Pollution

"Dispersants used to encourage the oil's breakdown actually hindered microbes that were helping clean-up the huge slick, says new research."

"Lax enforcement, outdated rules and numerous substances — natural and manmade — threaten drinking water for hundreds of thousands of state residents".

"After a ruptured oil pipeline went undiscovered for 17 hours, spilling 800,000 gallons of heavy oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River in 2010, Congress ordered an audit that laid bare the industry's lackluster record of spotting leaks. But after five years of work, the Obama administration has proposed a regulatory overhaul that fails to patch that hole in the nation’s pipeline safety net — a revelation that has been largely ignored amid Washington's obsession with the Keystone XL pipeline."

"The American Farm Bureau Federation and other industry groups today asked the Supreme Court to review U.S. EPA's landmark approach for cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay."

"Of 32 BNSF train cars that hurtled off the tracks near Alma, Wis., on Saturday, five of them broke open and spilled at least 18,000 gallons of ethanol into the Mississippi River, the railroad company said."

"U.S. EPA's science advisers are criticizing the agency's June announcement dismissing the dangers to drinking water from hydraulic fracturing."

"Only two of 10 Barataria Bay bottlenose dolphins that were found to be pregnant in 2011, a year after the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion oiled the bay, had successful pregnancies. And the survival rate through July 2015 for adult dolphins that were given health assessments in the bay in 2011 is 10 percent lower than found in two studies of dolphins in un-oiled Sarasota Bay, Fla."

"Shell has failed to fulfill its legal obligations to clear up oil spills that it has caused in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region, Amnesty International said on Tuesday."

"The Environmental Protection Agency said on Monday that it had discovered emissions-cheating software on more Volkswagen and Audi cars than previously disclosed and, for the first time, also found the illegal software in one of the carmaker’s high-end Porsche models."