Sunday, May 04th
Last update07:06:21 AM GMT
Environmental News Archive
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.
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.
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.
A new federal report, which is awaiting White House approval, concludes that human activity is "primarily responsible" for a drastic rise in the average temperature in the United States in the last four decades.
The Climate Science Special Report was authored by scientists from 13 federal agencies -- including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy -- and several academic institutions.
A top Environmental Protection Agency official resigned Tuesday in protest of the direction the EPA has taken under President Trump.
Elizabeth "Betsy" Southerland ended her 30-year run at the agency with a scathing exit letter in which she claimed that “the environmental field is suffering from the temporary triumph of myth over truth.” She last worked as the director of science and technology in the Office of Water.
Pepsico, Unilever and Nestlé have been accused of complicity in the destruction of Sumatra’s last tract of rainforest shared by elephants, orangutans, rhinos, and tigers together in one ecosystem.
Plantations built on deforested land have allegedly been used to supply palm oil to scores of household brands that also include McDonald’s, Mars, Kellogg’s and Procter & Gamble, according to a new report.
The Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica is about to calve, which will create one of the largest icebergs in the world, one the size of Delaware. This will be the climax of around one year of anticipation when a crack was first noticed in the ice shelf.
The "calving" event could occur at any time, according to researchers – although exactly when eludes them. As it was put by the UK-based Project MIDAS (Melt on Ice Shelf Dynamics and Stability) who have led the observation of Larsen C, the event that could occur in "days, hours or weeks."
Contrary to popular belief, an ice shelf breaking apart does not necessarily entail a rise in sea levels. Ice floats on top of water after all – and just like an ice cube in a glass of water, it causes the water to displace. However, the complete collapse of Larsen C might be a different story.
Nearly a third of the world’s population is now exposed to climatic conditions that produce deadly heatwaves, as the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere makes it “almost inevitable” that vast areas of the planet will face rising fatalities from high temperatures, new research has found.
Climate change has escalated the heatwave risk across the globe, the study states, with nearly half of the world’s population set to suffer periods of deadly heat by the end of the century even if greenhouse gases are radically cut.
“For heatwaves, our options are now between bad or terrible,” said Camilo Mora, an academic at the University of Hawaii and lead author of the study.
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