"When Penelope Jagessar Chaffer became pregnant, her obstetrician warned her to avoid alcohol, cigarettes and mercury-laden tuna. Dangers posed to her unborn child by industrial chemicals such as flame retardants, pesticides and plastics, however, never came up."
"U.S. EPA's nine-year effort to document air pollution at livestock operations is likely still many years from completion and unlikely to be as useful as industry and environmental groups had hoped."
"A new census study shows there are more than 2,400 white sharks off California and suggests that existing protective measures should be maintained because they are increasing the size and health of the population."
"House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Wednesday threatened to hold the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in contempt of Congress if officials fail to turn over subpoenaed communications with the White House."
"Home Depot and other U.S. companies are working to eliminate or limit use of a type of pesticide suspected of helping cause dramatic declines in honeybee populations needed to pollinate key American crops, officials said on Wednesday."
"President says members of congress are feigning ignorance of science because they fear backlash from 'fringe elements'."
SEJ members aren't the only ones who find federal agency press offices to be hard to get call-backs, on-record interviews, or simple information from. Many health writers have the same problem. In the latest issue of Harvard's Nieman Reports, Jenni Bergal paints a broad canvas of the problems many journalists have in getting from agencies key information that affects the public interest.
Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced a bill that would add a balancing test and sunset to the "deliberative process" exemption in the current FOIA law. That exemption shields from disclosure records documenting internal policy debates within agencies before final decisions are made. Prospects for the Senate bill are improved by the fact that Leahy chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and a related bill has already been passed by the House.
Federal data, though sometimes hard to get, can provide many local stories for environmental journalists. Case in point: AP and Climate Desk journalists got data from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management on high-risk oil and gas wells on federal and Indian lands from 2009 to 2012. Some 40 percent of the high-risk wells had not been inspected. BLM says it does not have enough inspectors. See AP's exposé and Climate Desk's map showing the counties with the most uninspected wells.
Should firefighters and residents know whether trains loaded with explosive oil are routed through the heart of residential districts? Many railroads say no, claiming it is a security issue. But on June 18, 2014, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) dismissed that claim, saying that oil train routing was not sensitive security information. Yet the railroads are fighting back.
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