By Becky Oskin, Senior Writer14 June 2014 SACRAMENTO, California (LiveScience.com) – Peru’s Amazon rainforest is extensively contaminated from decades of oil and gas drilling, researchers reported yesterday (June 12) here at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference. In the past decade, volatile demonstrations by indigenous groups and tangled lawsuits against oil companies have exposed the toxic […]
By Jim Carlton 6 June 2014 SAUSALITO, California – Record numbers of distressed sea lions have washed ashore in California for a second straight year, the latest example of a marine mammal facing severe problems amid what biologists say is overfishing and other human-caused strains on the world’s oceans. From January through May, a record […]
By Adam Vaughan 23 May 2014 (theguardian.com) – Drilling for oil in a part of the Amazon rainforest considered one of the most biodiverse hotspots on the planet is to go ahead less than a year after Ecuador’s president lifted a moratorium on oil drilling there. Last August, Rafeal Correa scrapped a pioneering scheme, […]
By Per Liljas 28 May 2014 (TIME) – An E.U.-mandated shift to diesel cars has sent London’s NO2 emissions through the roof. “It’s a public-health catastrophe,” says one prominent campaigner British tabloids may lash out at Chinese smog all they want, but when it comes to one important pollution indicator, the U.K. capital actually outpollutes […]
By Bob Yirka 27 May 2014 (PhysOrg) – A team of researchers with Dartmouth College in the U.S. and the University of Plymouth in the U.K. has found that a massive amount of tiny bits of rayon, plastics and other man-made materials are embedded in Arctic sea ice. In their paper published in the journal […]
By Terry Macalister 21 May 2014 (theguardian.com) – BP last night mounted a last ditch attempt to limit the costs of its settlement for the victims of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill by lodging an appeal to the US supreme court to make a final ruling. Earlier this week the British oil […]
By SIMON ROMERO and CHRISTOPHER CLAREY18 May 2014 RIO DE JANEIRO (The New York Times) – Nico Delle Karth, an Austrian sailor preparing for the 2016 Summer Olympics, said it was the foulest place he had ever trained. Garbage bobbed on the surface, everything from car tires to floating mattresses. The water reeked so badly […]
USDA Announces Fall Summit on Bee Nutrition and Forage; Launches “Bee Watch” Website to Broadcast Bee Activity and Increase Public Awareness of the Role of Pollinators in Crop Production WASHINGTON, May 15, 2014 – A yearly survey of beekeepers, released today, shows fewer colony losses occurred in the United States over the winter of 2013-2014 […]
By Michael Forster Rothbart (Mother Jones) – Photojournalists often distort the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion. They parachute in, expecting danger and despair, then leave after a few brief days with photos of deformed children and abandoned buildings. This sensationalist approach obscures the more complex stories about how a displaced community […]
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD26 APRIL 2014 (The New York Times) – At long last, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have found a new tax they can support. Naturally it’s a tax on something the country needs: solar energy panels. For the last few months, the Kochs and other big polluters […]
