Pollution

The gas drilling industry says fracking hasn't been linked to water contamination. But it has.

"A settlement reached in federal court promises an accelerated attack on pollution from the labyrinth of pipes under Boston and from pavement runoff, an effort designed to prevent raw sewage and other pollutants from reaching area waterways."

"SAN FRANCISCO -- The Center for Biological Diversity filed a legal petition with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Wednesday that asks the agency to set plastic pollution limits for ocean waters under the Clean Water Act."

"NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The Tennessee Valley Authority is liable for a huge spill of toxin-laden sludge in 2008 in Tennessee, a federal judge ruled Thursday."

"The fallout has begun just one day after a federal appeals court scrapped a major EPA rule designed to curb long-distance drifting power plant pollution -- and Louisville's air quality may pay the price."

"WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned a federal rule that laid out how much air pollution states would have to clean up to avoid incurring violations in downwind states.

 The decision sends the Environmental Protection Agency, and perhaps even Congress, back to the drawing board in what has become a long and paralyzing argument over how to mesh a system of state-by-state regulation with the problem of industrial smokestacks pumping pollutants into a single atmosphere.

"Royal Dutch Shell is spending billions of dollars to drill the first oil wells in U.S. Arctic waters in 20 years, backed by an Obama administration eager to show it wasn't opposed to offshore exploration. But the closely watched project isn't going the way the company or the government hoped—illustrating the continuing challenge of plumbing for natural riches in one of the world's most unforgiving locations."

"While Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the fate of Enbridge’s proposed pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to tankers on the British Columbia coast will be based on science and not politics, documents show some of that science isn’t forthcoming. And critics say there is no time for the science to be completed before a federal deadline for the environmental assessment currently underway."

"Beside Seattle’s notoriously polluted Duwamish River, an excavator scoops up small pieces of waste metal and slings them onto a rusty mountain at Seattle Iron & Metals Corp. A pile of flattened cars and trucks squats nearby amid vast sheets of scrap metal. For at least the last four years, this auto-shredder and metal recycler has dumped more pollutants into the river than allowed under the federal Clean Water Act, government records show. The levels have ranged higher than 250 times above what’s known to harm salmon that migrate through the river."

"Trading pollution 'credits' to reduce the cost of cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay risks endangering the health of the region's poor and minority communities, a new report warns."