"NEW ORLEANS -- After months of laboratory work, scientists say they can definitively finger oil from BP's blown-out well as the culprit for the slow death of a once brightly colored deep-sea coral community in the Gulf of Mexico that is now brown and dull."
"The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.
"The Farm Bill is the Olympics of U.S. food and agriculture policy. Every five years or so this important legislation comes up for renewal and the games begin. The federal government awards medals in the form of billion-dollar budgets that will determine what foods we eat and how we grow them. The current Farm Bill is set to expire on September 30, 2012, and the debate over who will dominate the food system is well underway."
"A proposed cleanup of Montana air pollution would force three industrial plants to spend $90 million on measures to improve visibility in some of the nation's prized public lands, including Yellowstone and Theodore Roosevelt National Parks."
"Michigan’s environmental regulator will reinspect a shuttered plant that’s part of Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s auto parts empire following complaints that the chrome-plating site used a chemical that causes cancer."
"Victorville, Calif. -- On a dusty, rock-strewn expanse at the edge of the Mojave Desert, a company linked to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants to build a bullet train that would rocket tourists from the middle of nowhere to the gambling palaces of Las Vegas."
"Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction—but they won't be able to share it with their patients. A provision buried in a law passed last month is drawing scrutiny from the public health and environmental community, who argue that it will "gag" doctors who want to raise concerns related to oil and gas extraction with the people they treat and the general public."
"MASSENA, N.Y. -- Larry Thompson sits high in his tractor cab and drives to a chain-link fence along his family property on the Mohawk Indians' Akwesasne Reservation, where they fished, grew vegetables and played as children. He points to a toxic landfill about 30 feet away, stretching toward the St. Lawrence River."
A recycling facility for contaminated soils and other hazardous waste in the California desert community of Mecca is causing major problems. The problems are made worse by the fact that the facility is on tribal land, making state and federal regulation more difficult.
"In January 2009, Riverside County fire Capt. Robert Fish ventured to the scrubby desert outpost of Mecca to check on the busy contaminated-soil recycling plant there.
He found something unusual, worrying enough to alert his superiors.
"Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were 'very likely' caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday."
