Biology
Breach
April 10, 2014, from Indiana Daily Student
The amount of pollution in Indiana's rivers and streams is greater than any other state's in the country, according to a study recently released by Environment America Research and Policy Center.
Five states -- Indiana, Virginia, Nebraska, Texas and Georgia -- accounted for 40 percent of the total amount of toxic discharge to U.S. waterways in 2010, according to the study, which reported that 226 million pounds of toxic chemicals were discharged into 1,400 waterways across the country...
"America's waterways are a polluter's paradise right now," Shelley Vinyard, clean water advocate with Environment America...
April 10, 2012, from Associated Press
Mining companies and other businesses will be allowed to keep environmental studies secret, even if they detail possible pollution problems, under industry-backed legislation that gained final House approval Monday.
Under the measure headed to Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, environmental audits generally could not be used as evidence in civil cases.
April 10, 2012, from Associated Press
Some nail polishes commonly found in California salons and advertised as free of a so-called "toxic trio" of chemicals actually have high levels of agents linked to birth defects, state regulators said Tuesday.
A Department of Toxic Substances Control report determined that the mislabeled nail products have the potential to harm thousands of workers in more than 48,000 nail salons in California, and their customers.
April 10, 2012, from Environmental Health News
In an announcement that stunned scientists, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has cancelled grant applications for what was supposed to be a $20-million, four-year green chemistry program. The mysterious cancellation comes less than three weeks before the deadline for the proposals. The grants, which were supposed to fund four new centers, would have been a major new source of funding for green chemistry, a field that seeks to design environmentally friendly chemicals and processes that can replace toxic substances. The requests for proposals may be reissued, the EPA said. But the program's sudden halt and uncertain future -- and lack of explanation -- have left scientists disheartened. "My reaction is shock that it happened and total dismay that what appeared to be a novel program was cancelled without warning or explanation," said Eric Beckman, a chemical engineer at the University of Pittsburgh.
April 10, 2012, from HazMat Management Magazine
Just eight weeks before ExxonMobil's annual shareholder meeting, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has sided with the company's investors in their battle to address concerns about the energy giant's hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") operations....
In response to the shareholder proposal, ExxonMobil argued to the SEC that it had substantially implemented the requests shareholders laid out in their resolution.
However, deeper research revealed a large gap between information shareholders requested and what ExxonMobil disclosed.
"ExxonMobil has provided fragmentary and incomplete information on some of the community concerns, does not disclose government enforcement actions as requested by the proposal, and has disclosed far too little analysis useful to investors on the short- and long- term risks posed by these developments," says As You Sow's attorney Sanford J. Lewis....
ExxonMobil asserted to the SEC that it had no hydraulic fracturing-related environmental violations. It made this claim by limiting reportable violations to activities detectable deep underground, ignoring impacts occurring near the surface.
In fact, in Pennsylvania alone, 156 notices of violations related to natural gas extraction operations where fracking is underway were issued to ExxonMobil or its recently acquired subsidiary, XTO, between 2010 and 2011.
April 10, 2009, from Toronto Globe and Mail
Dow AgroSciences LLC has decided to sue the federal government over Quebec's ban on the residential use of pesticides.
The U.S.-based company, maker of the herbicide 2,4-D, is claiming $2-million (U.S.) in damages, using controversial provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement that allow businesses to sue governments over regulations that harm their interests.... The case has attracted wide interest because so-called cosmetic pesticide bans are becoming increasingly popular, with Ontario recently following Quebec's lead in introducing one and many retailers removing chemical bug and weed killers from their shelves.
April 10, 2009, from London Guardian
Britain and other European governments have been accused of underestimating the health risks from shipping pollution following research which shows that one giant container ship can emit almost the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50 million cars.
Confidential data from maritime industry insiders based on engine size and the quality of fuel typically used by ships and cars shows that just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760 million cars. Low-grade ship bunker fuel (or fuel oil) has up to 2,000 times the sulphur content of diesel fuel used in US and European automobiles....pollution from the world's 90,000 cargo ships leads to 60,000 deaths a year in the US alone and costs up to $330 billion per year in health costs from lung and heart diseases.
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Climate
Chaos
April 10, 2014, from Indianapolis Star
Activists want Congressman Todd Rokita to rethink his stance on global warming and support limits on greenhouse gasses to stem the pace of climate change.
About 20 people gathered Tuesday evening around Rokita's Lafayette office at Fourth and Columbia Streets to draw attention to Rokita's belief that Earth is undergoing a natural cycle of environmental changes, not a sudden shift caused by man.
April 10, 2014, from Newsweek
...the suicide rate for male farmers has remained high: just under two times that of the general population. And this isn't just a problem in the U.S.; it's an international crisis. India has had more than 270,000 farmer suicides since 1995. In France, a farmer dies by suicide every two days. In China, farmers are killing themselves to protest the government's seizing of their land for urbanization. In Ireland, the number of suicides jumped following an unusually wet winter in 2012 that resulted in trouble growing hay for animal feed. In the U.K., the farmer suicide rate went up by 10 times during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, when the government required farmers to slaughter their animals. And in Australia, the rate is at an all-time high following two years of drought... One factor disputed among agricultural and mental health professionals is the connection between pesticides and depression.
April 10, 2012, from Michael Tobis, Planet 3.0
If a place is ten degrees above normal at a time of one degree of global warming, it does not make sense to say that one degree is due to climate change, and nine degrees "would have happened anyway", even in a statistical sense. It implies that the dynamics of the system are the same under perturbation. Is that a realistic presumption in the absence of other evidence? I think it shows a weak understanding of general systems principles to make that case....
Sure enough, the distribution of regional anomalies isn't just shifting to the warm side. It's also getting broader. It seems to me surprising that anyone expected anything different. The presumption that global warming should be expected to be a benign and gradual process has no basis in anything but tradition. Any basis in general systems theory indicates the opposite....
And this is why "global warming" is an inadequate name for what is happening. Climate is changing very quickly. Some of the slower parts of the system are just starting to wake up. We are entering a period of increasing disequilibrium, and what we are seeing is unequivocally worse than we expected.
April 10, 2009, from Science Daily
The North Atlantic Ocean is one of the Earth’s tools to offset natural carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, the ‘carbon sink’ in the North Atlantic is the primary gate for carbon dioxide (CO2) entering the global ocean and stores it for about 1500 years. The oceans have removed nearly 30 per cent of anthropogenic (man-made) emissions over the last 250 years. However, several recent studies show a dramatic decline in the North Atlantic Ocean's carbon sink....They believe the decrease is a natural phenomenon as a result of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which causes weather patterns to change.
April 10, 2009, from Yale Environment 360
Earlier this year, the World Bank released yet another in a seemingly endless stream of reports by global institutions and universities chronicling the melting of the world's cryosphere, or ice zone. This latest report concerned the glaciers in the Andes and revealed the following: Bolivia's famed Chacaltaya glacier has lost 80 percent of its surface area since 1982, and Peruvian glaciers have lost more than one-fifth of their mass in the past 35 years, reducing by 12 percent the water flow to the country's coastal region, home to 60 percent of Peru's population.
And if warming trends continue, the study concluded, many of the Andes' tropical glaciers will disappear within 20 years, not only threatening the water supplies of 77 million people in the region, but also reducing hydropower production, which accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
April 10, 2009, from Agence France-Presse
Scientists have decoded genomes of two strains of green algae, highlighting genes that allow them to capture carbon emissions and maintain the oceans' chemical balance, a study said Thursday.
The strains' productivity as a significant source of marine food and their ability to capture carbon means the algae can influence the carbon flux and have an impact on climate change, according to the study published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
An international team of researchers sampled two isolates of Microminas, one of the smallest known eukaryotic algae -- complex cellular structures containing a nucleus and enclosed within a membrane.
April 10, 2009, from BusinessGreen
US car maker Chrysler's electric vehicle range has moved a step closer to reality as the company inked a major partnership with US battery specialist A123Systems.
Under the terms of the deal, A123Systems will provide Chrysler with battery systems for its planned ENVI range of electric vehicles.
First showcased at the North American motorshow in Detroit this year, Chrysler's entry into the electric vehicle market includes the Dodge Circuit EV, Jeep(R) Wrangler EV, Jeep Patriot EV, Chrysler Town & Country EV and the Chrysler 200C EV concept car. The company is expecting its first all-electric model to go into production early next year.
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