"The U.S. Agriculture Department on Friday awarded $40.2 million in grants to farmers, ranchers and farmer-controlled rural business ventures aimed at spurring locally produced food supplies and renewable energy ventures."
Some coal-industyry front groups have begin a campaign to frighten Penn State into cancelling a speech by climate scientist Michael Mann -- who will be talking about coal industry efforts to silence climate scientists. Penn State has refused.
"EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. -- When the Army Corps of Engineers declared last year that the levees here were 'unacceptable,' it kicked up a storm of protest from officials and residents of the broad Mississippi River flood plain known as the American Bottom."
"Now the national planning rule that governs individual national forest plans is about to change, for the first time since the Reagan era. Scientists and environmentalists say many of the changes are improvements, but they object to a key change in the way the plan would protect wildlife."
"Some leading analysts and legal observers believe the highly anticipated 'trial of the century' over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, set to begin in three weeks, will end before it starts. BP and negotiators for federal and state governments are frantically working to confect a settlement so they won't have to leave the fate of billions of dollars in potential pollution fines and spill damage payments in the hands of U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier."
Both President Obama and the GOP-controlled House are pushing infrastructure investment as a job-producing way of maintaining and upgrading U.S. roads, bridges, dams, waterways, airports, and quality of life. The big questions include how to do it -- a set of choices with huge environmental consequences.
"TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.
"Enthusiasm for offshore wind projects may have cooled among developers in the United States these days, but the Obama administration is still trying to make a ribbon of wind farms off the Atlantic Coast a reality."
Do environmental triggers play a role in causing the growing epidemic of obesity in the United States over the past 150 years?
"The millions of gallons of chemical-laced wastewater that fracking produces must flow somewhere, and Ohio is trying not to be that place."
Advertisement 
