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.
Amazon is investing in a large-scale natural-gas-burning power plant as part of a huge data center in Texas, the company confirmed on Friday, a facility that could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States.
Amazon and other tech giants are racing to build enough data centers to keep up with surging demand for artificial intelligence services, and to secure the electricity to power them. A company spokeswoman said in a statement that its planned data center, in Pecos County, would be “powered by new on-site generation that won’t raise electricity costs for Texas families.”
The new gas-burning plant, if built to specifications, would be permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, regulatory records show, more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country.
Amazon has been struggling to meet its promise that it would effectively eliminate its planet-warming emissions by 2040 as part of the Climate Pledge, a voluntary agreement among companies that Amazon co-founded several years ago. Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas is the main driver of global warming, which is dangerously heating the planet.
Virginia Study on Data Centers Calls for Tighter Water Regulations
Virginia, the world’s largest data center hub, has released a long-delayed study that examined the state’s eastern region groundwater supply and the resource-hungry industry’s possible impact on it, finding declines are likely in a critical aquifer due to population growth and industrial use and urging stricter regulations.
Produced by environmental scientists, the report — which the state for more than six months had refused to release — said regulators should have more authority to reject industrial water withdrawal permits, force entities to examine alternative sources of water and clamp down on users who might be using more water than they should be.
The report noted limits around publicly available information on data center water use but did not lay blame with the industry for the concerns raised about the aquifer. The groundwater supply in Virginia’s populous eastern coastal plain region “is constrained, and current projections indicate declining availability in the near future,” said the report, which Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s office provided to The Associated Press Thursday.
More Than Half the Homes in East Omaha Have Unsafe Lead Levels. That Doesn’t Mean the EPA Will Clean Them Up.
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on environmental cleanup, more than half the yards in a section of Omaha, Nebraska, that used to surround a lead smelter still have enough contamination to cause high blood-lead levels in kids, according to tests by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica.
The findings were consistent across the city’s older urban core — in the historically Black neighborhoods north of downtown, the predominantly Hispanic areas to the south and the more white and affluent areas in midtown. However, homes closest to where a lead smelter and other downtown factories operated tended to have slightly higher concentrations than those farther out.
As part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, the federal government and the city of Omaha have been attempting to remove lead from Omaha’s yards since the late 1990s.
Trump Ordered to Release Billions in Climate Grants Meant for Black Communities
Dominika Parry never stopped fighting for Jackson, Mississippi, residents even after the Trump administration terminated a multibillion-dollar program last year meant to help the Black city still reeling from a water crisis. For years, if water did flow out of Black households’ faucets in Jackson at all, it was often brown. It left elders and babies with rashes and caused a slew of health problems across the city.
Parry and other community leaders and organizations got some semblance of hope in 2023 with a federal grant. Yet, two years later — before any funds could be distributed — President Donald Trump entered office and terminated a $2.8 billion program meant to help mitigate the harm from climate change and environmental issues in Black, low-income, and disadvantaged communities.
More than a year later, federal courts stepped in and rebuked the administration’s effort to dismantle climate funding. The case centers on the administration’s effort to roll back climate investments authorized by Congress under the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s cornerstone economic policy.
‘The Earth Itself Was Screaming out:’ Bay Mills Indian Community Fights Pipeline Permitting While Enveloped in Wildfire Smoke
Yale Climate Connections reported:
Whitney Gravelle spent July 15, 2026, trying to clear wildfire smoke out of tribal buildings, constructing homemade air purifiers from filters and box fans, and checking on community members with asthma and heart disease. Gravelle is the president of the Bay Mills Indian Community based on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
The same day, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy approved two key permits for Enbridge, a Canadian oil and gas company, to build a tunnel for a pipeline that runs through the Straits of Mackinac, a sacred waterway for the Bay Mills community that connects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. If fully approved, the project would allow Enbridge to operate the tunnel and pipeline through the Straits for 99 more years.
Bay Mills Indian Community has been fighting to shut down Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline for over 15 years, alongside climate action organizations and all of Michigan’s other recognized tribes. Line 5, they argue, poses extreme risks to fragile, sacred, and economically important ecosystems. And it locks Michigan into almost another century of supporting oil and gas infrastructure, even though burning oil and gas causes climate change and the state set a goal of 100% clean energy by 2040.
Glyphosate Disrupts Honeybee Brains and Reduces Foraging, Virginia Tech Study Finds
Researchers at Virginia Tech’s Department of Entomology set out to answer a question that had long lingered in the background of pollinator science: if glyphosate does not kill bees outright, could it still harm them in ways that are harder to see?
Led by Associate Professor Margaret Couvillon and Ph.D. student Laura McHenry, now a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State, the team designed an experiment using two artificial feeding stations. One contained a sucrose solution laced with glyphosate at a concentration of 5 mg acid equivalent per liter, while the other offered clean sugar water. Honeybees were trained to visit the feeders, and their behavior was monitored over several days.
Published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the study produced a striking result. After only three days, bees exposed to glyphosate reduced their foraging activity by 13.4 percent compared to their unexposed counterparts. On its own, that number might seem modest. But across a colony of tens of thousands of bees, the implications are far more serious.
