Air

"The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday said it has formally committed $1 billion in federal stimulus money to the recently retooled FutureGen clean-coal project, beating a deadline to use the money or lose it and kicking off years of further work that could finally see the project completed."

"In a sign of growing bipartisan opposition to a proposed crackdown on air pollution from industrial boilers, 18 Senate Democrats have joined a slew of Republicans in asking EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to scale back the agency's plans."

"A long-delayed government epidemiological study of possible ties between diesel exhaust and lung cancer in miners may finally be published this fall -- but only after a mining industry group, represented by the Washington lobbying powerhouse Patton Boggs, finishes a pre-publication review of the study's drafts."

"For the roughly 130 power plants, refineries and other facilities embroiled in the air permitting dispute between U.S. EPA and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, a new program being finalized by EPA could allow them to get on with business as usual."

The U.S. is expected to announce today that it will contribute to a U.N. effort to address the problem of indoor wood cookstoves whose smoke kills an estimated 1.9 million people annually.

"Moscow registered nearly 11,000 deaths due to an unprecedented heatwave this summer, a city official told AFP Friday, as the mortality rate more than doubled in the Russian capital."

"U.S. 9th Circuit panel says Southern California air quality board can't impose restrictions that could interfere with interstate commerce."

Three environmental groups have issued a report detailing some 39 cases across the U.S. where pollution from the ash left from coal-burning electric power plants has cause pollution that often threatens human health. Now as EPA moves to close the electric utilities' longtime exemption from hazardous waste laws, industry lobbyists may have quietly put the fix in at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has a 'critical responsibility' to the flying public to develop environmentally responsible solutions to the nation's most pressing aviation problems, NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. said Wednesday."

The release of a white, powdery catalyst from a Chalmette refinery that blanketed areas southeast of New Orleans on Monday has prompted a class action suit.