Climate change leads armadillos to expand their range from Texas as far as North Carolina, where they wreak “horticultural havoc.” 

The COP26 climate summit ends in Glasgow. At the last minute, China and India succeed in altering a call for a coal phaseout to a coal “phasedown.” Recognizing the weakness of many of the national plans offered, participants agree to return next year with strong emission-reduction targets.

Severe air pollution in New Delhi is up to seven times the level considered safe, leading to closures of schools and coal-fired power plants.

Days after COP26 ends, President Joe Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management offers 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas leasing, the largest offshore lease ever. ExxonMobil and others purchase rights to 1.7 million acres, an area larger than Delaware. Hundreds of organizations, including the Sierra Club, had asked that the sale be canceled. 

President Biden proposes a 20-year halt to oil and gas drilling within 10 miles of Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico.

Biden signs the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, guaranteeing billions of dollars for public transit, passenger rail, electric-vehicle charging stations, electric school buses, and more.  

Biden orders the Justice and Interior Departments to coordinate a new federal law-enforcement strategy focusing on reducing violence against Native Americans, especially missing and murdered Native American women.  

Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is stripped of his seat on the House Natural Resources Committee when he is censured by his peers for posting an anime video depicting him killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (D-NY).

A record 1,000 manatees have died in Florida thus far this year, many by starvation, as algal blooms kill the seagrass upon which they depend.

The world’s oceans are polluted by 26,000 tons of plastic personal protective equipment from the COVID-19 pandemic.

E-bikes outsell electric cars. 

President Biden asks the Federal Trade Commission to look into whether illegal market manipulation by the big oil companies was fueling the recent rise in gas prices.

Carbon capture and storage is achieved—on the moon. Astronomers discover frozen CO2 “cold traps” in the polar region of the moon’s dark side.  

Democratic senators Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) and Joe Manchin (WV) block efforts to reform the 1872 Mining Law, which allows hard-rock miners to extract valuable ore on public land without paying federal royalties.

The Moscow Metro allows riders to pay using a facial recognition system. 

Floods and landslides cut off access to Vancouver, British Columbia, by both road and rail. 

Extreme rains in Aswan, Egypt, lead to a swarm of fat-tailed scorpions that kill three people and injure almost 500.  

Demand for leather seats in luxury SUVs leads to illegal deforestation in the Amazon, to make room for cattle ranches. 

Birds in the Amazon are getting smaller, but their wings are getting longer.  

The record for longest dinosaur goes to Supersaurus, a Jurassic-period diplodocid that was at least 128 feet long and possibly as long as 137 feet. (The previous record holder, Diplodocus, measured 108 feet.)