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.
EPA has updated its Enforcement and Compliance History Online database so that federal standards violations through 2009 can be quickly identified. For example, pick a county and quickly get a customized listing of systems that fall into categories such as serial violators, or occasional violators of things such as health-based standards or monitoring requirements.
Each decade, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center updates its data for 30-year averages for a range of climate indicators. The most widely used "normals" for the period 1981-2010 (including temperature, precipitation, snowfall, snow depth, and heating and cooling degree days) are scheduled to be released at the end of June 2011, with the rest by year end.
"Judging from an annual survey by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities, the American public is roughly as fractured in its attitudes toward climate change today as it was last year."
"The snowpack in the Rocky Mountains has been gradually thinning over much of the past century, and a new study attributes much of that to global warming."
"A report says the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was “not forthcoming” with other commissioners in his decision to have the agency’s staff wind down the review of an application for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada."
"A panel of three federal administrative law judges has announced it is delaying Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant’s license renewal until at least December 2015." The renewal will await further seismic studies.
"As the heat wave continues, some civil rights leaders say high temperatures pose a particular threat to poor, minority communities."
"Motorists could face higher costs at the gas pump, analysts said, as oil prices jumped after a meeting of OPEC ministers dissolved into bickering."
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