National (U.S.)

A debate in Iowa last week between presidential candidates' surrogates feature the Romney camp alleging environmental regulations would hurt farmers, while Obama's team emphasized the help his administration had offered to suffering farmers.

"Speaking on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) yesterday blasted the Obama administration for environmental regulations he said were stifling farmers and ranchers.

"In a letter submitted Friday afternoon to internal investigators at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a whistleblower engineer within the agency accused regulators of deliberately covering up information relating to the vulnerability of U.S. nuclear power facilities that sit downstream from large dams and reservoirs."

"The letter also accuses the agency of failing to act to correct these vulnerabilities despite being aware of the risks for years.

"An environmental group asked the U.S. government on Thursday to consider classifying the orange clownfish -- Nemo, to a whole generation of children -- as endangered."

"Oil and gas drilling operations are already well underway in twelve national parks, and that number may soon balloon to 42 if the fossil fuel companies get their way."

"Today [Thursday] the US Commerce Department declared disasters not of fishermen's making in three key fisheries on four US coasts: the North Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, the Bering Sea, and the Gulf of Alaska in the Pacific Ocean. The declaration opens the door for Congress -- if they choose to accept the mission -- to appropriate funds to help struggling fishers."

After a study by Stanford researchers, published September 4, concluded that organic foods had negligible health benefits, controversy occurred. Now critics, mostly from the environmental health and organic food communities, are challenging the study's methods, its accuracy and completeness, its framing questions, potential conflict of interest stemming from funding support, and the competence of the news media in reporting it.

"Environmentalists sued the Obama administration on Wednesday seeking federal safeguards for seals that rely on vanishing Arctic sea ice and accusing the government of dragging its feet in listing the marine mammals under the Endangered Species Act."

"People of color eat a lot of locally-caught fish for economic and cultural reasons. And yet they are the least likely to be warned because state efforts fail to reach minority and low-income populations."

Oil and gas drilling can usually protect groundwater when enough effort is taken to install well casings and cement them properly. But even those safeguards may fail in karst formations, as the Bureau of Land Management's experience in New Mexico shows.

Land contamination may be as important as the direct radiation dose to humans in setting safety standards for nuclear plants, the disaster at Japan's Fukushima site suggests.