NewsTrust - Environment - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

The Dirt on Worms

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

agweb.com - By Pam Smith - Nov. 18 (News Report) - The earthworm has long been considered the farmer’s friend. Their burrowing has always been thought to aerate the soil while their droppings provide fertilizer. No-till farmers count on these tireless workers to improve soil tilth. And on their worst day, earthworms sacrifice everything to land us a lunch from our favorite fishing hole

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Missing the Gain But Joining the Pain

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Miller-McCune - By Sam Kornell - Nov. 15 (News Analysis) - Since the industrial revolution, profits from the exploitation of fossil energy — coal, oil and natural gas — have not been equally distributed. America, Europe and Japan got rich off of oil and coal; now China, India and much of the rest of the developing world are attempting to do the same thing. If they succeed, climate scientists say, it will mean environmental catastrophe. This progression has created a situation in which any solution to climate change is, to a greater or lesser extent, going to be unfair — a fact many negotiators openly acknowledge. The Danish environmental minister hosting the Copenhagen conference, Connie Hedegaard, has reportedly been "extraordinarily blunt" in insisting that China, India and the rest of the developing world shoulder a large share of the climate load.

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Anti-Statism In America

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By John B. Judis - Nov. 11 (News Analysis) - Liberals and progressives have fared poorly in the face of this staunch anti-statist tradition, but there have still been periods when they have broken through and enacted major reforms--during Woodrow Wilson’s first term, Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, Lyndon Johnson’s first two years, and Richard Nixon’s first term. They succeeded for different reasons at different times, but several conditions recur.

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Former Baucus Staffers Lobby on Climate Bill

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Independent - By Aaron Wiener - Nov. 09 (News Report) - Over a complete Republican boycott, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed its climate bill last week by a vote of 11-1. The lone dissenter was Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) — a name you’ll be hearing a lot more if you’re keeping tabs on

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Enviro groups face some tough decisions on path to climate bill

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Environment and Energy Publishing - Nov. 06 (News Report) - For the past year, major environmental groups have framed the climate change bill as the movement's single most significant piece of legislation in several decades -- if not ever -- dedicating the bulk of their political muscle and heavy financial resources to passage of the effort. But as the bill moves forward, with this summer's historic House vote and yesterday's Senate committee markup, some question whether in their quest to get a bill, environmentalists and their allies are far too willing to compromise on historic priorities such as offshore drilling and nuclear power.

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The Greenest Place in the U.S. May Not Be Where You Think

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Yale Environment 360 - By David Owen - Nov. 05 (Special Report) - Green rankings in the U.S. don’t tell the full story about the places where the human footprint is lightest. If you really want the best environmental model, you need to look at the nation’s biggest — and greenest — metropolis: New York City.

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Scientists: Biofuel Laws May Harm Environment

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

wbur.org - By Richard Harris - Oct. 23 (News Report) - One key part of the climate bill has to do with fuels made from green plants. These can reduce the use of fossil fuels, and they also are a big draw for farm-state votes. But scientists writing in the current issue of Science magazine point out a huge error in existing biofuel laws that could actually make climate change worse. They say these rules inadvertently encourage deforestation, which in turn contributes to global warming.

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Earth's Life Support Systems Failing

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Inter Press Service - By Stephen Leahy - Oct. 15 (Special Report) - The world has failed to slow the accelerating extinction crisis despite 17 years of national and international efforts since the great hopes raised at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. [A loggerhead turtle. Biodiversity is not just weird-looking animals and pretty birds. It is the diversity of life on Earth that comprises the ecosystems that provide vital services, including climate regulation, food, fibre, clean water and air. (Photo: Damien du Toit; Creative Commons License)]A loggerhead turtle. Biodiversity is not just weird-looking animals and pretty birds. It is the diversity of life on Earth that comprises the ecosystems that provide vital services, including climate regulation, food, fibre, clean water and air. (Photo: Damien du Toit; Creative Commons License) The last big promise to act was in 2003, when government ministers from 123 countries committed to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.

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The Coalfield Uprising

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Jeff Biggers - Oct. 01 (Special Report) - ...while officials are framing the issue as a manageable environmental problem, mountaintop removal has also caused....one of th largest displacements of US citizens since the nineteenth century... .

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Video: 20,000 Detergent Bottles Under the Sea

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Sam Baldwin, Andy Kroll, Taylor Wiles - Sep. 27 (News Report) - After a month spent studying the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a vortex of waste twice the size of Texas in the North Pacific Ocean where there's a 36-to-1 ratio of plastic to plankton, the scientists behind Project Kaisei offered tours of their vessel and talked with Mother Jones' Sam Baldwin, Andy Kroll, and Taylor Wiles about finding lawn chairs and laundry baskets floating a thousand miles at sea.

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Red Snow Warning

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Chip Ward, - Sep. 14 (Special Report) - Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert -- specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot 'n' dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue.

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EPA turns the lights on mountaintop removal

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - Sep. 11 (News Report) - This post originally appeared at TheNation.com . The Environmental Protection Agency made good on its promise today to assert greater scrutiny and “use the best science and follow the letter of the law” with regard to controversial mountaintop removal mining permits in the Appalachian coalfields. In a highly anticipated announcement, the agency declared that all seventy-nine pending permits in four states would “likely cause water quality impacts” and sent them on for additional review under the Clean Water Act. Does today’s big announcement end the practice of mountaintop removal—which has clear-cut more than 1.2 million acres of deciduous forests, employed billions of pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil ...

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Study: Global warming would hit Utah hard

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

StandardNet - By Charles F. Trentelman - Sep. 08 (Special Report) - the Nature Conservancy has issued a warning on what global warming will do to the humans in Utah if current trends do not change. Average temperatures will rise just a bit over nine degrees in the next 90 years. Lakes will dry up faster, snowpack will be less, grasslands will die and huge chunks of the state’s economy all will be affected if the latest projections of the effect of climate change come to pass. That puts Utah at number nine in the list of 10 states that will see the largest change.

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Bodega Bay scientists weigh impact of ocean acid levels on shellfish

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

pressdemocrat.com - By Bob Norberg - Sep. 06 (News Report) - The danger from increasing levels of acid in the ocean, which could devastate California's shellfish industry, is under investigation by Bodega Bay scientists. It is painstaking work that requires the team to wade through knee-deep mud at Tomales Bay to collect native Olympic oysters and then raise their young in salt-water tanks under conditions that mimic climate change.

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Party Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Sep. 04 (News Analysis) - During the past year, Republicans have frequently said they want to work with Democrats. But the real story of the last few months is how unserious those pledges turned out to be. Although you wouldn’t know it from their rhetoric or the media coverage, there are not one but two ostensibly bipartisan proposals out there right now. Either of them could be the template for successful reform if even a few Republicans started pushing them seriously. But, even the ostensibly reasonable Republican senators whom Democrats have tried to engage--Mike Enzi, Charles Grassley, and Hatch--just aren’t interested. And it appears they haven’t been for a while.

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Van Jones seeks a ‘healing for our politics’

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Brad Johnson - Sep. 04 (News Analysis) - Jones’s true record is one of turning away from anger and finding hope, abandoning division and seeking consensus. Speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas this August, Van Jones argued that “for all of the battleground politics that’s going on,” energy policy should be “the one place that should be a safe harbor for all of us.” Van Jones praised the “bipartisanship” of Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who as a representative from Los Angeles succeeded in getting “the first president ever to sign into law a green jobs act, President George W. Bush.” He recognized that the summit participants came to find a “healing for our politics” in a “common ground agenda”:

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Fracking and the Environment: Natural Gas Drilling, Hydraulic Fracturing and Water Contamination

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Juan Gonzalez, Amy Goodman - Sep. 03 (Special Report) - Gas drilling companies such as Halliburton say the gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is safe, but opponents contend it pollutes groundwater with dangerous substances. Now, new evidence has emerged possibly linking natural gas drilling to groundwater contamination. ProPublica journalist Abrahm Lustgarten reports federal officials in Wyoming have found that at least three water wells contain chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing.

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The Courtship

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Gabriel Sherman - Aug. 31 (Special Report) - In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

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What's Your Water Footprint?

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Josh Harkinson - Aug. 30 (Special Report) - Even as the greenest among us cut our showers short and let our toilets go yellow, we may be blissfully unaware that our household water use accounts for only 6 percent of the water that we consume. The other 94 percent comes from the products we buy, everything from almonds and tomatoes to blue jeans and microchips. (See "Big Gulp.") The average person in the developed world drinks a gallon of water each day but "eats" another 800 gallons. And as Americans, our water consumption per capita is twice the world's average. Each one of us uses enough water annually to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool—four times what someone in Yemen uses.

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EPA Fails to Inform Public About Weed Killer in Drinking Water

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Danielle Ivory, Amy Goodman - Aug. 25 (Special Report) - An investigation by the Huffington Post reveals the Environmental Protection Agency knew that one of the country’s most widely used herbicides exceeds federal safety limits in four states but failed to inform residents of the associated dangers. The Huffington Post discovered that the EPA has been collecting data that shows people are drinking water laced with high levels of a weed killer known as atrazine but did not publish the data.

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Colony Collapse and Ruptured Ribosomes; Minding Darwin's Bees Wax: Scientific American Podcast

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

scientificamerican.com - By Steve Mirsky - Aug. 25 (News Analysis) - John Williams, the beekeeper at Down House in England, talks about Darwin's bees. And May Berenbaum, entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, talks about the latest publication related to colony collapse disorder and ribosome damage in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Websites related to this episode include www.bee-craft.com

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EPA Fails to Inform Public About Weed Killer in Drinking Water

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Danielle Ivory - Aug. 24 (News) - Records that tracked the amount of the weed-killer atrazine in about 150 watersheds from 2003 through 2008 were obtained by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund under the Freedom of Information Act. An analysis found that yearly average levels of atrazine in drinking water violated the federal standard at least ten times in communities in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas, all states where farmers rely heavily on the herbicide.

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EPA Fails To Inform Public About Weed-Killer In Drinking Water (VIDEO)

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Danielle Ivory - Aug. 23 (Investigative Report) - One of the nation's most widely-used herbicides has been found to exceed federal safety limits in drinking water in four states, but water customers have not been told and the Environmental Protection Agency has not published the results.

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Greens call for reduction in palm kernel imports

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

odt.co.nz - Aug. 23 (News Report) - Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said palm kernel and palm oil was produced on land cleared of tropical rainforest in Indonesia and Malaysia, which was a major source of carbon emissions and the extinction of animals.

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Germ-killing chemical from soaps, toothpaste building up in dolphins

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

environmentalhealthnews.org - By Brett Israel - Aug. 11 (Special Report) - Triclosan is the germ-killing chemical of choice in hundreds of products, including liquid hand soaps, toothpaste and deodorants. Now some scientists are calling for its removal from consumer products because it is building up in the ocean's food web. A new study found that one-third of the bottlenose dolphins tested off South Carolina and almost one-quarter of those tested off Florida carried traces of triclosan in their blood. The concentrations found in the dolphins are known to disrupt the hormones and growth and development of other animals.

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