Welcome to The Sponge, the place to soak up a week’s worth of environmental news.

Bootleg Fire Smoke Goes Coast to Coast

Smoke from the nation’s largest wildfire in Oregon can be seen from space.

Oof. We couldn’t give Jeff Bezos a better view?

You can’t escape everything in space. Meanwhile, the fires in the Western U.S. still rage on. All 83 of them. The largest, the Bootleg Fire, has burned 606 square miles (or, larger than the size of Los Angeles). It is hard to understate the complexity of these spectacles. The fast, unpredictable blazes leap fire breaks and even generate their own kinds of clouds…

Welcome to The Sponge, the place to soak up a week’s worth of environmental news.

The Amazon Rainforest was a Carbon Sink…Aaaand Now That’s Gone

A new study shows that the Amazon Rainforest has been emitting a billion more metric tons of carbon dioxide than it absorbs.

Isn’t that just photosynthesis?

You’ve got it backwards. The Amazon Rainforest has earned the nickname for being the Earth’s “lungs”, because its 390 billion trees absorb 5% of global carbon emissions annually and produce tons of oxygen. (In other terms, the Amazon rainforest stores twice to triple the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the United Kingdom since 1750.) But, when its trees…

Welcome to The Sponge, the place to soak up a week’s worth of environmental news.

Fight Climate Change, or Elsa.

Tropical Storm Elsa packed a punch last week and we were NOT ready.

My socks were soaked.

That’s the worst. The tropical storm splashed down in Florida, caused a tornado in Georgia, then headed towards New England and did. not. look. back. The downpour surrounding the tropical storm in New York City gained viral attention. Videos circulated online of residents wading chest-deep through brown stormwater in submerged subway stations.

New York grit, amiright?

No, it’s just disgusting. The videos and personal experiences demonstrate a full-blown…

Welcome to The Sponge, the place to soak up a week’s worth of environmental news.

“Eye of Fire”, AKA the Pits of Hell

Early Friday morning, an underwater oil pipeline leak in the Gulf of Mexico caught fire, creating an “eye of fire” that looked like molten lava bubbling at the water’s surface. The Mexican state-owned oil company responsible, “Pemex”, credited the catastrophe to an electrical storm and a break in a 12-inch diameter pipeline near one of its drilling platforms. After five hours, ships quelled the blaze using nitrogen, only after they (now infamously) tried dumping water…on top of an underwater fire. …

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The US is So Hot Right Now

We didn’t need to tell you that, though.

The Pacific Northwest, especially, is encountering what some deem a “once-in-a-millenium heat dome”. Portland, OR and Seattle, WA experienced record-high temperatures over the past few days at 116-degrees and 108-degrees respectively. (In Portland, the heat melted through a power line.) This is cause for serious concern, considering that many people in the region lack air conditioning and the appropriate infrastructure to effectively cope with the heat. …

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Big Oops from Big Oil: Refinery Shuts Down

After a series of environmental catastrophes and financial troubles, the Limetree Bay refinery officially shut down last week.

Define environmental catastrophe.

Like it literally rained oil in St. Croix, the US Virgin Island where the refinery is located. Rained. Oil. And the air is so bad that one EPA officer said that they would normally be given protective breathing equipment before visiting an area like this. And several accidents contaminated the drinking water, leaving hundreds of people sick. …

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Officially Cancelled: Bye Bye to the Keystone XL Pipeline

After over a decade of political back-and-forth, protests, and thanks to the dedicated efforts of Indigenous tribes, environmentalists, and activists, the Keystone XL (KXL) oil pipeline project has officially been terminated.

Should we pop the champagne?

Three cheers for planet earth. For context, KXL was originally proposed by TC Energy (a Canadian energy company) in 2008 as a way to carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico to be refined. …

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Shut Up and Grab a Shovel

A recent report from the UN states that regreening 1 billion hectares of land by 2030 can change the game for issues like hunger, climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. New hashtag alert: #GenerationRestoration.

Regreening sounds made up.

Regreening is the process of restoring nature to its, well, natural state by replanting vegetation, rewatering soil, and rehabilitating environments. Our planet has a serious degradation problem, caused by things like deforestation, overgrazing, and potent pesticide use. …