After decades of putting hazardous and toxic waste into the Parker Street Dump, the city of New Bedford Massachusetts built a high school and middle school on the site. Today, the city is dealing with the toxic legacy.

"If taxpayers end up paying only 1 percent of the cost of cleaning up PCB contamination in the Fox River, that could be between $10 million and $15 million. If the taxpayer obligation reaches 10 percent, the figure becomes $100 million or more."

Residents of Treece, Kansas, try to go forward as they wait for buyouts at a Superfund site created by years of lead and zinc mining.

"Global warming is now officially considered a threat to U.S. national security. For the first time, Pentagon planners in 2010 will include climate change among the security threats identified in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Congress-mandated report that updates Pentagon priorities every four years."

"Wind turbines can kill a few Indiana bats without endangering the species but the owners must ask for permission first, U.S. District Judge Roger Titus ruled on Dec. 8. Titus blocked construction of 82 turbines in Greenbrier County, W.Va., and restricted 40 turbines already under construction to seasonal operation."

"BRUSSELS – EU leaders agreed Friday to commit euro2.4 billion ($3.6 billion) a year until 2012 to help poorer countries combat global warming, as they sought to rescue their image as climate change innovators and bolster talks in Copenhagen."

"OSLO -- President Barack Obama accepted the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace at a ceremony today at Oslo City Hall. Delivering a Nobel lecture focused on the uses and limits of military force in creating a worldwide just and lasting peace, President Obama underlined the importance of environmental protection."

"Two degrees may be too much. That's the message from a delegation of ocean science and policy experts from Monterey's Center for Ocean Solutions and Stanford University, who traveled to Copenhagen to relay the staggering burdens of greenhouse gas emissions on the sea."

"Three Senators released a broadly-worded blueprint of a climate change and energy bill on Thursday afternoon that they believe can win the 60 votes needed to push the bill through next year."

"TORONTO - A Mexican man who strongly opposed the presence of a Canadian company in his hometown felt sure his activism would lead to his murder but was willing to pay that price to protest what he regarded to be human rights abuses, friends said Thursday."

"The first official draft blueprint for a deal at the UN climate talks sees targets of limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius (2.7 or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a document seen by AFP on Friday."

"The owner of the highly polluted Kin-Buc Landfill in Edison has agreed to make the largest environmental clean-up contribution in the United States, $1.79 billion, as part of a bankruptcy settlement."

"The Bureau of Reclamation wants to use an experimental biological pesticide to control invasive mussels that are interfering with dam and hydropower operations that supply electricity and drinking water to millions of people across the Southwest."

"Nearly 130 scientists today asked the Interior Department to change a policy set under the Bush administration guiding how agencies decide whether a species is endangered."

"Ordinary office paper coated with an inky layer of carbon nanotubes or nanowires can make a lightweight, flexible and highly conductive battery or superconductor, according to Stanford University researchers."