The Guardian

• Scientists are fighting a longer mosquito season with ... more mosquitoes

  Nearly half a million more of the insects are being released in California – they’re all male and carry abacterium

  The box arrived in the San Gabriel Valley, just east of Los Angeles, filled with more than two dozen paper tubes about the size of toilet paper rolls.

  “All 25 tubes are here,” said Tristan Hallum, who oversees scientific programs for the San Gabriel Valley mosquito and vector control district.

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• Trump’s love of fossil fuels is about more than money | Moira Donegan

  The US decision to remove limits on coal and gas plant emissions is rooted in a perception of manliness in these industries

  You can impress a certain kind of person at a party by reciting the fact that there are more yoga instructors in the US than there are coalminers. In fact, the disparity is greater than this catchy phrasing suggests: there are actually more yoga instructors in the US than there are people employed in the entirety of the coalmining industry, miners and otherwise. It’s not even especially close: about 38,000 people in the US work in coal, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to about 100,000 yoga instructors who are registered with the Yoga Alliance, an industry group.

  If you looked only at the numbers, you might think a politician would be incentivized to talk about the interests of the yoga industry, about the dignity that yoga jobs give to American families, or about the need to foster growth in the yoga industry, more than they talk about these things for coal; after all, yoga, not coal, is putting food on the table in more American households. But no politician would ever talk about the interests of yoga teachers, or wax poetic about their role in the American dream, the way they do with coal miners; if they did, they’d be laughed out of the room. And we all know why: yoga is thought of as decadent, cosmopolitan and feminine, while coal mining is imagined as hardscrabble, honorable and masculine.

  Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

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• Trump EPA’s arguments for letting power plants spew unlimited pollution ‘dead wrong’

  Claims that dismantling pollution rules will lower energy bills and have little climate impact are far from convincing

  In allowing US power plants to emit any amount of planet-heating pollution they wish to, the Trump administration made two striking claims – that this will cut Americans’ electricity bills and that the pollution itself doesn’t really matter anyway. Both claims struggle to stand up to even basic scrutiny.

  On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would erase any limits on emissions from coal and gas plants that are dangerously heating up our planet. This move, which follows a similar dismantling of pollution limits from cars ands trucks, is part of a broader push to eliminate the longstanding legal authority of this, or any future, US administration to deal with the climate crisis.

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• Datacenter rush will create ‘tsunami’ of discarded electronics, report says

  Global push will triple toxic e-waste annually in 25 years, filling enough shipping containers to circle globe six times

  The ongoing campaign to build thousands of massive datacenters for AI will create a “tsunami” of discarded electronics, putting the world on a course to triple its annual generation of toxic e-waste in the next 25 years, a new report projects.

  The electronic trash AI generates in the next 25 years could fill enough shipping containers to encircle the globe six times, it said. Yet, says the report by the non-profit environmental group Basel Action Network (BAN), there is no plan to deal with that waste – which typically contains toxins like lead, mercury, cadmium and forever chemicals, as well as valuable metals that are challenging to reclaim.

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• ‘We’re near a breaking point:’ firefighters say US government is failing them amid intense wildfire season

  US grapples with federal firefighter shortage as crews say they’re spread thin and lack resources during unrelenting year of fire

  Firefighters battling enormous wildfires in the United States say the federal government is failing them at a time when supercharged blazes have made their jobs exponentially more dangerous.

  While the US continues to grapple with a critical shortage of federal firefighters – with especially large gaps in essential management positions – the Trump administration has increased pressure on firefighting forces to rapidly and aggressively contain the flames.

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