Public

"The federal Energy Department will make good on a pledge for a bolder technology strategy on Monday, awarding research grants for ideas like bacteria that will make gasoline, enzymes that will capture carbon dioxide to counter global warming and batteries so cheap that they will allow the use of solar power all night long."

"Decades of industrial pollution in the Portland Harbor Superfund site have left high levels of contaminants in river sediment, an exhaustive survey concludes, posing risks to wildlife, fish and humans who eat fish from the nine-mile stretch of the Willamette River."

A trawl survey that has been conducted weekly for some 50 years in Narragansett Bay is finding profound changes in the composition of sea life there. Biologically, the news is bad. Despite huge investments in cleaning up the Bay, climate change seems to be the villain.

Refugees from global warming are arriving at camps in Kenya.

"Federal investigators entered a smoldering fuel depot for the first time Sunday to investigate what may have caused an explosion that forced hundreds to evacuate and spewed thick, toxic smoke across the region."

"Many experts think pig farming presents a serious and overlooked risk to public health. Proof of that assertion -- indirect but indisputable, in the opinion of virologists -- is the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza."

Gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale formation of Pennsylvania is bringing an economic boom there -- even as oil and gas drilling has fallen dramatically nationwide. But the gas is tax-exempt in Pennsylvania.

"Taking aim at business interests that have lobbied against an energy and climate bill moving through Congress, President Obama urged lawmakers on Friday to rally around the push toward using more renewable energy."

On Saturday, campaigners against global warming tried "a synchronized burst of more than 4,300 demonstrations, from the Himalayas to the Great Barrier Reef, all centered on the number 350."

"The Senate bill aimed at reducing global warming pollution will initially grant billions of dollars of free emissions permits to utilities and industry but will require the bulk of the money be returned to consumers and taxpayers, according to newly released details."