california

For the first time in 14 years, there will be no commercial and recreational Chinook salmon fishing for much of the California and Oregon coast this season.

In a swift manner of action, California has passed a law that prohibits companies from price gouging at the gas pump, meaning companies will face civil penalties for hiking up fuel costs. The new bill also establishes an independent watchdog division within the California Energy Commission (CEC) and gives CEC authority to impose penalties as […]

In 2020, University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, scientist David Valentine used a deep-sea robot to confirm that the largest dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) maker in the U.S. had dumped tens of thousands of barrels of the toxic pesticide off the Los Angeles coast. “Holy crap. This is real,” Valentine told the Los Angeles Times of his […]

Torrential storms soaked California and set off flooding across the state this weekend. The heavy rainfall was caused by one of the many atmospheric river events to hit the state this winter. Californians have seen hundreds of inches of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains and rain elsewhere in the state since January. Atmospheric rivers, long, narrow bands of moisture in the atmosphere that extend from the tropics, are responsible for most of the flood damage in the United States.

Your child could go to gym class on Monday morning and play soccer on a field that was sprayed over the weekend with 2,4-D, a toxic weedkiller that has been investigated as possibly causing cancer. Alternatively, the school grounds may have been treated with a lower-toxicity weedkiller. Or maybe the grounds were managed with safe, nontoxic products and techniques.

The usually mild West Coast is seeing an unusually snowy winter, with flakes falling from Portland, Oregon to Phoenix.  In California, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for 13 counties Wednesday as back-to-back storms have buried mountain communities.  “This rain and snow bucked the trend and it’s highly unexpected,” meteorologist and former National […]

The Laguna Beach, California, city council has voted to ban the sale and public use of balloons — inflated with helium or not — in order to stop a major source of marine trash and reduce the risk of wildfires. Starting next year, all balloons in the community of 23,000 will be prohibited from being […]

A new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects 54% of new electric-generating capacity in the U.S. to come from solar energy for 2023. Developers are planning to add 54.5 gigawatts of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity to the country’s power grid this year, most of it being solar, according to EIA’s Preliminary Monthly Electric […]