Tuesday, Jan 20th
Last update09:48:22 AM GMT
Environmental News Archive
A Bush administration rule barring states and local governments from requiring more air pollution monitoring is illegal, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
Appeals court judge Brett Kavanaugh, a former attorney in the Bush White House, wrote the sole dissenting opinion.
He said that while EPA and state and local governments may disagree about whether monitoring requirements will adequately measure compliance, he found "nothing in the statute that prohibits EPA's approach."
Paul Hoffman, high-ranking Interior official, resigns - Hoffman, who got his post thanks to Vice President Dick Cheney, regularly helped the veep undercut environmental regulations, according to a Washington Post investigation published last year. From keeping the Yellowstone cutthroat trout off the Endangered Species List to helping lift the Clinton-era ban on snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park, Hoffman, former director of the Cody, Wyo., Chamber of Commerce, made sure that commerce in his and Cheney's home state wasn't unduly burdened. Hoffman also overrode the decision of the Grand Canyon's park superintendent to remove biblical plaques from the park, and forced its bookstores to stock a creationist text claiming the canyon was created in six days a few thousand years ago. More recently, he tried to rewrite national park management rules to give snowmobiles and off-road vehicles free rein and allow commercial activities, like mining and rock concerts. Perhaps Interior will bleed a bit more green now.
Many coastal areas of the world’s oceans are being starved of oxygen at an alarming rate, with vast stretches along the seafloor depleted of it to the point that they can barely sustain marine life, researchers are reporting.
The main culprit, scientists say, is nitrogen-rich nutrients from crop fertilizers that spill into coastal waters by way of rivers and streams.
There are now more than 400 known dead zones in coastal waters worldwide, compared to 305 in the 1990s, according to study author Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
Dead zones occur when excess nutrients—usually nitrogen and phosphorus—from agriculture or the burning of fossil fuels seep into the water system and fertilize blooms of algae along the coast.
As the microscopic plants die and sink to the ocean floor, they feed bacteria, which consume dissolved oxygen from surrounding waters. This limits oxygen availability for bottom-dwelling organisms and the fish that eat them.
Officials also have told the governments of Malaysia and Singapore that the sub made port calls to those countries while leaking the radioactive water, Navy officials said. The Houston also made stops in Guam and Hawaii.
Officials with knowledge of the incident could not quantify the radiation level but insisted it was "negligible" and an "extremely low level." The total amount of radioactivity that leaked while the sub was in port in Guam, Japan and Hawaii was less than a half of a microcurie (0.0000005 curies), or less than what is found in a 50-pound bag of lawn and garden fertilizer, the officials said.
THE FEW climate-change "skeptics" with any sort of scientific credentials continue to receive attention in the media out of all proportion to their numbers, their qualifications, or the merit of their arguments. And this muddying of the waters of public discourse is being magnified by the parroting of these arguments by a larger population of amateur skeptics with no scientific credentials at all.
Water with trace amounts of radioactivity may have leaked for months from a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered submarine as it traveled around the Pacific to ports in Guam, Japan and Hawaii, Navy officials told CNN on Friday.
The leak was found on the USS Houston, a Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine, after it went to Hawaii for routine maintenance last month, Navy officials said.
TVNL Comment: The US military...keeping us all safe!
It took 30 years, but Jimmy Carter finally has gotten recognition for the wisdom of his energy policies. Speaking on Science Friday, Senator John Warner, a Republican from Virginia who first entered the Senate during Carter's term in office, said that Jimmy Carter "was right" when he called for a massive program of energy conservation and alternative energy research.
Warner has recently discovered the threat posed by global warming through his discussions with Pentagon brass who are concerned about the submerging of Naval ports around the world as the oceans rise. Though he is late to the ball, Warner readily admitted the country was asleep at the switch for the last three decades.
California will sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for "wantonly" ignoring its duty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from ships, aircraft, and construction and agricultural equipment, state Attorney General Jerry Brown said on Wednesday.
"Ships, aircraft and industrial equipment burn huge quantities of fossil fuel, causing greenhouse gas pollution, yet President (George W.) Bush stalls with one bureaucratic dodge after another," said Brown, a strong advocate for the environment since his two terms as a liberal California governor in the 1970s and 1980s.
"Because Bush's Environmental Protection Agency continues to wantonly ignore its duty to regulate pollution, California is forced to seek judicial action," he said.
Page 153 of 156
