"Climate scientist Michael Mann can proceed with defamation claims against two writers who accused him of fraud and misconduct related to his iconic 'hockey stick' graph of global warming trends, a panel of three judges on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled today."

"It seems increasingly likely that the Trump administration would either alter, or attempt to stop using entirely, an Obama-era metric known as the 'social cost of carbon' in its federal rule-making processes. And that could have have major effects on the way environmental policies are written (or unwritten) in the coming years."

"More than three years after an official prompt from the President, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finalized a long-awaited rule aimed at preventing disasters like the 2010 refinery explosion that killed seven workers in Anacortes, Washington."

"President-elect Donald Trump’s landing team at the Environmental Protection Agency includes some of the Obama administration’s biggest foes on climate and energy policy. But what appears to be absent from the nine members of the EPA transition team is any background in chemicals, pesticides, water pollution, and other policy areas where the agency enforces environmental laws to control contamination and protect public health."

"Texas is among several states grappling with a surge of abandoned drilling sites and dwindling funds to clean them up."

"Federal inspections of cattle and hog feedlots, turkey houses, and other animal feeding operations dropped for a fourth consecutive year, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. The number of fines and orders to change management practices for those same facilities fell for a fifth consecutive year."

"In a scientific triumph that will change the way the world fights a terrifying killer, an experimental Ebola vaccine tested on humans in the waning days of the West African epidemic has been shown to provide 100 percent protection against the lethal disease."

"The city of Clovis won its more than three-month-long civil trial against chemical manufacturing giant Shell Oil Co. over the cleanup of a toxic chemical found in drinking-water wells around the city of 108,000 people."

"The Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has established a hotline for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees to report political meddling. There’s currently concern among NOAA scientists about who Trump’s pick to head the agency will be."

"New Mexico has given its approval to resume operations at the nation's only permanent nuclear waste disposal site after state inspectors found the facility safe to reopen for the first time since a radiation leak there nearly three years ago, officials said on Thursday."