A green comet that last bypassed Earth in the Stone Age comes around again.

The Biden administration declares a 20-year moratorium on hard-rock mining upstream of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, likely ending the long-running threat to the popular park. 

The Biden administration also restores the Roadless Rule to more than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest—America’s largest rainforest—protecting it from new roads and logging.

After pulling in record profits in 2022, Chevron will use $75 billion to buy back its own stock. 

Republican senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, spreads the lie that US environmental groups are funded by Russia. 

The International Atomic Energy Agency stations teams of experts at all four of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants to reduce the risk of accidents and to discourage Russian attacks.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moves its “doomsday clock” forward to 90 seconds before midnight, the nearest in the clock’s 76-year history. While recent movement has generally been about climate change, the latest change is in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine and the risk of nuclear conflict.

Indonesia is censoring scientists who question the government’s claim that the number of endangered orangutans and rhinos is increasing. 

Women scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography get half the research space and one-third the storage space their male counterparts do.

The EPA tells six coal-fired power plants that they can no longer store their toxic coal ash in unlined ponds, a move that will make the plants even more uneconomical to operate. 

For the first time in 2022, global investment in clean energy matched that invested in oil and gas—$1.1 trillion each. 

A Florida man doing yoga in a Miami park is injured when a 20-to-30-pound iguana falls out of a tree and hits him in the face.

Down to 34 birds in 1984, the San Clemente Island Bell’s sparrow has recovered enough to be removed from the endangered species list. Key to its turnaround was the removal of invasive feral goats and pigs from the island off the coast of Southern California, which allowed native plants to return. 

A record-breaking, six-pound invasive cane toad dubbed “Toadzilla” is found in a rainforest in Queensland, Australia.

Having eaten all the deer on Alaska’s Pleasant Island, wolves there have taken to dining on sea otters. 

Three juvenile grizzly bears in Montana are euthanized after they were found to be suffering severe neurological damage after contracting avian flu, probably from eating diseased birds. 

There appears to be a bear on Mars.

Earth’s molten inner core may have reversed the direction in which it spins.