ICYMI: BlackRock Gets Woke, Panthers Croak, Richmond Nixes Coke & More

A weekly roundup for busy people

By Paul Rauber

Illustrations by Peter Arkle

January 17, 2020

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with over $7 trillion in investments, says that its future investing policy will be guided by concerns about climate change. 

Australian firefighters save a secret grove of Wollemi pine trees, a species that dates to the Jurassic age and of which only 200 remain.

Widespread, heavy rains in Australia put out some but not all of the country’s many bushfires. The fires have burned more than 65,000 square miles, an area larger than Tunisia.

For eight of 10 high-profile issues, Trump’s Interior Department has rolled back environmental protections despite public opposition rates of 95 percent or more.

A wolf pack is spotted in Colorado for the first time in 80 years. 

Ocean temperatures hit a record high in 2019. The heat is increasing at a rate equivalent to detonating five Hiroshima-size atomic bombs in the water every second. 

A heat wave in the Pacific Ocean from 2014 to 2016 is now believed to have killed nearly a million common murres.

Because of effective management, the world’s fish stocks are, for the most part, stable or improving.

Florida will buy 20,000 acres in the Everglades to prevent oil drilling in the sensitive area. 

In the first two weeks of 2020, three endangered Florida panthers were killed by cars and another by a train.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service proposes to finance infrastructure improvements to Louisiana wildlife refuges in part through a lottery for alligator hunts

A federal judge refuses a request by former coal-company CEO and current presidential candidate Don Blankenship to vacate his 2015 conviction for conspiracy to violate mine safety laws. The conviction, for which Blankenship served a year in prison, was in connection with the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster, in which 29 West Virginia miners were killed.

Despite Donald Trump’s efforts to prop up the US coal industry, the pace of coal-fired power plant closures in 2019 was second only to the closures in 2015. Since 2010, more than 300 US coal plants have closed or been slated for retirement. 

Richmond, California, bans shipments of coal and petroleum coke from a private port that last year shipped nearly a million metric tons of fuel to Asia. 

General Motors is relaunching its humongous gas-guzzling Hummer as a humongous electric-powered pickup truck.

A Galápagos tortoise (Chelonoidis hoodensis) named Diego is given a break from procreation after saving his subspecies from extinction by fathering 800 offspring.