"The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear appeals from Republican-led states and coal companies asking it to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act."
"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday announced a revised strategy for reducing lead exposure, with a focus on communities that have had a disproportionate amount.
The draft plan would focus on identifying communities with especially high levels of both lead exposure and blood lead levels. The agency would next develop national standards and guidance to address those exposures and enforce existing regulations.
"A coalition of environmental and animal rights groups petitioned the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) yesterday to abandon a "sweetheart" deal with factory farm owners—and start enforcing air pollution regulations."
"Rita Capitan has been worrying about her water since 1994. It was that autumn she read a local newspaper article about another uranium mine, the Crownpoint Uranium Project, getting under way near her home. Capitan has spent her entire life in Crownpoint, New Mexico, a small town on the eastern Navajo Nation, and is no stranger to the uranium mining that has persisted in the region for decades."
"Years before Amplify Energy made headlines for its ruptured pipeline that spewed oil into Southern California ocean waters in early October, the company’s owners were successfully fighting in court to change its obligation to maintain federally mandated funds for plugging and abandoning offshore oil and gas wells and equipment."
"Hot off the heels of releasing its PFAS road map last week, EPA has found that a deeply controversial “forever chemical” that has contaminated drinking water in North Carolina is, indeed, toxic to humans and will be subject to a drinking water advisory."
"Lax oversight has allowed oil and gas developers to dump billions of barrels of toxic wastewater into the ground, endangering the San Joaquin Valley’s dwindling groundwater supplies".
"New research shows that methane emissions in the Boston area were six times higher than previously estimated. That could make the greenhouse effect of natural gas “equivalent to coal.”"
"Levels of climate-heating gases in the atmosphere hit record levels in 2020, despite coronavirus-related lockdowns, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization has announced."
Plastic waste, already the subject of preliminary international talks, could be increasingly targeted after UN meetings in early 2022. Meanwhile, this ubiquitous product is polluting land, ocean and air in its various forms, as well as through little-understood microplastic particles. The latest TipSheet has the backstory on efforts to forge an international plastics treaty, as well as ideas for how to cover plastic pollution locally.
