"With Arctic sea ice thinning and shrinking rapidly in recent years, the U.S. military and scientific agencies are scrambling to cope with the looming prospect of a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean."
"The environment may not come to mind when most people think about former President Bill Clinton, but on Wednesday he defended his legacy as the Environmental Protection Agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., was renamed in his honor."
Science is the key to many environmental stories, and EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) offers a wide range of data tools journalists may find worthwhile to explore.
Studies by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health show silica used in hydraulic fracturing of tight oil and gas formations can endanger workers. But a FOIA request seeking to know the sites where workers had been endangered has met with no response, independent journalist and SEJ member Elizabeth Grossman reports.
"WASHINGTON, DC -- The latest environmental assessment of the controversial TransCanada Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is flawed because the contractor hired by the U.S. State Department to write the review 'lied' on its conflict of interest disclosure form about its past work for TransCanada, finds research released Wednesday by two environmental groups."
"Hydrologist David Evetts drove north from his office in Boise, Idaho, to the former prospecting town of Elk City on May 2. Fifty miles down a dead-end mountain road, he stopped at a gray metal box on a bridge over the South Fork Clearwater River. Reaching inside, he turned off the satellite feed that once relayed the river's water-level measurements from stream gauge number 13337500 every 15 minutes."
"This week could be pivotal not only for the future of the farm bill, but also the direction for the rest of this Congress."http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/view/blog/getBlog.do?blogHandle=policy&blogEntryId=8a82c0bc3e43976e013fbbecd2200e83&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
"Josh Fox galvanized the U.S. anti-fracking movement with his incendiary 2010 documentary 'Gasland.' Now he’s back with a sequel — and this time, he’s targeting an audience of just one."
"COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- As the West battles one catastrophic wildfire after another, the federal government is spending less and less on its main program for preventing blazes in the first place."
If you want to take advantage of EPA databases to report on local (or even national) environmental conditions, this tool is a step beyond the all-in-one EPA data interfaces many journalists are used to, in that it catalogs some of the less-known specialized databases. It is unusual among government data programs in that it explicitly encourages third-party developers to build apps based on open agency data.
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