This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!
Top EPA Official 'Bullied' Scientist to Change Congressional Testimony
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) chief of staff pressured the leader of its Board of Scientific Counselors to change her congressional testimony to downplay the impact of the agency's mass dismissal of scientists from the board, the New York Times reports.
According to emails obtained by the Times, EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson requested that Dr. Deborah Swackhamer, a retired science and public policy professor, keep to agency "talking points" on the dismissals ahead of a May 23 appearance before the House Science Committee.
Jackson also requested Swackhamer tell the committee a "decision had not yet been made" on final dismissals, despite notices being sent to multiple scientists earlier that month.
"I was stunned that he was pushing me to 'correct' something in my testimony," Swackhamer told the Times. "I was factual, and he was not. I felt bullied."
For a deeper dive:
For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for daily Hot News.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
In 2018, there were about 5 million electric cars on the road globally. It sounds like a large number, but with well over a billion cars worldwide, electric vehicles are still only a small percentage.
Nestlé, the world's largest food company, said it will invest up to $2 billion to address the plastic waste crisis that it is largely responsible for.
Screen Time: Conclusions About Effects of Digital Media Are Often Incomplete, Irrelevant or Wrong
By Byron Reeves, Nilam Ram and Thomas N. Robinson
There's a lot of talk about digital media. Increasing screen time has created worries about media's impacts on democracy, addiction, depression, relationships, learning, health, privacy and much more. The effects are frequently assumed to be huge, even apocalyptic.
By Raphael Tsavkko Garcia
Rarely has something so precious fallen into such unsafe hands. Since Jair Bolsonaro took the Brazilian presidency in 2019, the Amazon, which makes up 10 percent of our planet's biodiversity and absorbs an estimated 5 percent of global carbon emissions, has been hit with a record number of fires and unprecedented deforestation.
Trending
Microsoft announced ambitious new plans to become carbon negative by 2030 and then go one step further and remove by 2050 all the carbon it has emitted since the company was founded in 1975, according to a company press release.