With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, and with so much riding at both national and state level on voter turnout, the stakes could not be higher.
Credit: Justin Lane/EPA

With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, many Americans are beginning to worry about their votes.

A recent poll by Politico and Morning Consult found that 52% of registered voters believed Russia was likely to try to influence the 2018 midterm elections for Congress, while a Supreme Court decision in June upholding Ohio’s aggressive voter roll purging practices has renewed concerns about who gets stripped from state registration lists, especially among Democrats.

“The vote is a precious resource that we need to guard and make that we are able to express,” said Paul Beck, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University and an expert in voting behaviors. “Sometimes state practices get in the way of that.”

Here are some steps you can take to protect your vote this November and beyond.

Re-register […]

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The full extent to which the fossil fuel industry, companies like Shell and Exxon, knew—as early as the 1970s—how their combustible products were contributing to irreversible warming of the planet, became public knowledge over the last few years. A series of painstakingly researched articles published in 2015 by the Pulitzer-prize winning Inside Climate News revealed an industry totally aware and informed for decades about the inevitable warming certain to occur as more and more carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels was released into the atmosphere.

In fact, the oil industry, and Exxon in particular, had the best climate models available, superior to those relied on by scientific community. And armed with the foreknowledge developed through those models, Exxon and the other oil companies planned and executed an elaborate, cynical long term strategy: to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a comprehensive propaganda effort designed to raise doubts about the existence and cause of climate change, a phenomenon they well knew was irrefutable, based on their own research. By 2016 the industry’s lobbying to discredit the science of climate change had surpassed 

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Most of Joshua Tree national park could become uninhabitable for its eponymous trees, according to a new study.
Credit: Eric Lowenbach/Getty/Flickr RF

America’s national parks have warmed twice as fast as the US average and could see some of the worst effects of climate change, according to a new study. (Emphasis added)

Most of Joshua Tree national park could become uninhabitable for its eponymous trees, glaciers will continue to melt away at Glacier national park, and many other of America’s most treasured beauty spots could be rendered virtually unrecognizable by climate change, Patrick Gonzalez, the lead author of the study, writes in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Even the tiniest of creatures are at risk in the worst-case predictions: the American pika, a small alpine mammal, may no longer be able to survive on park land.

“We are preserving the most remarkable ecosystems, and they happen to be in extreme environments,” said Gonzalez, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Gonzalez is also the principal climate change scientist for the US National Park Service but conducted […]

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