Comment on Thousands of abandoned mines in Colorado are leaking toxic water, but Congress finally has a solution in sight

The Denver City Council took a definitive step on Monday toward making the construction of the East Colfax Avenue bus rapid transit project a reality — one that will completely reshape Denver’s best-known east-west arterial street. The project will stretch from Denver’s Union Station east to the Regional Transportation District’s rail station near Colfax and Interstate 225 relying on a network of high-frequency, quick-loading buses to increase mass transit reliability along the busy corridor.

PARK COUNTY — Polluted water leaking from thousands of abandoned mines in Colorado’s mountains is turning wetlands orange and dumping toxic dissolved metals in the headwaters of many of the state’s rivers. But people who want to fix the problem are hampered by the very federal laws meant to protect the environment. Organizations and local governments that want to fix the acidic drainage from a mine outside of Alma — and the hundreds of thousands of other abandoned mines across the West — are hopeful about new legislation under consideration in Congress.

“Voters in six key swing states think former President Trump is more likely than Vice President Harris to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, respond effectively to a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan, and advance U. S. interests internationally, according to new polling from the Institute for Global Affairs,” Axios reports.

In the years before the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, Florida’s 55 reproductive health care clinics were a critical part of the national abortion infrastructure, caring for tens of thousands of women annually from across the state and the South. Now, with Florida’s six-week abortion ban, the number of clinician-provided abortions in the state has plunged, while the need for supportive services for pregnant people is rising.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Among those concerned about the climate, it’s become something of a self-evident truth that as people suffer more severe and more frequent extreme weather and grapple with global warming’s impact on their daily lives, they’ll come to understand the problem at a visceral level.

The choice between Trump and Harris is indeed stark, more so than possibly any other time in American history.