Climate & Environment

Climate change will hurt working-class and poor communities the hardest. Monsoons and absurd levels of heat are already battering huge portions of India, for example. Closer to home, much has already been written about “climate gentrification” in Miami — that is, the process by which wealthier people are buying…

Hurricane Michael ripped a hole in the roof of Amy Bauer’s tiny apartment in Springfield, a poor Panama City neighborhood. An administrative assistant in her early 50s who gets paid by the hour, she met the storm with no cash on hand, no extra food, no batteries, no flashlights…

Miami has a reputation for being the kind of city where it’s fine to fake it. But city officials’ decision to replace dozens of plots of real grass with artificial-turf-covered concrete is not going over well.

Miami already has the highest percentage of seriously mentally ill citizens compared to any other city in America. Miami is also likely to see the largest rise in so-called deadly heat days due to climate change by the year 2100.

Hurricane Michael continues strengthening this afternoon and could deliver strong winds and heavy rain to Miami by early Tuesday. By 2 p.m. Monday, the storm’s strength had reached 75 mph, and as it moves away from Cuba, it’s expected to strengthen all the way through Wednesday, when wind speeds might hit 120 mph, making Michael a strong Category 3.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is a bad person. He’s now running for U.S. Senate, and one of his central campaign strategies is to flat-out admit he stole a then-record amount of money from Medicare and Medicaid when he ran a hospital system. He literally made it harder for poor people to go to the hospital.

Dead fish are washing ashore. Maggots are wriggling in piles of washed-up garbage. Wildlife rescuers are weeping as they encounter lifeless manatees and sea turtles. And most obvious, Florida’s waterways are clogged simultaneously with toxic green algae and toxic, choking, stinging red tide.

King-tide season is coming soon. That’s when huge swaths of Miami-Dade County flood on sunny days as the moon pulls South Florida’s already-rising oceans onto the land. But this year, toxic algae has brought stinking, poisonous, fish-killing red tide to town…

After months of watching a wrenching natural catastrophe unfolding in slow motion across Florida’s Gulf Coast and hoping against hope it wouldn’t move to the Atlantic, Miami’s dreaded day has come at last: Red tide is here.

Miami was already bracing for a miserable Labor Day thanks to a tropical wave blowing out of the Caribbean. But as of 8:30 a.m., the National Hurricane Center is actually going to be worse than predicted — that wave has now formed into Tropical Storm Gordon over the upper Keys…

Were you looking forward to a fun Labor Day weekend spent sunning yourself on the beach, drinking to excess, and blacking out in a warm haze as you temporarily forget the world’s problems? Think again. Tropical weather is coming.

South Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve is aptly named for its abundance of large cypress trees. The 720,000-acre stretch of land is one of the last few large chunks of protected Everglades wetland in South Florida — but thanks to a web of nefarious, manmade problems, the site will likely look very different within the next 50 years.

If you dump more than 500 pounds of garbage around Florida, you could be charged with a felony. Florida is one of the few states with a felony litter law, and Miami-Dade Police officers are using it: In the past three years, 53 people have been arrested for dumping excessive amounts of trash wherever they feel like it.

After 12 senior citizens overheated and died last year in a sweltering Hollywood nursing home where Hurricane Irma knocked out the air conditioning, commissioners in Miami-Dade County agreed to look into installing generators in all of the county’s public housing developments. But now that officials have crunched the numbers, those improvements seem unlikely to ever happen.

From the beginning of June until early July, an algae bloom in Lake Okeechobee grew and grew until it covered 90 percent of the lake’s surface. Then the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released water from the lake, letting the algae migrate to both coasts of Florida. The nasty, toxic…

Compared to wind farms and solar parks, nuclear power plants are, in general, extremely expensive to operate and terrible for their surrounding environments. Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Homestead certainly has not done good things for the local water supply. The power plant’s infamous canal system…

The Monday morning after Hurricane Irma made landfall, Valencia Gunder woke up feeling hopeless. Her house in Liberty City had flooded. Power was out across her neighborhood and would be for days. Though cell service was spotty, texts from her neighbors kept jolting her phone. Everyone was asking Gunder the same thing: “When is help coming?”

In 2012, Miami Beach became one of the first cities in the nation to enact a partial ban on plastic straws. Since then, the so-called straw wars have heated up: Seattle, Malibu, Santa Barbara, and Oakland recently passed ordinances banning their use, and New York City is mulling a similar move. Meanwhile, businesses such as Starbucks and Royal Caribbean have announced plans to ditch the plastic tubes.

Maybe you think you can live just fine in the postapocalyptic future that Americans are creating by pumping carbon emissions into the air. You’re OK with the dead trees, the flooded city streets, the extinct alligators. You’ll be cool living life in your windowless bunker and traveling across town in a series of air-conditioned tunnels…