"WASHINGTON, DC -- Forty-five areas across the country are not meeting the latest government standards for ground-level ozone or smog, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday."
"If the Potomac River has gotten more attention than the Anacostia in the past 50 years, it’s partly because the Potomac supplies 90 percent of the region’s drinking water. That amounts to an average of 486 million gallons a day, according to the Potomac Conservancy. The Potomac watershed, which includes 14,670 miles of land that drains to the river, covers parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District, Maryland and Virginia. In the 1950s, reports of stench and dangerous levels of pollution clouded the Potomac’s reputation. But the 383-mile river wasn’t always in such bad shape."
"A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted."
"Earth-observing systems operated by the United States have entered a steep decline, imperiling the nation’s monitoring of weather, natural disasters and climate change, a report from the National Research Council warned on Wednesday."
"HOUSTON -- Aubrey K. McClendon built Chesapeake Energy into the nation’s second-largest producer of natural gas through a combination of debt, foresight, luck and sheer bravado. Now both he and the company have been forced to add humility to the mix."
The resignation of EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz has not resolved much. Conflicts over oil-industry pollution and whether laws against it should be enforced remain intense in parts of Texas where people are making money from the pollution while others fear they are being made sick by it.
Gabriel Nelson reports for Greenwire May 1, 2012.
"WASHINGTON — The heavy fuel that oceangoing vessels burn adds so much to air pollution hundreds of miles inland that the United States joined with Canada during the George W. Bush administration to ask the International Maritime Organization to create an emissions-control area along the coasts. Large ships would be required to reduce pollution dramatically in a zone 200 miles out to sea along all the coasts of North America, mainly by using cleaner fuel."
"U.S. EPA is writing rules that would require pollution-discharge permits for the muddy runoff from logging roads -- regulations mandated by a court ruling that sparked bipartisan political backlash."
"In a year of wild weather so far, hardly anyone would use the word 'normal' in predicting what to expect in the future – except for long-range forecasters talking about the coming hurricane season.
"Airborne emissions and stray dust from coal tar–based sealers, one of the two main types of products used to coat certain asphalt pavements, may be a more significant human health threat than previously thought, according to three new studies and a review published by U.S. government and university researchers."
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