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"Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without a big food company making promises to deliver products from green, sustainable farms. Turning those promises into reality, though, can be complicated."
"A Tennessee gravel and sand mining operator has been ignoring a cease and desist letter for months, and opponents say its continued construction on the banks of North America’s most biodiverse river may already be harming wildlife."
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is handing over to the Government Accountability Office information on oil refiners that petitioned for exemptions to biofuel blending mandates, in an effort to help the government watchdog investigate the exemption program."
"The White House has signaled privately to lawmakers and stakeholders in recent weeks that it supports taxpayer subsidies to keep nuclear facilities from closing and making it harder to meet U.S. climate goals, three sources familiar with the discussions told Reuters."
"Coal-fired power generation and its notoriously dirty emissions are rapidly declining, but the potential health gains from cleaner air are being stymied by biomass burning and combustion sources, Harvard University researchers found in a new study."
"Oaks are the elders of London’s Richmond Park. Some of them are 800 years old and have slumped, bulged and grown cavernous with age. By the time King Charles I visited in 1625 and turned a collection of medieval farms into the royal park we have today, they would have already been veteran trees."
"EPA's top enforcement official has directed agents to ramp up inspections in communities that have long been afflicted by pollution and called on agents 'to step in and take necessary action' in cases where state regulators are falling short on the job."
"President Biden pledged last week to 'end cancer as we know it,' a bold promise focused on boosting funding to the National Institutes of Health for a special Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health. ... But public health experts who have spent their careers examining environmental causes of cancer say it may not be possible to truly stop cancer without EPA stepping in."
"Over a quarter-century, proposals for a clean energy standard (CES) have flared up and sputtered out, done in by political indifference or opposition to mandatory federal controls to shrink power plant carbon emissions. President Biden's climate team is searching now for the right design for a CES — an essential pathway toward his far-reaching clean energy goals — making the definition a high-stakes question."
"Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) announced a new $73 billion plan on Tuesday aimed at replacing the country’s mass transit buses with clean vehicles."
"America’s new normal temperature is a degree hotter than it was just two decades ago."
"Expansion will stretch hundreds miles and is fiercely opposed by numerous groups – but despite repeated calls the Canadian government has not forced the pipeline reveal its insurers".
"A novel lawsuit is taking advantage of a local ‘rights of nature’ measure passed in November in effort to protect wetlands".
"Pesticides are causing widespread damage to the tiny creatures that keep soils healthy and underpin all life on land, according to the first comprehensive review of the issue."
"Monocultures of corn and soybeans carpet 75% of the U.S. Midwest, leading to soil erosion, water pollution, and massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, a new wave of farmers is breaking the monocrop monotony by growing these annuals between long rows of perennial shrubs like American hazelnuts, which keep soils intact while harboring beneficial bugs and sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere."
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