Published: Feb 23, 2012
After 20 years of delay and litigation by polluters, the Obama administration approved in December one of the most important rules in the history of the Clean Air Act. It will require power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants by more than 90 percent in the next five years and is expected to prevent as many as 11,000
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology
Published: Feb 23, 2012
KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. — Danny Miles is a coach. For four decades, he has coached here, mostly basketball, through the collapse of the logging industry and the Klamath Basin water crisis, for more wins than all but three coaches at any level in the history of college basketball. He turned down other jobs, at bigger schools, in larger towns. He
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology
Published: Feb 21, 2012
WASHINGTON — The United States and Mexico reached agreement on Monday on regulating oil and gas development along their maritime border in the Gulf of Mexico, ending years of negotiations and potentially opening more than a million acres to deepwater drilling. The agreement, if ratified by Mexican and American lawmakers, would for the first
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology
Published: Feb 19, 2012
Before humans conquered snowmaking, ski resorts relied on the vagaries of Old Man Winter. He was not always forthcoming. So in the dry Connecticut chill of 1949-1950, Walter Schoenknecht, the owner of the Mohawk Mountain ski resort, took matters into his own hands. “He trucked in 700 tons of ice,” recalled Arthur Hunt, a forefather of
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology
Published: Feb 18, 2012
In a crucial step toward the ultimate approval of new oil drilling off the North Slope of Alaska, the Interior Department on Friday tentatively approved Shell’s plans for responding to a potential spill in the frigid Arctic waters. Shell still needs to cross several more regulatory barriers before it will be
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology
Published: Feb 16, 2012
Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming a part of the nation’s culture wars. The documents, from a nonprofit organization in Chicago called the Heartland
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology
Published: Feb 12, 2012
WATCHING the Republican Party struggling to agree on a presidential candidate, one wonders whether the G.O.P. shouldn't just sit this election out -- just give 2012 a pass. You know how in Scrabble sometimes you look at your seven letters and you've got only vowels that spell nothing? What do you do? You go back to the pile. You throw your letters
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology
Published: Feb 10, 2012
SAN DIEGO -- Almost hidden in the northern hills, the pilot water treatment plant here does not seem a harbinger of revolution. It cost $13 million, uses long-established technologies and produces a million gallons a day. But the plant's very existence is a triumph over one of the most stubborn problems facing the nation's water managers: if they
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology
Published: Feb 07, 2012
WASHINGTON -- For years, scientists and policy makers have been trying to address two improbably linked problems that hinge on a single radioactive isotope: how to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, and how to assure supplies of a material used in thousands of heart, kidney and breast procedures a year. They seemed to be getting
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology
Published: Feb 01, 2012
KUANTAN, Malaysia -- The world's largest refinery for rare earth metals has risen out of the red mud of a coastal swamp here and could soon obtain permission to operate -- a step that would help break China's near monopoly on rare earths but also worsen an emerging glut of some of these strategic minerals. China's suspension of exports of rare
Read original article Topics: Environmental-Technology