By Brian Merchant13 February 2014 (Motherboard) – China, faced with ever-worsening pollution in its major cities—a recent report deemed Beijing “barely suitable for living”—is doing what so many industrializing nations have done before it: banishing its titanic smog spewers to poor or rural areas so everyone else can breathe easier. But China isn’t just relegating […]
By Jonathan Kaiman25 February 2014 Beijing (theguardian.com) – Chinese scientists have warned that the country’s toxic air pollution is now so bad that it resembles a nuclear winter, slowing photosynthesis in plants – and potentially wreaking havoc on the country’s food supply. Beijing and broad swaths of six northern provinces have spent the past week […]
By Holli Riebeek28 Feb 2014 (NASA) – Dense smoke cloaks central Sumatra, Indonesia, in these images taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. The smoke is coming from fires in Riau province, where palm oil and pulpwood plantations are abundant. Though illegal for all but small landowners, fire […]
By Helen Davidson 3 March 2014 (theguardian.com) – Doctors have warned of serious health risks to people living around the Morwell coalmine fire, due to a carcinogenic air pollutant reaching levels up to 20 times the average level. The Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) group, which spoke to a rally of Morwell residents on […]
By MELISSA EDDY18 February 2014 ATTERWASCH, Germany (The New York Times) – A grove of apple saplings grows on the lee side of Ulrich Schulz’s barn. He did not plant them for the fruit, he said, but as an act of rebellion against a nearby mining company that wants to raze his farm, which his […]
By Elisabeth Behrmann 25 February 2014 (Bloomberg News) – Lend Lease Group, Australia’s biggest listed property developer, won’t take part in a planned coal terminal expansion close to the Great Barrier Reef after a mandate for the project lapsed. Lend Lease is no longer part of the AP-X expansion at the port of Abbot Point, […]
By TRIP GABRIEL28 February 2014 RALEIGH, N.C. (The New York Times) – Last June, state employees in charge of stopping water pollution were given updated marching orders on behalf of North Carolina’s new Republican governor and conservative lawmakers. “The General Assembly doesn’t like you,” an official in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources told […]
Contact: Miyoko Sakashita, (415) 632-5308, miyoko@biologicaldiversity.org 26 February 2014 SAN FRANCISCO (CBD) – The Center for Biological Diversity today filed a legal petition urging the Environmental Protection Agency to stop oil and gas companies from dumping toxic chemicals from fracking directly into ocean waters off California. About half the oil platforms in the Santa Barbara […]
By Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Richard Borsuk18 February 2014 SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) – California’s drought has put 10 communities at acute risk of running out of drinking water in 60 days, and worsened numerous other health and safety problems, public health officials in the most populous U.S. state said on Tuesday. Rural communities where residents […]
12 February 2014 (The Asahi Shimbun) – Two cracks were discovered in a concrete floor near radioactive water storage tanks on the grounds of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the plant operator said Feb. 11. Officials with Tokyo Electric Power Co. said some of the contaminated water from the melting snow blanketing […]
