Pollution

"Tiny bits of plastic are contaminating mussels from the European Arctic to China in a sign of the global spread of ocean pollution that can end up on people’s dinner plates."

"A federal court wants the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to report, with “precision and specificity,” how it plans to take a key step in implementing a 2015 smog pollution rule."

"PolyMet Mining Corp. would have to put up roughly $1 billion dollars halfway through the life of its proposed copper-nickel mine in northern Minnesota to protect state taxpayers from environmental risks — with more than half the funds dedicated to a trust fund for water treatment that would be required long after the mine has closed."

"A coalition of nearly 20 environmental and Native American tribal groups sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, challenging its delay of a rule limiting emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane from oil and gas drilling operations on federal lands."

"The Environmental Protection Agency says an internal task force appointed to revamp how the nation’s most polluted sites are cleaned up generated no record of its deliberations."

"When the Zortman Landusky gold and silver mine, located upstream from Montana’s enormous Fort Belknap reservation, went bankrupt in 1998, the cost of the cleanup fell on the US taxpayer. The costs keep growing."

"A senior executive at the Russian nuclear processing plant suspected of being behind a spike of radioactivity over Europe this fall admitted Wednesday that the isotope recorded does emerge as part of the plant’s production cycle but said its levels are negligible."

"U.S. Steel failed to test a Lake Michigan tributary for highly toxic hexavalent chromium after blue liquid "with visible solids" poured out of one of the company's northwest Indiana plants in late October, according to documents posted online Tuesday by state regulators."

"The man President Trump picked to regulate coal believes that mining is simply 'accelerated erosion.'"