Santa Clara County Local News: Environment

02/27/2024
The City Council unanimously agreed to stop enforcing its ban on gas infrastructure to comply with a recent decision by the Ninth Circuit Board of Appeals which struck down a similar prohibition on gas infrastructure in Berkeley in 2023.

02/26/2024
Ecologists estimate that up to 14,000 sequoias have been killed in recent wildfires. The National Park Service for the first time has begun replanting some severely burned areas.

02/22/2024
The state’s environmental tool skews which communities are designated as disadvantaged, researchers say. Some immigrant neighborhoods could be left out, while other groups are overrepresented.

02/20/2024
A temporary lake in Death Valley National Park doubled after recent rains and is now deep enough to launch a kayak. Prior to August, ghostly Lake Manly hadn’t appeared in 19 years.

02/14/2024
Foragers at the beaches in Half Moon Bay might be damaging the area’s reef.

02/05/2024
The storm fed off of unusually warm waters as it grew. It also reached “bomb cyclone” status as it neared California.

02/05/2024
A handful of super powerful tropical storms in the last decade and the prospect of more to come has a couple of experts proposing a new category of whopper hurricanes: Category 6.

01/30/2024
Monarch butterflies have a long way to go before reaching stable population numbers.

01/29/2024
What is an ARkStorm and why is everyone talking about it on social media right now?

01/29/2024
As an underground fire burns deep within Chiquita Canyon Landfill, air regulators are raising alarms over the possible spread of toxic vapors.

01/28/2024
Take a period of limited rainfall. Add heat. And you have what scientists call a “hot drought”—dry conditions made more intense by the evaporative power of hotter temperatures.

01/25/2024
Just weeks after a deal fell through to buy the Richmond Ranch for development, county leaders are moving forward with turning the open space into a massive park.

01/19/2024
A major housing project proposed in the East Whisman neighborhood received praise for adding more green space and affordable units, but not with some misgivings about the loss of trees and where those affordable units would go.

01/17/2024
When Palo Alto passed an ambitious tree-protection law in 2022, it aimed to shield the city's treasured canopy from destruction. But as the council pared back the law, some called for more radical measures.

01/16/2024
A federal appeals court has declined to reconsider its controversial April 2023 decision that mutes Los Altos’ and other cities’ attempts to require natural gas bans in new construction.

01/05/2024
Heavy snow is projected in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Previously, warmer storms had been bringing precipitation mainly to higher elevations in the Sierras.

01/05/2024
Munition boxes, depth charges and smoke floats have been found 3,000 feet underwater off the coast of Los Angeles. More than 100 square miles of ocean might be contaminated.

01/05/2024
The Bay Area’s fog is iconic. But the latest episode of KQED podcast “Bay Curious” looks at how climate change could reduce the number of foggy days in the area.