"BP will spend more than $400 million to significantly reduce noxious air pollution from its massive refinery in northwest Indiana, the company announced today in a settlement with federal authorities and environmental groups that could set a precedent for oil companies nationwide."
"In 2009 and 2010, the Delaware River near Wilmington got a little-noticed early taste of the waste left behind by the controversial natural gas drilling method called fracking. Some 1.4 million gallons of partially treated wastewater collected from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, wells outside the Delaware River basin were further processed and flushed into Delaware waters through the commercial side of DuPont Co.’s big wastewater plant in Deepwater, N.J., near the foot of the Delaware Memorial Bridge."
"One of Canada's top experts on Arctic issues is warning of the 'near-inevitability' of an Exxon Valdez-scale oil spill at a fragile choke point in Alaskan waters if Canada ends up shipping oilsands fuel to China via pipeline terminals on the British Columbia coast."
"A new law in Pennsylvania has doctors nervous."
"Quite a few of the 225 people who live in Dish, Texas, think the nation's natural gas boom is making them sick. They blame the chemicals used in gas production for health problems ranging from nosebleeds to cancer.
And the mayor of Dish, Bill Sciscoe, has a message for people who live in places where gas drilling is about to start: 'Run. Run as fast as you can. Grab up your family and your belongings, and get out.'"
"COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio senators approved new regulations for horizontal shale drilling known as fracking on Tuesday in a bipartisan vote punctuated by a spoken rendition of 'The Beverly Hillbillies' theme song."
A Chicago Tribune investigative series on flame retardant chemicals helps illustrate how federal agency control of what scientists say to reporters can help the chemical and tobacco industries. By reporter Michael Hawthorne.
After backroom lobbying by gas and oil industry groups, the Obama White House watered down the promised fracking-fluid disclosure requirement promised earlier this year — imposing it only after completion of the fracking operation, when the information may have little effect (such as public pressure on BLM to deny a drilling permit).
"Living in the middle of a natural gas boom can be pretty unsettling. The area around the town of Silt, Colo., used to be the kind of sleepy rural place where the tweet of birds was the most you would hear. Now it's hard to make out the birds because of the rumbling of natural gas drilling rigs." ...
"A new report named the Potomac the nation’s most endangered river, saying it is threatened by nutrient and sediment pollution that lowers the quality of drinking water and kills marine life and will only get worse if Congress rolls back regulations in the Clean Water Act."
