National (U.S.)

"Despite a surge in oil tank car blasts, Obama stops short of strict regulatory action demanded by trackside residents".

"Even U.S. EPA's fiercest foes on Capitol Hill sometimes come calling for favors." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, an implacable enemy of EPA's regulatory efforts, asks EPA to smile upon cleanup grants for his state. He is not alone.

"The U.S. Forest Service announced it will try to reinstate the exemption to Colorado’s roadless rule that allows coal mines to build roads in protected areas of Western Colorado.  The exemption was struck down last summer by a federal court because the government failed to assess the impact of that future coal mining on climate change."

"NOAA has slashed by more than two-thirds the budget for a National Weather Service program that has led to groundbreaking improvements in hurricane forecasts and that is on the brink of more.  James Franklin, a manager at the National Hurricane Center, made this revelation in a presentation at the National Hurricane Conference in Austin, Texas last week."

"Utilities in the U.S. Northeast stand to lose as much as half of residential sales by 2030 as customers install solar and battery-storage systems and generate their own power, according to a report by the Rocky Mountain Institute."

"A federal appeals court Tuesday (April 7) ordered a New Orleans federal judge to reconsider his ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency must decide whether more stringent rules are needed to curb the flow of fertilizer and other nutrient pollutants into the Mississippi River to stem the size of a low-oxygen "dead zone" that forms along Louisiana's coast each spring."

"Plummeting sardine populations could lead to a complete ban on harvesting the small oily fish off the U.S. West Coast starting later this year, officials with the Pacific Fishery Management Council said on Tuesday."

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sounded the alarm on a common foodborne illness that has acquired a new and challenging type of drug resistance—and the discovery betrays the difficulty, not just of finding new treatments, but of tracking resistance as it moves around the world."

"The neonicotinoid insecticide clothianidin is a likely contributor to monarch butterfly declines in North America, finds new research by a team from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Theirs is the first report of neonicotinoids affecting monarchs or any other butterflies."

"The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy will hold a legislative hearing next week to discuss the draft of a House bill to reform the nation’s toxic chemical laws."