The year's top state climate laws, an ecological disaster that didn't happen, and your favorite newsletters
Welcome back to The Planet You Save, a weekly newsletter on local climate action. I'm Taylor Kate Brown and I hope you're having a good end to 2021.
This week, I'm sharing some recent & best-of-this-year local climate action stories. If this is your first newsletter, check out the archive to see what our regularly scheduled editions look like.
"Our story was no longer that Boeing appeared to be poisoning Portland; it was that Boeing had said it was poisoning Portland four years in a row — and the EPA had ignored it." This ProPublica story about an apparent ecological disaster that never actually happened (and how ProPublica ended up reporting themselves out of a story) is a good example of checking data with additional reporting and paying attention to where regulators are not paying attention.
Sammy Roth, among the best local/regional climate reporters working today, gives us some tough love on what to expect from efforts to slow climate change in 2022: "But as easy as it is to live and die with each day’s news — with every disappointing headline, frustrating tweet and panicked proclamation by the talking head on your TV screen — the story of climate change is long, as is the story of the pandemic."
The top 6 ambitious state climate laws passed in 2021 and the top state legislative issues.
The disaster we must make mundane — among my favorite climate essays by a non-climate writer this year.
"The blob": When a warming Alaska imperils a decades-old pipeline infrastructure.
The top three Planet You Save newsletters this year: The inaugural issue, what its like to travel across the country by train and what do these small-sounding numbers mean to you?