"A gas company that legally doused a patch of West Virginia forest with salty wastewater from a drilling operation killed ground vegetation within days and more than half the trees within two years, a new report from the U.S. Forest Service says."
"Consumers who switched from polycarbonate-plastic water bottles to metal ones in hopes of avoiding the risk that bisphenol A will leach into their beverages aren’t necessarily any better off, a new study finds."
People whose blood contains more of the chemicals (BPA and phthalates) found in household plastics are likelier to have impaired thyroid function, a new large-scale study confirms.
"COLQUITT, Ga. — The heat and the drought are so bad in this southwest corner of Georgia that hogs can barely eat. Corn, a lucrative crop with a notorious thirst, is burning up in fields. Cotton plants are too weak to punch through soil so dry it might as well be pavement."
"The House adjourned at 9:24 p.m. [Monday] after debating several more amendments to the 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations Act, and is expected to hold votes on these on Tuesday in the process of wrapping up the bill." The Tuesday votes are likely to illuminate the stark differences between Republicans and Democrats on energy and environmental policies, but House-passed riders may have dim hopes in the Senate.
"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is taking an inventory of more than 30,000 coastal shipwrecks — some of them casualties of the 1942 Battle of the Atlantic — and identifying those that pose the most significant threat."
Lake Ontario, the farthest downsream of the Great Lakes, suffers from water quality problems.
"The La Nina weather anomaly blamed for one of the worst droughts in the southern United States could revive this autumn, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center forecast on Thursday."
"Bayer CropScience has agreed to pay $750 million to settle claims by U.S. rice farmers that the company's genetically modified rice has contaminated their crops."
The DuPont company, which has touted its own safety and environmental record, turned down in 1988 a construction option for its Belle, WV, plant that could have protected workers and the community from deadly phosgene gas. One worker died in a series of three phosgene releases there in 2010.
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