"PITTSBURGH  -- In a lawsuit over gas industry secrecy, doctors, scientists, researchers and advocates filed court documents supporting two newspapers seeking access to information that could shed light on the health impacts of gas development, including the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. ...

The resignation of EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz has not resolved much. Conflicts over oil-industry pollution and whether laws against it should be enforced remain intense in parts of Texas where people are making money from the pollution while others fear they are being made sick by it.

Gabriel Nelson reports for Greenwire May 1, 2012. [8]

"WASHINGTON — The heavy fuel that oceangoing vessels burn adds so much to air pollution hundreds of miles inland that the United States joined with Canada during the George W. Bush administration to ask the International Maritime Organization to create an emissions-control area along the coasts. Large ships would be required to reduce pollution dramatically in a zone 200 miles out to sea along all the coasts of North America, mainly by using cleaner fuel."

"U.S. EPA is writing rules that would require pollution-discharge permits for the muddy runoff from logging roads -- regulations mandated by a court ruling that sparked bipartisan political backlash."

"Airborne emissions and stray dust from coal tar–based sealers, one of the two main types of products used to coat certain asphalt pavements, may be a more significant human health threat than previously thought, according to three new studies and a review published by U.S. government and university researchers."

"DETROIT -- The first call came in from one of the control towers at drawbridges along the Rouge River. It was April 10, 2002, and by the time the reports of large amounts of oil in the water reached U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials, the spill likely had been under way for at least a day. By the time the contaminated flows had stopped, as many as 250,000 gallons of oil had spread over three miles of the Rouge, into the Detroit River and been carried as far south as Lake Erie."

"Climate scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have discovered that particulate pollution in the late 20th century created a "warming hole" over the eastern United States-that is, a cold patch where the effects of global warming were temporarily obscured."

"The cause célèbre of plastic litter in the ocean is the Texas-sized, swirling island of plastic debris thousands of miles off the coast of California in the Pacific Ocean. But researchers from the Universities of Washington and Delaware and the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass., say the story is much bigger, and scarier, than that."

"A federal judge has ruled that NCR Corp. is responsible for paying for environmental damage to the Fox River in northeastern Wisconsin -- a decision that is expected to jump-start stalled cleanup work on the massive pollution project."

"CLINTON, Ill. -- Fly over Clinton and the 266-acre landfill south of town doesn't look much different than 44 other landfills in Illinois.

But beneath its surface of inoffensive trash, the kind you put at the curb each week, are 4 trillion gallons of water used every day for public use, industry and irrigation in 15 Central Illinois counties.

And if ever the two shall meet, there could be trouble for the 750,000 people who rely on the Mahomet Aquifer, especially if Area Disposal's landfill starts accepting PCBs, a certain type of hazardous waste.