"For the past year local air regulators have been tracking the chemicals companies use in oil and gas exploration around Southern California. In a report released Wednesday, four environmental groups crunched the tracking reports to find that more than 40 toxic chemicals have been used in dozens of drilling operations, often near homes, schools, and hospitals."
"A heated budget battle in Sacramento over more oil-spill protection for rivers, lakes and other inland bodies of water has prompted a last-minute lobbying blitz by formidable adversaries: the oil industry and environmentalists."
"In a new study, hairdressers who often used light colored hair dyes or hair-waving products on clients had more potentially cancer-causing compounds in their blood than hairdressers who used the chemicals less frequently."
"NEW YORK — The world oil market has set up quite nicely for OPEC. Dramatic changes in oil production around the globe are balancing each other out instead of wreaking havoc. This has helped world oil prices stay high enough to provide OPEC countries with robust income, but not so high that they scare customers away from buying more of their precious product."
"You might say Texas has a running start in the race to slash carbon emissions in electricity generation, a pursuit spurred by last week's proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gases."
"Decades of shortsighted decisions by industry and government have put the Mississippi River’s future at risk, and degradation at its southern Louisiana delta is contributing to 'the greatest land loss on the planet,' a five-state environmental coalition warned Wednesday."
"Americans are willing to bear the costs of combating climate change, and most are more likely to support a candidate seeking to address the issue."
Experienced journalists know that a press credential is often critical to gaining physical or virtual access to news events and information. It's an aspect of information access rarely covered by the news media themselves. A new report from the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard looks systematically at who gets a press card and who does not.
Local reporters can find information about coal-ash situations in their own areas using a newly improved database compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project which goes well beyond anything previously available because it includes large amounts of painstaking research by EIP. The site is important for its focus on contamination of groundwater that people may drink by the toxic heavy metals in coal combustion wastes.
For some years now, under multiple administrations, journalists who have called EPA scientists and other experts asking to talk to them about matters large and small have almost universally been told something like, "I'm not allowed to talk to news media without Press Office permission." Yet EPA officials maintain they do not have a press policy. SEJ's WatchDog filed June 10, 2014 the first of what will be an ongoing series of FOIA requests to get to the bottom of this ironic situation.
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