TV News LIES

This year's historic hurricane season exposed a little-known public health threat: Highly polluted sites that can be inundated by floodwaters, potentially spreading toxic contamination.

In Houston, more than a dozen Superfund sites were flooded by Hurricane Harvey, with breaches reported at two. In the Southeast and Puerto Rico, Superfund sites were battered by driving rains and winds from Irma and Maria.

The vulnerable sites highlighted by AP's review are scattered across the nation, but Florida, New Jersey and California have the most, and the most people living near them. They are in largely low-income, heavily minority neighborhoods, the data show.

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Nebraska regulators approved the Keystone XL pipeline Monday, clearing the last big regulatory hurdle for the controversial oil project after nearly a decade of bitter protests from environmentalists and landowners and delivering a win for President Donald Trump's drive for U.S. "energy dominance."

The Nebraska Public Service Commission voted 3-2 to approve the route through the state for the pipeline that will transport up to 830,000 barrels per day of crude from Canada's oil sands and North Dakota's shale fields to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. Former President Barack Obama had blocked the permits for the pipeline in 2015, citing the oil sands' impact on climate change, but Trump quickly reversed that decision after taking office.

John Konkus, an EPA spokesman and former campaign worker for President Donald Trump in Florida, confirmed that the agency scientists would not speak at the program.

When Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, U.S. oil refining plummeted to record lows. Now, nearly three weeks later, six key refineries remain shut down and an additional 11 are either struggling to come back on line or operating at a significantly reduced rate.

That slowdown, coupled with predictions of decreased demand in the wake of Hurricane Irma and the devastating earthquake that struck Mexico last week, has shifted oil pressures in other places, too. And none may be quite as vulnerable as the tank farms in Cushing, Oklahoma.

Greenpeace should be worried. A second large company has accused the prominent environmental group of violating the potent U.S. racketeering law. In a lawsuit filed August 22, Energy Transfer Partners accused Greenpeace of spreading lies and inciting vandalism to raise money and hamper completion of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.

The legal attack follows a similar suit against Greenpeace brought last year on behalf of the Canadian timber company Resolute Forest Products Inc.

The Trump administration has ordered researchers to stop work on an independent evaluation of potential health effects from mountaintop removal coal mining.

The Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM) last year, under then-President Barack Obama, had commissioned the research into the possible connections between certain health risks and living near current or former surface mining sites in Appalachia.

But the agency sent a letter Friday to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which it had contracted to do the independent review, asking it to stop its work immediately.

TVNL Comment: This is an outrage. People are dying so that others can profit.  Donald Trump is an evil influence on this country and the world.

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Last year was Earth's warmest on record, according to an international climate report issued Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that documents other record-breaking global warming trends of 2016.

The report is the most comprehensive assessment of the effects of climate change released by the Trump administration, and it could make it easier to refute efforts from the president and his Cabinet members to publicly discount climate science as they have frequently done in the past. However, the annual report does not detail the link between climate change and human activities such as burning coal or gasoline. Those conclusions are drawn in a separate draft portion of the National Climate Assessment highlighted by The New York Times earlier this week.

TVNL Comment:  But the Fool in the WH chose to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord agreed to by 176 nations.  Be afraid America.

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The developer of the Marine East 2 pipeline in Pennsylvania has reached a settlement agreement with the state and environmentalists that could let it resume underground boring.

Under the deal, Sunoco Pipeline would have to re-evaluate construction plans for high-risk areas in an effort to prevent the clay slurry spills that occurred dozens of times in recent months during pipeline construction, particularly in vulnerable areas like wetlands, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

Regulators last month ordered a halt to all underground boring for the cross-state project in response to environmentalists’ challenges, which cited the spills.

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