"The plastic bag industry, increasingly on the defensive as municipal bag bans proliferate, has gone on the attack against ChicoBag, a competitor that bills itself as an eco-friendly alternative. A federal lawsuit in South Carolina accuses ChicoBag of illegal trash-talking about plastic bag waste."
New Jersey is pulling out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and three other states may follow. Why is RGGI on the ropes and who is throwing the punches? RGGI is made up of 10 northeastern states stretching from Maine to Delaware. In 2008, they banded together to form a carbon-trading program for power plants --- a market mechanism that enables utilities to buy and sell emission credits so they can meet caps on the amount of carbon they're allowed to put into the air.
The rise of the 'tea-party' movement has caused House Energy Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R=MI) to transform himself from a green advocate to an anti-EPA standard bearer.
"The 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior made the converted fishing trawler a campaigning icon. Now, in its 40th anniversary year, Greenpeace is launching its first purpose-built protest ship – one of the most technologically advanced vessels to set sail."
"Radioactive strontium up to 240 times the legal concentration limit has been detected in seawater samples collected near an intake at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday."
Dengue fever, a painful disease transmitted by mosquitos, is now showing up in Florida for the first time in more than 70 years. Climate change could be a factor.
"The government issued warnings on Friday about two materials used daily by millions of Americans, saying that one [formaldehyde] causes cancer and the other [styrene] might."
Firefighters working dangerous night shifts were barely beginning to get a handle on some 6 wildfires in Arizona that were spreading to New Mexico, the largest of which, the Wallow fire, was barely more than 10 percent contained. Regional smoke continued to be a serious health threat. Authorities looked for a human cause to blame the fire on, even though the tinder-dry conditions had been causing the Wallow fire to spread at nearly 1,000 acres per hour. Evacuations began in New Mexico even as some Arizona evacuees were being allowed to return home.
On June 6, EPA announced a new round of grants going to nearly 200 communities in some 40 states and 3 tribal areas. Most of them go to poor and minority areas with high unemployment rates.
Just in time for summer, 41 new segments of the US National Recreation Trails system in AL, AR, CT, FL, IL, IN, KS, MA, MD, MI, MN, NJ, NM, OK, PA, TN, and WV, covering about 650 land and water miles in 17 states, are open for business. These are part of a much larger system of about 1,100 trails spanning 13,000 miles.
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