Pollution

"The U.S. House voted Wednesday to grant states the authority to regulate the disposal of ash from coal-fired power plants and to roll back some of the new federal safety standards scheduled to take effect later this year."

"The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule on emissions of certain toxic air pollutants at manufacturing plants."

"Utah state officials have given the go-ahead for a tar sands mine under construction on the eastern flank of the state. They will, however, require the company to do water and air quality monitoring in a move environmentalists are calling a victory."

"Below the center of Butte flows water tainted with poisons drawn from a mass of mining and smelting waste that has been a pollution problem for more than a century."

"A train derailment in rural eastern Montana spilled 35,000 gallons (132,489 liters) of crude oil and forced the evacuation of about 30 people, a U.S. official said on Friday in an email to state officials."

"Mercury levels in bluefish caught off the U.S. Atlantic coast dropped more than 40 percent over the past four decades thanks to federal restrictions on coal emissions, according to a new study."

"One of the largest leaks in Alberta history has spilled about five million litres of emulsion from a Nexen Energy pipeline at the company's Long Lake oilsands facility south of Fort McMurray."

"The Interior Department on Thursday proposed a new rule aimed at protecting streams from the high level of pollution caused by a technique known as mountaintop removal mining."

"The National Park Service thought it had a good strategy for reining in the discarded water bottles that clog the trash cans and waste stream of the national parks: stop selling disposable bottles and let visitors refill reusable ones with public drinking water."

"Capitol Hill lawmakers from Louisiana have intervened on behalf of a New Orleans company that has failed to stop a decade-old oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico but lobbied for a refund of money reserved for spill containment work, according to letters obtained by The Associated Press through public records requests."