"LITTLETON, New Hampshire -- A New Hampshire jury on Tuesday found Exxon Mobil Corp liable for $236.4 million in a civil lawsuit that charged the oil company had polluted groundwater in the state with a gasoline additive used to reduce smog in the 1970s and 1980s."
"President Barack Obama’s choice to lead the Energy Department pledged to increase use of natural gas Tuesday as a way to combat climate change even as the nation seeks to boost domestic energy production."
SEJ member Elizabeth H. McGowan and her InsideClimate News colleagues Lisa Song and David Hasemyer won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their “The Dilbit Disaster” entry, an investigative piece uncovering what really happened when millions of gallons of tar sands oil from Canada poured into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River after a pipe burst. They were also named as a finalist in the Environmental Reporting category of the 2012 Scripps Howard Awards competition; earned an honorable mention in the 2012 John B. Oakes Award contest presented by the Columbia University School of Journalism; and won the 2012 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism presented by Hunter College.
"More than 1,000 people were injured when a severe tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri, on 22 May 2011, and 158 eventually died. Within a few days of the tornado, several of the injured began to suffer from a fungal infection suspected to be cutaneous necrotizing mucormycosis."
"Much of the oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 disappeared within weeks of the capping of BP's Macondo well on July 15, digested by a massive explosion in oil-eating microorganisms, said Terry Hazen, a professor of environmental biology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, during a Monday panel at the national conference of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans."
"British chef and food activist Jamie Oliver ignited a firestorm in January 2011 when he mentioned on the Late Show with David Letterman that castoreum, a substance used to augment some strawberry and vanilla flavorings, comes from what he described as 'rendered beaver anal gland.' The next year, vegans were outraged to learn that Starbucks used cochineal extract, a color additive derived from insect shells, to dye their strawberry Frappuccino® drinks (eventually, the company decided to transition to lycopene, a pigment found in tomatoes)."
"Japan's Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Monday it does not have enough tank space should it need to move contaminated water from storage pits that started leaking over the weekend at its wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant."
"Toxic chemicals clinging to plastics could cause health problems for fish and other organisms in the Great Lakes."
"Ohio State scientist Lonnie Thompson tests the limits of science -- and his health -- to unlock climate secrets frozen at the top of the world's highest mountain ranges."
"The year: 1990. The venue: Palais des Nations, Geneva. The star: Margaret Thatcher, conservative icon in the final month of her prime ministership. The topic: global warming. Thatcher went to the Second World Climate Conference to heap praise on the then-infant Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and to sound, again, the alarm over global warming."
