Public

"Greenland's glaciers are hemorrhaging ice at an increasingly faster rate but not at the breakneck pace that scientists once feared, a new study says."

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.

"A trial to assign blame and damages that could total tens of billions of dollars for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been put off until January, in a setback for the U.S. government, which wanted to try its case this summer."

"Two states with large amounts of military and civilian nuclear waste told a federal court panel on Wednesday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was flouting the law by declining to decide whether the Nevada desert is a suitable burial spot — even if the Obama administration says the storage plan is dead."

"Japan shuts down its last working nuclear power reactor this weekend just over a year after a tsunami scarred the nation and if it survives the summer without major electricity shortages, producers fear the plants will stay offline for good."

"Climate change and oil dependence are issues of national security, and the Pentagon will take a lead role in shifting the way the country uses energy, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said [Wednesday] night."

"Plants are flowering faster than scientists predicted in response to climate change, research in the United States showed on Wednesday, which could have devastating knock-on effects for food chains and ecosystems. Global warming is having a significant impact on hundreds of plant and animal species around the world, changing some breeding, migration and feeding patterns, scientists say."

"The results, showing an engineered flu strain can spread easily between ferrets, derive from a controversial study that stirred debate over fears of a bioterrorism threat."

"WASHINGTON — The Department of Energy has successfully completed an unprecedented test of harvesting the vast storehouse on Alaska’s North Slope of methane hydrate, essentially natural gas locked in ice crystals under the permafrost.

"WASHINGTON, DC -- Forty-five areas across the country are not meeting the latest government standards for ground-level ozone or smog, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday."