Pollution

"It was like a sequel to a bad movie. One month after I watched the California Coastal Commission whack the executive whose career was devoted to preserving and assuring equal access to the state's greatest treasure, I went to Diamond Bar on Friday to watch another massacre. This time the target was a man with more than three decades of experience fighting smog and improving public health in a region with some of the dirtiest air in the nation."

State and federal officials Friday announced a plan to clean up more than a century's worth of toxic pollution from the lower eight miles of the Passaic river, in one of the largest and most expensive projects under EPA's 35-year-old Superfund program.

"Raleigh, N.C. — The state Department of Environmental Quality on Friday issued violations against Duke Energy for allowing wastewater to leak from coal ash basins at 12 facilities."

Some chemicals that are common in commercial products and processes are known to find their way into the environment and seriously (even fatally) harm human health. Yet current U.S. law makes it hard for EPA to keep companies from using them. Sometimes the chemicals used to replace them are just as bad, but the law does not even require those to be tested. A vast regime of secrecy based on unchallenged claims of "confidential business information" makes the danger to public health worse. Often, not even the EPA employees responsible for protecting people can access information about the toxic chemicals. The chemical reform bills now pending in Congress won't fix the problem.

"In a significant victory for the Obama administration, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Thursday refused to block an Environmental Protection Agency regulation limiting emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from coal-fired power plants."

"Since the early 1990s, thousands of York County residents have played softball and soccer on acres of well-manicured fields at Chisman Creek Park and the adjacent Wolf Trap Park."

"Mining company Samarco and its owners, BHP Billiton and Vale SA, reached a deal with the Brazilian government on Wednesday to pay an estimated 20 billion reais ($5.1 billion) in damages over 15 years for a deadly dam spill in November."

"The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ended a five-year legal challenge to the Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan, rejecting without comment the American Farm Bureau Federation’s request that the court hear its argument that the federal government is effectively seizing land use authority from state and local governments. The decision removes any legal cloud from the pursuit of the Bay pollution reduction strategy imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

"Facing hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits, the giant biotechnology company Monsanto last year received a legislative gift from the House of Representatives, a one-paragraph addition to a sweeping chemical safety bill that could help shield it from legal liability for a toxic chemical only it made."

"America's Car-Battery Waste Is Making Mexican Communities Sick".