Pollution

Several federal agencies and an array of environmental groups and companies are at odds over how much selenium pollution should be allowed from an Idaho phosphate mine. It is the two-headed trout that may end up carrying the argument.

"In a blow to the oil and gas industry, a judge has ruled small towns in New York have the authority to ban drilling -- including the controversial method known as fracking -- within their borders."

"There are an estimated 11,000 private and commercial injection and disposal wells in Oklahoma. Each year those wells are injected with billions of gallons of oil and gas wastewater. According to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission commercial disposal wells pumped at least 8.8 billion gallons of wastewater into the earth in the last two years. A spokesperson for the Corporation Commission said they have not tallied the amount of water injected through private wells." One of those operations may have ruined the well water of Rusty Russell.

"A Southwest Florida conservation official is calling a federal judge's ruling on clean water limits a total victory for the environment. U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle's ruling in Tallahassee on Saturday ended years of delays in setting and enforcing specific limits on sewage, manure and fertilizer contamination in Florida waters."

"The House by a wide margin [Thursday] night passed a bill to vastly expand oil and gas development off the nation's coasts, in an Alaskan reserve and on experimental shale tracts in the Intermountain West."

"Michigan environmental regulators said Thursday that they reached a long-sought deal with Dow Chemical Co. to clean up to 1,400 residential properties in Midland, home of its corporate headquarters and a plant that polluted the area with dioxin for much of the past century."

"WASHINGTON, DC -- New Jersey already has 144 Superfund sites, more than any other state, but it could have even more according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency documents obtained through a lawsuit by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a national alliance of state and federal agency resource professionals.

Twenty-seven contaminated sites in New Jersey pose risks equal to or greater than sites placed on the Superfund National Priority List and scheduled for cleanup, yet the EPA has not added these uncontrolled sites to the list, PEER has determined.

The damage that the natural gas production method known as hydrofracturing ("fracking") can do to water wells and streams is hard to document because of a federal law prohibiting disclosure of chemicals drilling companies inject underground. There are almost no federal regulations protecting the public from fracking pollution. "Why? The answer is money. The oil and gas industry has reaped billions in profits from fracking. And since 1990, they've pumped $238.7 million into gubernatorial and Congressional election campaigns to persuade lawmakers that fracking is safe, which has effectively blocked federal regulation."