"With state regulators required to start issuing Clean Air Act permits next year for large stationary sources of greenhouse gas emissions, the Lone Star State will be the lone holdout, according to a report released today by an association of state and local air agencies."

"Energy magnate David Koch ceded his spot on a National Cancer Institute (NCI) advisory board last month, but green advocates are taking aim at the conservative mega-donor nonetheless by calling for a review of federal ethics policies that allowed him to sit on the panel despite a potential conflict of interest."

Despite the dominance of jobs and government spending as issues in Washington state congressional races, anti-environmental positions seem to be a non-starter in a state where so many people love the outdoors.

The coffers of wildland fire-fighting agencies are depleted in places like Colorado, even as property-damage figures are hitting record highs. That's partly because more and more people are building houses in the high-risk wildland-urban interface.

"President Barack Obama will make a visit to Charlottesville, Va. on Friday to rally for Tom Perriello, the vulnerable freshman Democrat who has championed a number of White House causes in the past two years."

"The central U.S. was hit Tuesday with a massive storm with wind gusts up to 81 mph. The storm snapped trees and power lines, ripped off roofs, delayed flights and soaked commuters hunched under crumpled umbrellas. The storm spanned from the Dakotas to the eastern Great Lakes. The unusual system had barometric pressure similar to a Category 3 hurricane, but with much less destructive power."

"Members of President Barack Obama's Oil Spill Commission said this week that they were shocked to learn during their months of investigation that federal drilling rig inspectors generally know little or nothing about the process of safely lining and sealing an offshore oil well."

"The federal government announced the first national emissions and fuel economy standards for heavy vehicles on Monday, one of a series of regulatory steps that the Obama administration is taking to increase energy efficiency and reduce atmospheric pollution in the absence of Congressional action on climate change."

"Pregnant women living in Texas neighborhoods with higher air levels of benzene – a pollutant often released from oil refineries and traffic exhaust – are more likely to have babies with neural tube defects. Women living in the areas with the highest benzene levels had a two times greater risk for their children to be born with spina bifida."

Hydraulic fracturing of underground shale to produce natural gas also releases uranium that is part of the rock, say researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The uranium may pollute groundwater.