"During a week of United Nations climate negotiations in Geneva, the draft of a new treaty got longer and more complex, rather than shorter and simpler as leaders had planned. That may nonetheless represent progress, according to participants and environmentalists."
Mississippi Power, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, is building a so-called "clean coal" plant in Mississippi. The cost has ballooned from the original estimate of $1.8 billion to the current $6.17 billion (and counting). As the residents of rural Kemper County can tell you, that is just the beginning. It will strip mine lignite from 48 square miles of timber and pasture land.
"A federal judge has granted two animal protection groups a unusual preliminary injunction to stop the Bureau of Land Management’s roundup of more than 330 wild horses in northern Nevada, saying the government cannot rely on a five-year-old environmental analysis that ignores claims the herd would be harmed by a pesticide given as a form of birth control."
An ecological treasure, a forest maintained by the Kernan Family in upstate New York for seven decades, is now "threatened by the construction of the Constitution Pipeline, a $700 million, 124-mile conduit designed to transport natural gas from the Marcellus Shale fields of northeast Pennsylvania" to pipelines serving markets in New York and New England.
"All the recent declarations that 2014 was the hottest year on record seems to have prompted a spate of panic denial among climate change contrarians, denialists and ideologues."
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has selected a plan to clean up dioxin contaminated properties along the Tittabawassee River floodplain and work is expected to start this year."
"A task force representing Iowa and 11 other states said Thursday it needs another 20 years to reduce the size of a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico by two-thirds."
"A U.N. deal to fight global warming due in 2015 is set to avoid tough penalties for nations that fail to keep their promises, relying instead on persuasion and peer pressure, delegates at climate talks said on Thursday."
"A revised environmental review of a contested Arctic oil lease makes drilling in the area far more likely, a development that has infuriated environmentalists."
"Some eight million metric tons of plastic waste makes its way into the world’s oceans each year, and the amount of the debris is likely to increase greatly over the next decade unless nations take strong measures to dispose of their trash responsibly, new research suggests."
