"Royal Dutch Shell is spending billions of dollars to drill the first oil wells in U.S. Arctic waters in 20 years, backed by an Obama administration eager to show it wasn't opposed to offshore exploration. But the closely watched project isn't going the way the company or the government hoped—illustrating the continuing challenge of plumbing for natural riches in one of the world's most unforgiving locations."

"While Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the fate of Enbridge’s proposed pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to tankers on the British Columbia coast will be based on science and not politics, documents show some of that science isn’t forthcoming. And critics say there is no time for the science to be completed before a federal deadline for the environmental assessment currently underway."

"Beside Seattle’s notoriously polluted Duwamish River, an excavator scoops up small pieces of waste metal and slings them onto a rusty mountain at Seattle Iron & Metals Corp. A pile of flattened cars and trucks squats nearby amid vast sheets of scrap metal. For at least the last four years, this auto-shredder and metal recycler has dumped more pollutants into the river than allowed under the federal Clean Water Act, government records show. The levels have ranged higher than 250 times above what’s known to harm salmon that migrate through the river."

"Trading pollution 'credits' to reduce the cost of cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay risks endangering the health of the region's poor and minority communities, a new report warns."

"This week, Bill Gates was at a summer fair in Washington State, but he was not eating deep-fried butter on-a-stick, or checking out livestock. Gates was inspecting cutting-edge toilet technology on display at an event his foundation hosted in Seattle — the Reinvent the Toilet Fair."

"A Canadian company opens a test pit in Utah. But is there enough water to support the industry?"

"A U.S. study has found an unusually high incidence of gastrointestinal disease in a small U.S. town located downstream from a Teck smelter in Trail, B.C."

"The Department of Interior on Monday proposed a mixture of new oil and gas development and environmental protections in a vast swathe of Arctic land."

"In the early 1990s, anglers in the Upper Columbia River reported seeing beads of liquid mercury floating in the water."