Pollution

"Soccer balls, motorcycles and a million other reminders of the massive tsunami in Japan a year ago are appearing along Alaska's coastlines."

"TransCanada, the company behind the disputed Keystone XL pipeline, submitted a new application for the project to the State Department on Friday, as expected. The company will route the pipeline around the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region of Nebraska, and the revised proposal starts a fresh clock on the environmental review process."

"HARTLEY BAY, B.C. -- The Gitga'at Nation of Hartley Bay has reported an oil spill between two and five miles long in the Grenville Channel, not far from the tanker route for the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline."

The Niagara Falls City Council, recalling the Love Canal disaster, has blocked a plan to raise revenue by using the city's sewage plant to treat the toxic waste from natural-gas drilling.

"If the Potomac River has gotten more attention than the Anacostia in the past 50 years, it’s partly because the Potomac supplies 90 percent of the region’s drinking water. That amounts to an average of 486 million gallons a day, according to the Potomac Conservancy. The Potomac watershed, which includes 14,670 miles of land that drains to the river, covers parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District, Maryland and Virginia. In the 1950s, reports of stench and dangerous levels of pollution clouded the Potomac’s reputation. But the 383-mile river wasn’t always in such bad shape."

"With Asia's energy demands pulling more U.S. coal to West Coast ports, rail-line communities across Montana fear the effects: More train traffic, health problems, noise and congestion."

"A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted."

"PITTSBURGH  -- In a lawsuit over gas industry secrecy, doctors, scientists, researchers and advocates filed court documents supporting two newspapers seeking access to information that could shed light on the health impacts of gas development, including the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. ...

The resignation of EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz has not resolved much. Conflicts over oil-industry pollution and whether laws against it should be enforced remain intense in parts of Texas where people are making money from the pollution while others fear they are being made sick by it.

Gabriel Nelson reports for Greenwire May 1, 2012.

"WASHINGTON — The heavy fuel that oceangoing vessels burn adds so much to air pollution hundreds of miles inland that the United States joined with Canada during the George W. Bush administration to ask the International Maritime Organization to create an emissions-control area along the coasts. Large ships would be required to reduce pollution dramatically in a zone 200 miles out to sea along all the coasts of North America, mainly by using cleaner fuel."