Water & Oceans

"The waters in Puget Sound's main basin are acidifying as fast as those along the Washington Coast, where wild oysters have not reproduced since 2005."

"Interior Secretary Ken Salazar  issued revised rules on Monday for a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil  drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, replacing an earlier one that had been declared invalid by federal courts."

"U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on Wednesday declared the entire concrete-lined Los Angeles River channel 'traditional navigable waters,' a designation crucial to applying Clean Water Act protections throughout its 834-square-mile urban watershed."

"Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records  of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review."

"New Orleans, which managed to escape the oil from the BP spill for more than two months, can't hide any longer. For the first time since the accident, oil from the ruptured well is seeping into Lake Pontchartrain."

"La Nina is likely to cool the tropical Pacific in coming months, a phenomenon which usually causes stronger monsoons across Asia and eastern Australia, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday."

"More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows."

Just as harmful to the Gulf of Mexico as the BP oil spill is the annual "dead zone" whose increase in recent years has been driven by nitrogen fertilizer used to produce corn ethanol in the U.S. heartland.