"In a blow to the oil and gas industry, a judge has ruled small towns in New York have the authority to ban drilling -- including the controversial method known as fracking -- within their borders."
"There are an estimated 11,000 private and commercial injection and disposal wells in Oklahoma. Each year those wells are injected with billions of gallons of oil and gas wastewater. According to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission commercial disposal wells pumped at least 8.8 billion gallons of wastewater into the earth in the last two years. A spokesperson for the Corporation Commission said they have not tallied the amount of water injected through private wells." One of those operations may have ruined the well water of Rusty Russell.
"GOP scientists say their attempts to talk about climate dangers with their party's politicians and their aides have largely fallen on deaf ears."
"According to one of the documents that came out in last week's scandal, the Heartland Institute plans to pay a federal scientist for his contributions to an annual climate-denial report. The proposed 2012 budget for the institute is one of the more interesting things to come out of the Heartland documents that were passed around the internet, as it includes a $1,000-per-month payment to a Department of Interior employee."
Hundreds of coal-waste dams, scattered across Appalachia and often poorly regulated, could bring a new disaster like the one at Buffalo Creek in 1972 that killed 125 people and left 4,000 homeless.
"CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Forty years ago Sunday morning, a trio of coal-waste dams at a Pittston Coal operation on Buffalo Creek in Logan County collapsed. A wall of sludge, water, and debris stormed down the hollow from Saunders to Man.
"Scary antibiotic-resistant infections aren’t just lurking in the hospital anymore. They’re in gyms, at the beach, and increasingly, on the farm."
"In a major ruling in the oil spill litigation, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier ruled Wednesday that BP and Anadarko are responsible parties under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and are liable for civil penalties under the Clean Water Act for the undersea discharge of oil from the ill-fated Macondo well.
A bill that would mandate open public access, free of charge, to papers resulting from federally funded research is currently languishing in the GOP-controlled House. Private for-profit publishing companies aim to stop it, preserving their control over the science publishing market. One of these is Elsevier, the largest single academic publisher in the world, currently being boycotted by almost 7,000 researchers worldwide.
The Patton Boggs lobbying firm, which represents the mining industry, has sent letters threatening unspecified legal action against four scientific journals if they publish results of a study about the exposure of miners to diesel emissions, according to Science magazine.
Advertisement 
