"PITTSBURGH -- An ongoing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study on natural gas drilling and its potential for groundwater contamination has gotten tentative praise so far from both industry and environmental groups."

"Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that was drilling the BP Macondo well when it caught fire and sank off the Louisiana coast in 2010, beginning the nation's largest oil spill, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal misdemeanor violation of the Clean Water Act and pay $1.4 billion in civil and criminal fines to settle violations of the Clean Water Act and federal offshore drilling safety regulations, the company and the U.S. Justice Department announced today."

"In three decades of drilling, John C. Holko said, his oil and gas business has never faced such a hostile environment."

"RICHMOND, Calif. -- The Chevron refinery’s massive oil storage tanks sit on the hills overlooking this small, impoverished city in San Francisco’s East Bay. Painted earthen red to blend with the natural surroundings, the tanks cannot help dominating the city’s skyline, much the way the oil giant itself has long shaped Richmond’s identity, economy and politics."

"CONCORD, N.H. -- Nearly a decade after it was first brought, a lawsuit accusing two oil giants of widespread groundwater contamination in New Hampshire is expected to present jurors with the most complex and time-consuming trial in state history."

"Residents of Gardendale, a suburb near the hub of the west Texas oil industry, face having up to 300 wells in their backyards."

"Ruling in a bitterly contested case with national ramifications, a federal judge found Thursday that the Waterkeeper Alliance failed to prove that an Eastern Shore farm's chicken houses were polluting a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay."

"FAIRBANKS -- Longtime Fairbanks-area resident Suzanne Fenner doesn't have to check the borough's air quality monitoring website to see whether or not pollution is high. She just looks out the front door. When she sees smoke rolling through, she knows she'll be coughing soon enough."

"Fenner, who's lived in Fairbanks since 1986, was shocked to learn recently she'd developed asthma. After being sick off and on for months, her doctor told her the asthma was a direct result of air pollution. ...

"Wading into one of the hottest environmental debates in the nation, California on Tuesday released its first-ever regulations for hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," the increasingly common -- and controversial -- practice of freeing oil and gas from rock formations by injecting chemicals under high pressure into the ground."

"The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new standard for soot pollution on Friday that will force industry, utilities and local governments to find ways to reduce emissions of particles that are linked to thousands of cases of disease and death each year."

"Florida's rivers are in trouble. That's what the Orlando Sentinel found after a yearlong evaluation of some of the state's biggest and smallest, most urban and remote, cleanest and dirtiest, protected and abused rivers."

"DEPUE, Ill. -- This tiny village tucked into the Illinois River Valley is known for its lake, a tranquil body of tree-lined water that has drawn thousands of spectators to a national boat race for nearly 30 years. But most visitors heading to Lake DePue must pass another village landmark before reaching the shore — a pile of contaminated slag weighing at least 570,000 tons that looms over the main road into town, left behind by a zinc smelter that employed many locals for decades."

"A signature battle of the energy boom, a public fight over a waste-water deep disposal well, plays out amid scientific uncertainty over safety in a small town."

"The low-income neighborhood of older wood-frame homes in West Dallas is a far cry from the suburb of newly built brick houses in Frisco 30 miles to the north. But the two North Texas communities share a bond: Both were contaminated by industrial lead for nearly half a century."

"Debris that gathered this past summer on Alaska's Kayak Island made walking on its beaches feel like walking through a natural disaster zone, a federal biologist said Thursday."