"Los Angeles County sued Monsanto Co on Thursday, seeking to force the unit of Germany’s Bayer AG to help pay for reducing PCB contamination in dozens of bodies of water."
"A half-million-acre national wildlife refuge would be established in California's Riverside County under a new bill introduced with bipartisan support."
"When Karen Cakebread was forced to evacuate her home in Calistoga, Calif., during the Tubbs fire in 2017 — and when she lost power at the winery she owns — she realized the danger frequent wildfires could pose to the electricity that powers her daily life."
SEJ joined with several dozen other journalism groups to support the right to film police activity in a public place, and bills to block information of importance to environmental reporters failed in Louisiana, California and Iowa, but a Colorado paper was blocked from covering a wild horse roundup. All that in this month’s WatchDog Tipsheet.
"Electrical transmission lines owned and operated by utility giant Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) caused last fall's Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, state fire investigators said Wednesday."
It’s a good case for the global-local nexus: The potent greenhouse gas methane may be leaking from your local landfill. And this week’s TipSheet explains the latest news developments in this long-standing controversy, as well as policy disputes over capturing the gas. Plus, get story ideas and questions to ask for your local reporting.
"Do ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft make a city's traffic worse or better? In San Francisco at least, the answer is decidedly worse, according to a newly published study in the journal Science Advances."
"A more than five-year moratorium on leasing land in California for oil and gas development will be coming to an end with a May 9 Interior Department plan to open up about 725,000 acres across the state’s Central Coast and the Bay Area for drilling."
"Steelhead trout numbers are growing on the Carmel River, a potential model for other dam removal projects nationwide".
"The nation’s most productive agricultural state moved Wednesday to ban a controversial pesticide widely used to control a range of insects but blamed for harming brain development in babies."
Advertisement 
