It takes up enough space to cover a billiards table, but next year it will fit inside a backpack. The electronic contraption, only in its first generation, was named this year by experts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as one of the 10 most important technology innovations of 2010. The digital transformer will form the electronic guts of the vaunted Smart Grid, the automated power network that is expected to replace nation's aging mechanical power grid in the coming decade. | 06/20/11 07:40:56 By - John Murawski
Deep in the West Texas sand dunes is something that some say could threaten the state's oil and gas production: The dunes sagebrush lizard, also known as the sand dune lizard. State officials hope that federal officials don't designate it an endangered species. "It's reptile dysfunction," said Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson. | 06/18/11 17:01:12 By - Anna M. Tinsley
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback on Wednesday called for a 9/11-type federal commission to study flood-control policy along the Missouri River — as muddy, rising water swirled only a few feet away. | 06/16/11 07:16:55 By - Dave Helling
Workers are preparing a large building at the Hanford nuclear reservaton for demolition. It once recovered uranium from waste left from processing for nuclear weapons. | 06/15/11 16:12:50 By - Annette Cary
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administratio predicts the largest ever dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico this summer. | 06/15/11 16:02:59 By - Karen Nelson
Ash from a volcanic eruption in Chile continued to frustrate travelers Tuesday as flights were grounded in South America, Australia and New Zealand. Anyone with plans to travel to South America is being urged to sign up for flight status alerts with their airline and check for updates online before heading to the airport. | 06/15/11 06:52:12 By - Hannah Sampson
A deal that would allow Cook Inlet Region Inc. to build an electricity-generating wind turbine farm on Alaska's Fire Island is in the final stages. The board of Chugach Electric Association, the biggest power utility in Alaska, is scheduled to consider today a proposed contract to buy wind power from CIRI. | 06/15/11 06:33:12 By - Rosemary Shinohara
House subcommittee began deliberating Tuesday whether to speed up the killing of an exploding population of California sea lions that's preying on thousands of endangered salmon in the Columbia River. | 06/14/11 18:15:00 By - Rob Hotakainen
The Obama administration on Tuesday raised caution signals over a Merced Irrigation District proposal to expand Lake McClure. | 06/14/11 17:46:00 By - Michael Doyle
Congressional Republicans on Tuesday challenged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's inspector general over his finding last week that the NRC's chairman did nothing illegal in his role in ending plans for a dump for highly radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. | 06/14/11 16:32:00 By - Renee Schoof
A house built for a new museum exhibit in Cleveland shows how walls more than a foot thick, big triple-pane windows, doors like bank vaults and clever engineering can cut heating and cooling costs - and pollution - by 90 percent. The house keeps a comfortable temperature year-round. No need for heavy sweaters, no drafts, no noise. | 06/14/11 15:27:00 By - Renee Schoof
Next time a hurricane hits, families will turn to their smartphones to stay in touch, track the storm and find the shortest gasoline lines. To handle the load, wireless carriers are turning to time-tested disaster plans but on an exponential scale. | 06/14/11 12:44:17 By - Bridget Carey
The rising Merced River today may force some Yosemite Valley campers to higher ground, the National Park Service says. As June temperatures climb, the near-record snowpack is melting faster, which may cause flooding in Yosemite National Park for several days, according to the federal River Forecast Center. | 06/14/11 12:19:30 By - Mark Grossi
Fireworks stands will begin opening Wednesday. But with burn bans in force across the Gulf Coast, some people are calling for a ban on fireworks. | 06/14/11 11:58:42 By - Mary Perez and Melissa Scallan
A controversial bill blocking restoration of the San Joaquin River would "ignore universally accepted" science and "hasten the decline of numerous species," a top Obama administration official declared Monday. | 06/13/11 17:20:00 By - Michael Doyle
Every day at Fresno Chaffee Zoo, food is chopped, sliced and diced for hundreds of hungry mouths. Chaffee is the first zoo in the U.S. to join with the San Diego Zoo in a program to improve animal nutrition, said Michael Schlegel, director of nutritional services for the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park | 06/13/11 12:27:41 By - Marc Benjamin
Drought is overwhelming the Everglades. | 06/10/11 16:16:56 By - Curtis Morgan
The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant's liclense renewal has been delayed until December 2015 to give time for seismic studies. | 06/09/11 11:31:55 By - David Sned
Former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt is calling on President Barack Obama to stand up to Republicans against new legilsative moves to prevent the protection of wilderness. Babbitt says the House majority is taking "the most radical course in history" on the environment. | 06/09/11 11:05:36 By - Rocky Barker
Summer air pollution could trigger more asthma attacks for children who live in industrial cities, and the Environmental Protection Agency would like stricter rules to cut smog. | 06/08/11 18:30:00 By - Jarondakie Patrick
Legislation that could offer health care to hundreds of thousands of victims of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, N.C., continues to have trouble gaining traction on a debt-wary Capitol Hill. | 06/08/11 17:28:00 By - Barbara Barrett
The Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday approved a bill to help the families of the 11 victims of last year's Deepwater Horizon blowout by changing outdated federal maritime laws, one going back to the 1850s, to make it possible to recover damages from BP, rig operator Transocean and rig subcontractors. | 06/08/11 15:27:00 By - Maria Recio
Concrete doesnt usually act like a sponge, but thats exactly what the pervious concrete sidewalk did when the Kansas City water department tested it Tuesday. | 06/08/11 11:48:59 By - Lynn Horsley
The worst droughts in decades are wilting wheat fields worldwide. In Kansas, the custom cutters arrived around noon Monday at Karen and Harold Sturm's farm near Caldwell. | 06/07/11 16:01:39 By - Beccy Tanner
A moratorium on new uranium mining around the Grand Canyon expires in six weeks, and the Interior Department is under pressure from conservation groups and mining companies over what to do about it. | 06/06/11 19:03:00 By - Renee Schoof
Environmental groups want stricter ship speed limits off portions of the California coast to protect marine mammals from getting slammed. | 06/06/11 18:22:00 By - Michael Doyle
All-terrain vehicles still rumble across the eight-mile stretch of Pensacola Beach each morning, driven by workers looking for tar balls. One year after crude from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion reached Floridas shores, cleanup crews are still unearthing the sticky hardened bits of oil. | 06/06/11 07:06:35 By - Laura Figueroa
A Parnell administration rule that requires Alaska state scientists to adhere to official policy and not the principles of independent science when they work outside their agencies continues to fuel debate more than a month after two biologists were removed from a federal beluga whale recovery team. | 06/06/11 06:41:30 By - Richard Mauer
A team of scientists will set out Saturday from Hawaii on a research expedition to study how radioactive contamination from the nuclear power plant crisis in Japan has spread in the Pacific Ocean and what effects it will have on marine life, the food chain and human health. | 06/03/11 17:16:00 By - Renee Schoof
The University of Texas and a Fort Worth company plan to commercialize a new process for converting natural gas to a synthetic fuel. | 06/03/11 11:08:40 By - Jack Z. Smith
Government officials said theyre confident a new bio-defense lab planned for Manhattan, Kan., can safely withstand a direct hit from the most powerful tornado. A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which is building the $650 million National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, said designers agreed earlier this year to harden the facility to make it more resistant to tornado damage. | 06/03/11 11:00:14 By - Dave Helling and Mike McGraw
The nation's wetlands are being studied to assess water and soil conditions in some ofthe nation's most vulnerable ecosystems. | 06/03/11 10:50:16 By - Anne Gonzales
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour came to the U.S. Capitol on Thursday with a message: last summer's Gulf of Mexico oil spill was an economic — not an environmental - disaster, and he wants lawmakers to help shore up the region's hard-hit fishing, tourism and energy sectors. | 06/02/11 18:57:00 By - Maria Recio
California officials and the Obama administration on Thursday strongly objected to a politically divisive bill that blocks San Joaquin River restoration efforts, casting the bill's long-term prospects into doubt. | 06/02/11 15:27:00 By - Michael Doyle
Frank Armijo, the president of Hanford's Mission Support Alliance, drives around the nuclear reservation in a hybrid Chevy Tahoe. | 06/01/11 14:12:56 By - Annette Cary
The World Health Organization for the first time has rated cellphone use as possibly a cause of cancer. | 06/01/11 14:07:21 By - Diane Stafford
A lawsuit filed in California says a commercial solar project would cause irreparable harm to endangered and rare plants and animals. | 06/01/11 13:52:50 By - David Sneed
Southern China is going through its worst drought in at least half a century. Barges reportedly are having trouble navigating some spots of the Yangtze River, and farmers are reporting bone-dry rice fields in a nation already concerned about food prices. Over it all is a nagging question: Has the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project, made things worse? | 05/30/11 13:16:00 By - Tom Lasseter
The deadliest tornadoes in decades. Severe flooding on the Mississippi River. Drought in Texas, and heavy rains in Tennessee. What's up with the weather? Scientists say there are connections between many of the severe weather events of the past month and global warming. | 05/25/11 17:51:00 By - Renee Schoof
Nations with interests in the Arctic region — including the United States — are beginning to stake their claims on the resource-rich region. Although numerous logistical challenges to oil and gas exploration in the region remain, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that as much of a third of the world's undiscovered gas and 13 percent of its undiscovered oil may be in the offshore Arctic, in relatively shallow water. | 05/24/11 16:03:00 By - Jarondakie Patrick and Erika Bolstad
Since the first plea for help came over a Florida Keys radio station, hundreds of volunteers have worked around the clock to save pilot whales that mysteriously stranded themselves in shallow waters. | 05/24/11 06:54:55 By - Cammy Clark
For decades, conservationists, the U.S. Forest Service, tribes, Native corporations and the people who live in the Tongass National Forest have warred over how to manage the vast temperate rain forest that covers most of southeast Alaska. The fight resurfaces in Washington this week. | 05/23/11 18:37:07 By - Erika Bolstad
As record amounts of freshwater head down the Mississippi River toward the Mississippi Sound, the oyster industry can expect to face extreme losses, an official with the Department of Marine Resources said Tuesday. | 05/18/11 07:06:41 By - Tammy Smith
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday defended his agency's changes in the year after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, dismissing criticism of a lengthier and more extensive permitting process as mere "Washington noise." | 05/17/11 18:01:00 By - Erika Bolstad
Duke Energy's nuclear power plants aren't equipped with firefighting equipment that is designed to withstand earthquakes, according to plant inspections launched after the Japanese nuclear crisis. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission initiated the inspections to see how the 104 U.S. reactors would respond to Fukushima Dai-ichi-style events that they weren't designed to survive. | 05/17/11 07:09:29 By - Bruce Henderson
Protecting a covey of 140 lesser prairie chickens southeast of Dodge City, Kan., could add hundreds of millions of dollars to the price of a critical wind energy power line. | 05/16/11 13:20:19 By - Steve Everly
Here in Florida, you can adopt a highway, a park, a manatee, a tree — donating money and time to make sure the object or creature of your interest receives care and upkeep. And now, you can also adopt a shark. | 05/16/11 06:59:01 By - Susan Cocking
State parks officials today announced the closure of 70 parks because of the state budget deficit, including the governor's mansion and the Stanford mansion in Sacramento. | 05/13/11 19:19:09 By - Tory Van Oot
This is the time of year when everyone and their uncle flocks to Yosemite Valley to view waterfalls at their gushing best. And for good reason. But the valley doesn't own a monopoly. | 05/12/11 12:15:37 By - Marek Warszawski
The Texas House gave tentative approval Wednesday to a bill requiring natural gas drillers to publicly disclose the chemicals they use in the controversial practice known as hydraulic fracturing. | 05/12/11 07:32:06 By - Aman Batheja
Lee Jones is fighting night and day to build up a levee to protect his family's lumber yard from the rising Mississippi River. The business will was to celebrate its centennial this month. | 05/12/11 13:03:38 By - Karen Nelson
Four environmental groups sued a coal company in Kentucky in federal court, saying it submitted false and incorrect water reports to state regulators. The lawsuit says 48 times the company's data for discharged pollutants was exactly the same as from a prior month. | 05/12/11 12:37:05 By - Dori Hjalmarson
Republican lawmakers on Wednesday resumed their controversial efforts to repeal a San Joaquin River restoration plan and curtail fish and wildlife protections. | 05/11/11 17:54:00 By - Michael Doyle
A new research facility in Florida will raise bugs to attack invasive plants in the Everglades. | 05/11/11 16:23:25 By - Curtis Morgan
California could save $7.2 billion or more in health and other societal costs by adopting tough clean car standards, a new report said. The state and federal government are in the process of drafting new fuel-efficiency and greenhouse gas-emission rules that could raise the average mileage rates for new cars to as much as 62 miles per gallon by the year 2025. | 05/11/11 06:46:31 By - Rick Daysog
High gas prices have reignited a familiar debate about drilling off California's coast, with everyone playing their usual part and the outcome pretty much predictable. | 05/10/11 18:42:00 By - Michael Doyle
Officials find that a South Carolina city failed to keep track of an industry's discharges for lead. | 05/09/11 16:18:50 By -
California plans to consider making the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta more open for recreation. The area is nearly as large as Rhode Island, but has few parks. | 05/09/11 11:16:35 By - Matt Weiser
A congressional Democrat has again introduced legislation to help Marine veterans and family members affected by historic water contamination at Camp Lejeune, N.C. | 05/06/11 16:57:00 By - Barbara Barrett
Many farmers across the nation want to make sure that federal regulators don't make it more difficult to spread chemicals on their land. On Capitol Hill, those farmers have found allies in Republicans and some Democrats who are working to ease the regulations and strip some power from the Environmental Protection Agency. The back and forth speaks to broader tension between some Republicans and the Obama administration over environmental policy. | 05/06/11 16:34:00 By - Halimah Abdullah and Rob Hotakainen
Protesters attended a Duke Energy shareholders meeting. Some condemned coal and nuclear plans, and others were against the company's renewable energy. | 05/06/11 12:50:32 By - Bruce Henderson
California regulators have proposed new rules that would require farmers to reduce runoff from fertilizer and pesticide use and create buffer zones between farms and creeks. But the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board lacks a quorum and is unable to act. | 05/06/11 12:41:14 By - David Sneed
Elaine Fuller, 74, walked through her empty home in a rural community near Yazoo City. With the help of church friends, neighbors and family, she put on white waders, packed her belongings -- everything but a clock on the kitchen wall -- filled an 18-wheeler van and had it hauled away. | 05/06/11 12:27:42 By - Karen Nelson
American scientists working on an island far above the Arctic Circle have been launching unmanned aircraft and digging snow samples to measure how soot helps melt Arctic snow and ice. | 05/05/11 14:02:00 By - Renee Schoof
An ambitious draft plan to protect California's crucial Bay-Delta region is fragmented, incomplete and hard to understand, a National Academy of Sciences panel warned Thursday. | 05/05/11 13:43:00 By - Michael Doyle
The Great Flood of 1927 on the Mississippi River set high marks that might be broken this month. The historic flood is well known in Mississippi and Louisiana. | 05/05/11 13:49:10 By - Karen Nelson
The estimated 1,000 wolves that roam Idaho's canyons, mountains and rangeland lost federal protection under the Endangered Species Act on Thursday. State officials plan to allow hunters to kill wolves. | 05/05/11 13:17:43 By - Rocky Barker
They are the stuff of conspiracy theories, myth and legend. And the subject of scholarly papers as well as the bane of drivers who encounter them in vast swarms this time of year. They are, of course, lovebugs. | 05/04/11 15:01:43 By - James A. Jones Jr.
A wildfire has burned more than 16,400 acres of the Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. | 05/04/11 13:55:20 By - Sun Sentinel
BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. has agreed to pay a $25 million civil fine to settle a federal lawsuit over the largest-ever oil spill on Alaska's North Slope, according to a proposal filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage on Tuesday. | 05/04/11 06:37:22 By - Lisa Demer
A Texas natural gas producer is fighting the EPA's claim that it contaminated two water wells. | 05/03/11 14:27:32 By - Jack Z. Smith
North Carolina's legislature has decided not to vote this year on a bill that would make it easier for utilities to raise rates to pay for new nuclear reactors. | 05/03/11 14:17:09 By - John Murawski
North Carolina officials have approved a huge wind farm, the state's largest clean energy project by far. If built next year, it will be the first commercial-scale wind energy project in the Southeast and one of the biggest in the nation. | 05/03/11 14:02:52 By - John Murawski
Scientists find that the behaviors of birds frogs, ants and fish provide hints of a change in climate. This story is the last in a three-part series about local signs of climate change in North Carolina. | 05/02/11 10:25:43 By - Bruce Henderson
Beware. The Dutch are coming, and theyre armed with a radical idea about the future of transportation that could cure obesity and global warming, stall traffic congestion, and maybe shake the very steering wheel from your hands: Bicycles. | 05/02/11 07:01:30 By - Andres Viglucci
Solar companies in California say their installations have been bogged down by problems in getting permits. | 05/02/11 10:33:59 By - Rick Daysog
The nuclear power accidents at Fukushima this spring and at Chernobyl 25 years ago Tuesday show that radiation releases can endanger people and contaminate land many miles beyond evacuation zones. | 05/02/11 18:11:00 By - Renee Schoof
Over a thousand juevnile white sturgeon were released in eastern Washington state as part of a year-long recovery project. Sturgeon can live for 100 years. | 04/29/11 14:04:38 By - John Trumbo
Four coal companies settled a lawsuit with 91 Kentucky residents over flooding in 2009. | 04/29/11 13:51:30 By - Dori Hjalmarson
A conservation group wants the government to protect the Sierra Nevada red fox under the Endangered Species Act. It's one of the rarest mammals in North America. | 04/28/11 11:39:35 By - Matt Weiser
Workers are ahead of schedule to put the last plutonium production reactor at the Hanford reservation into long-term storage. Six plutonium reactors, produced materials for nuclear weapons, and N Reactor is the last one being placed in storage. | 04/27/11 15:23:51 By - Annette Cary
Aiming a legal shot directly across the bow of Gov. Rick Scotts anti-regulation agenda, a Miami federal judge cleared the way for the federal government to do something he contends the state has failed to do for decades: Enforce water pollution standards tough enough to protect the Everglades. | 04/27/11 07:11:48 By - Curtis Morgan
Most Americans fear that the United States someday could face the kind of nuclear emergency that's plagued Japan in recent weeks, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll. | 04/26/11 17:29:00 By - David Lightman
Global warming could increase flooding, shrink salmon habitat and invite in more invasive species in the West, scientists conclude in a sobering new report. | 04/25/11 17:55:00 By - Michael Doyle
Until they were classified as a threatened species in the United States three years ago, a Canadian polar bear was the ultimate trophy for many elite American sport hunters. Today, the rare trophies from those hunts are in a legal limbo that stretches from the Arctic Circle to the Canadian capital in Ottawa to the halls of the U.S. Congress. | 04/25/11 17:11:00 By - Erika Bolstad
Bomb, baby, bomb. The U.S. sits on a trove of natural gas, but its trapped in shale and other rock formations. Using chemicals and pressurized water to force it out takes an environmental toll. So heres Plan B: Lets plug some nuclear bombs into the shale, light the fuse and let the natural gas flow. Dont snicker. That was tried in the 1960s and 70s. | 04/25/11 07:20:17 By - Steve Everly
TALLAHASSEE -- The day after the Florida House passed a bill to ban implementation of water quality standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration, Gov. Rick Scott on Friday asked the agency to rescind a January 2009 determination that the federal rules are necessary for Florida. | 04/23/11 14:59:09 By - Janet Zink
Imagine Kansas without a prairie. Without pure running creeks or streams. Without wildlife prairie chickens, swift foxes, ferruginous hawks, black-footed ferrets and prairie dogs. It could happen, biologists say, and already is in many parts of the state. | 04/22/11 14:04:46 By - Beccy Tanner
BP has made a $1 billion downpayment toward restoration in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a step toward fulfilling the company's obligation to fund the restoration work from last year's oil disaster. | 04/21/11 14:06:13 By - Karen Nelson
Idaho is considering how to handle hydraulic fracking, a natural gas drilling method that some critics say could pollute water. A state commission gave the go-ahead for the first natural gas driller in the state. | 04/21/11 13:41:56 By - Rocky Barker
California is reopening salmon fishing in the Sacramento Valley for the first time since 2007, when the population crashed. | 04/21/11 13:26:43 By - Matt Weiser
A team that's spent two decades studying psychological distress among residents who lived near the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska has found striking similarities among those affected by the Deepwater Horizon spill. | 04/20/11 18:51:00 By - Erika Bolstad
Local government leaders in Biloxi are defending what has been called a shopping spree with millions of dollars of emergency grants from BP, saying they were uncertain what they needed for the unprecedented disaster and didnt want to be caught ill-equipped. | 04/20/11 12:25:34 By - Geoff Pender
In California, county lawmakers in San Luis Obispo approved their county's first large solar project. | 04/20/11 11:37:45 By - David Sneed
Environmentalists say they'll file a lawsuit against rules that would require all shrubs and trees to be cut from levees in California's central valley. The region has only 5 percent of its historic riparian habitat. | 04/20/11 11:27:50 By - Matt Weiser
Florida Power & Light has proposed a compromise plan that would allow state regulators to determine whether rates could be raised to pay for renewable energy plants. | 04/20/11 11:20:25 By - Mary Ellen Klas
Three people alleged to have been involved in an oil and gas well drilling scam in which about 500 investors lost more than $33 million went on trial in federal court in Lexington on Tuesday. | 04/20/11 11:53:04 By - Jennifer Hewlett
A year after the BP oil spill put the brakes on full-bore domestic production, it's back to "drill, baby, drill" as federal lawmakers, anxious about rising gasoline prices, push legislation to open offshore leases and make it easier to drill domestically. | 04/19/11 17:00:00 By - Maria Recio
Florida's governor says the state will not join a lawsuit against Transocean, the operator of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded a year ago, setting off the nation's worst oil accident. | 04/19/11 16:22:42 By - By Mary Ellen Klas and Katie Sanders
For almost a decade, celebrities, journalists and shareholders have tromped through Ecuadors jungles on competing excursions that have become a routine part of what could be the worlds most expensive environmental case. Villagers claim Chevrons predecessor pumped millions of gallons of oil-tainted wastewater into creeks and streams, among other practices. | 04/19/11 07:13:31 By - Jim Wyss
The Quileute Tribal School is perched just a stone's throw from a rugged ocean beach framed by sea stacks and islands and splashed by powerful waves at this remote northwest corner of the U.S. After a killer tsunami hit Japan last month following a 9.0 earthquake, people up and down the Pacific coast worry that the next tsunami might forever change their lives. | 04/18/11 15:53:00 By - Rob Hotakainen and John Dodge
Ticket scalping is a crass reality for the Giants, the Lakers and Lady Gaga, but here's a wave of price-gouging you may have missed: Yosemite National Park. | 04/18/11 13:12:30 By - Marjie Lundstrom
President Barack Obama signed the budget resolution Friday that for the first time removed a species from the endangered species list by congressional action. The delisting of Rocky Mountain gray wolves means that hunters in Idaho and Montana will be able to shoot wolves again. | 04/18/11 12:27:35 By - Rocky Barker
Fresno County leaders have begun recruiting outside groups to help run a public park system wracked by budget cuts. | 04/18/11 12:19:41 By - Kurtis Alexander
The rebuilding process one year after the BP oil spill is leaving those who live along the northern Gulf distrusting of government, optimistic about the beaches and this years crop of seafood, but leery that what lies below the surface of the Gulf in the water and on the sea floor will haunt them for decades and generations. | 04/18/11 07:42:31 By - Karen Nelson
One year later, the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history looks more and more like just a big bump in the road in the drive to drill deeper in the Gulf of Mexico and potentially closer to Floridas coastline. In the months since the anxious, ugly summer of the monster slick, political tide and public opinion seem to have shifted. | 04/18/11 07:30:13 By - Curtis Morgan
Outside Palm Desert, a young bobcat dies mysteriously at a nature preserve. South of Nevada City, a farmer finds an owl dead near his decoy shed. In San Rafael, a red-shouldered hawk bleeds heavily from its mouth and nose before succumbing at an animal care center. Each of those incidents shares a link to a widely used toxin that is turning up at dangerous levels in wildlife across California: rat poison | 04/18/11 00:07:24 By - Tom Knudson
Oil companies recently turned in their first plans for exploratory drilling in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including new information the government has required since last year's BP blowout about how they'd try to prevent and cope with another oil disaster. | 04/15/11 15:55:00 By - Renee Schoof and Kevin G. Hall
Five members of Congress on Friday called the Department of the Navy to task — again — for what they say is an apparent resistance to keeping veterans informed about past water contamination at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. | 04/15/11 14:19:00 By - Barbara Barrett
BP's chief of operations for the Gulf cleanup, Mike Utsler, has been on the job since the first days of the spill. He's shifted it from a major effort in the summer and fall to pulling back as oil residue washing ashore has diminished each month since the winter. | 04/15/11 07:18:39 By - Karen Nelson
The Environmental Protection Agency announced a sweeping settlement Thursday with the Tennessee Valley Authority over pollution from 11 coal-fired power plants in at least three states. The agreement requires the TVA to shut down many of its coal-fired boilers and invest an estimated $3 billion to $5 billion on new and upgraded pollution controls. | 04/14/11 20:45:00 By - Halimah Abdullah and Mary Cornatzer
In Canada's Fraser River, a mysterious illness has killed millions of Pacific salmon, and scientists have a new hypothesis about why: The wild salmon are suffering from viral infections similar to those linked to some forms of leukemia and lymphoma. | 04/14/11 18:26:00 By - Rob Hotakainen
Saying the Environmental Protection Agency's air-permitting process has "run amok," House Republicans on Wednesday debated legislation that would make it easier for companies such as Shell to get permission to drill offshore in the Arctic region. | 04/13/11 15:52:00 By - Erika Bolstad
A fatal bat disease has been confirmed in Kentucky for the first time, state and federal officials said Wednesday. White-nose syndrome was first detected in New York state in 2006 and has killed more than 1 million cave-dwelling bats in eastern North America. With confirmation of the disease in Kentucky, 16 states and three Canadian provinces have now been affected. | 04/13/11 14:21:41 By - Greg Kocher
The rosy scene bothered Tampa attorney Steve Yerrid. There was Gov. Rick Scott on Monday, happily announcing a $30 million marketing and tourism grant from BP for seven Panhandle counties, thanking a BP senior executive at his side for "stepping up." | 04/13/11 07:05:04 By - Katie Sanders
Gov. Jerry Brown Tuesday signed a far-reaching renewable energy law requiring California utilities to obtain a third of their electricity from wind, solar and other green sources. | 04/12/11 20:18:13 By - Rick Daysog and David Siders
As Japan struggles with radioactive contamination from one of the world's worst nuclear accidents, American nuclear experts are watching for clues on how to make U.S. nuclear power plants more resistant to the forces of nature or hostile attacks. | 04/12/11 15:28:00 By - Renee Schoof
Pacific Gas and Electric has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to delay license renewal for the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California until it completes 3-D seismic studies. | 04/12/11 15:30:15 By - David Sneed
This country's battle to curb oil imports is being plotted in high-tech laboratories and elite universities hunting for breakthroughs in alternative fuels. The goal: Instead of using corn to make ethanol, see if it's feasible to use cellulosic fiber, particularly six-foot tall stalks of switchgrass. | 04/11/11 20:58:01 By - Steve Everly and Scott Canon
On Feb. 24, Jay Wright, 25, a miner for Webster County Coal, noticed something jutting from the roof of the Dotiki Mine, where he was bolting a roof 700 feet underground. Wright had found the 300-million-year-old black jawbone and still-sharp teeth of an Edestus, a prehistoric shark. | 04/11/11 16:52:27 By - Cheryl Truman
The late-night budget deal includes a provision that will remove wolves from the endangered species list. | 04/11/11 14:00:22 By - Rocky Barker
A group of Sacramento-area property owners filed suit on Friday to remove the valley elderberry longhorn beetle from the endangered species list. The dime-size beetle, unique to California's Central Valley, has been the bane of developers and flood-control officials since it was first listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1980. | 04/09/11 12:06:05 By - Matt Wesier
Officials in San Luis Obispo plan to ask a power company to suspend its relicensing of a nuclear plant until seismic studies have been completed. | 04/08/11 16:29:53 By - David Sneed
A small amount of hydrogen gas was released from a pipe and ignted at a nuclear power plant in Washington state. | 04/08/11 16:15:41 By -
Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear kept a promise to coal-mining protesters and visited counties with surface mines. | 04/08/11 15:57:27 By - Dori Hjalmarson
In a largely symbolic gesture driven by growing Republican frustration with the Obama administration's environmental policies, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives on Thursday passed a measure that would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. | 04/07/11 17:11:00 By - Halimah Abdullah
The Senate voted Wednesday against a measure that would have blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing new regulations on greenhouse gasses — a move that further cripples efforts by lawmakers to weaken the agency's regulatory authority. | 04/06/11 20:11:00 By - Halimah Abdullah and Renee Schoof
It wasn't pollution or radiation from Japan that caused thousands of starfish to wash up on the shores in South Carolina. The answer is much simplier. | 04/06/11 13:51:44 By - Gina Vasselli
Farmers and city residents spent decades depleting portions of the Equus Beds aquifer, drying out part of the aquifer roughly the size of Cheney Reservoir. But now 65 percent of that water is back, thanks mostly to several rainy years. | 04/05/11 13:35:45 By - Brent D. Wistrom
FreedomWorks, a conservative group aligned with the tea party movement, has launched a petition drive to fire Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers for guaranteeing a $10 million line of credit to the 2012 Democratic National Convention. | 04/04/11 18:10:49 By - Jim Morrill
When oil hit a record price of $147 a barrel in July 2008, it was a game-changing moment that sparked a serious push to create electric cars and hybrid electric engines that could help wean Americans off oil. Today, crude is back over $100 a barrel and the payoff is the first generation of mass-produced electric cars rolling off production lines. | 04/04/11 13:27:00 By - Kevin G. Hall and Renee Schoof
Entire industries grew up around gasoline-powered cars, ranging from the ubiquitous filling stations to fast-food restaurants along highway exits. Similarly, the rise of electric cars probably will transform more than just the automobile. | 04/04/11 13:22:00 By - Kevin G. Hall
The uncertain science of protecting the public from nuclear accidents is a concern in heavily populated, hurricane-prone South Florida. | 04/04/11 10:03:40 By - Curtis Morgan
California has a lot of water now from the winter runoff. Dams to store water for later use have been considered, but have high costs and environmental problems. | 04/04/11 09:55:55 By - Matt Weiser
The California sea lions were unwelcome visitors from the very beginning, greeted with yells, rubber bullets and firecrackers when they swam up the Columbia River to gobble up thousands of endangered salmon at the Bonneville Dam. This spring, the sea lions have found safe harbor at the dam, about 50 miles east of Portland, Ore., after an appellate court in San Francisco ruled that states and the National Marine Fisheries Service had to stop the killings. But the reprieve could be short-lived | 04/03/11 13:56:00 By - Rob Hotakainen
Its been nearly seven years since Tallevast, Fla., residents learned that the wells they had been using for their homes were contaminated with highly toxic substances. | 04/03/11 13:36:42 By - Toni Whitt
Calling them "hypocrites, plain and simple," Alaska Rep. Don Young thumbed his nose last week at one of the nation's foremost animal advocacy organizations, the Humane Society. | 04/03/11 13:27:10 By - Erika Bolstad
Lawmakers from states stuck with tons of radioactive materials left over from the Cold War Friday cheered a House of Representatives panel's decision to investigate the Obama administration's scrapping of a central nuclear waste dump in Nevada. | 04/01/11 19:20:00 By - James Rosen
President Barack Obama wants to make it easier for Americans to use parks and public lands, saying that too many "can go days without stepping on a single blade of grass." But with the nation deep in debt and facing a long backlog of projects on its public lands, many Republicans are lining up against Obama's plan, leaving its fate uncertain. | 04/01/11 17:19:00 By - Rob Hotakainen
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency opposes plans for a huge gold mine north of Camden, South Carolina, saying in a recent letter that the project could threaten drinking water, wildlife and creeks that drain off the site. Romarco Minerals wants to create what would be the largest gold mine east of the Mississippi River. But the mine would excavate or fill an unusually large number of wetlands and streams and the EPA said it cant support the plan. | 04/01/11 07:29:25 By - Sammy Fretwell
Kansas' Wolf Creek nuclear power plant is among three in the United States that need more intensive oversight, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Congress on Thursday. The other two are the H.B. Robinson plant in Hartsville, S.C., and the Fort Calhoun plant near Omaha. | 04/01/11 07:13:44 By - Mike McGraw
Anchorage's city power utility made a long-awaited offer this week to buy wind power from Cook Inlet Region Inc., backers of a proposed wind turbine project on Fire Island. But CIRI senior vice president Ethan Schutt said the offer is so low it's ridiculous and contains unworkable terms. | 04/01/11 06:34:25 By - Rosemary Shinohara
In Kentucky, where coal mining has been the lifeblood of many rural communities, miners and the lawmakers who represent them say the Obama administration's push for regulations that cap greenhouse gases and toughen mine permitting requirements feels like an assault. | 03/31/11 07:08:17 By - Halimah Abdullah and Renee Schoof
In an energy security speech that focused heavily on increasing domestic oil and gas production, President Barack Obama mentioned Alaska just once. The mention came just after Obama criticized oil companies for sitting on leases, and right before he suggested that there's also a need to focus on cleaner, renewable sources of energy that won't have as significant a contribution to climate change. | 03/31/11 06:39:26 By - Erika Bolstad
President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced a goal to cut U.S. reliance on foreign oil by one-third by 2025, saying that demand from growing economies such as China and India probably will force prices up in the long term. | 03/30/11 19:09:00 By - Margaret Talev and Kevin G. Hall
Solar energy is proving so successful in North Carolina that industry advocates want to double the amount of sun-powered electricity that is required by state law. | 03/30/11 07:25:11 By - John Murawski
California consumers could see sharp electricity rate increases under sweeping new legislation that would require them to ramp up their energy supplies from wind, solar and other green sources, local utilities said. The state Assembly approved a measure requiring power companies to obtain up to 33 percent of their energy supplies from green sources, up sharply from the current 20 percent. The state Senate already has passed the bill. But utilities say they face steep cost increases to comply with the measure. | 03/30/11 06:47:29 By - Rick Daysog
During the worst week of the Japanese nuclear crisis, the EPA's radiation monitor in Dutch Harbor recorded the highest levels of radioactive iodine fallout in the United States among reporting stations, the agency said. Despite the relatively high levels in the Aleutian Island community on March 19 and 20, state and federal health officials say the amounts of radioactive byproducts were way too small to pose a health risk. | 03/30/11 06:40:02 By - Richard Mauer
More than 140 women who'd championed Gulf Coast recovery after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were at it again Tuesday, convening on Capitol Hill to announce that they were supporting legislation that would guarantee the five Gulf Coast states at least 80 percent of BP's fines from last spring's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, an amount that could top $21 billion. | 03/29/11 18:04:00 By - Maria Recio
Activists urged the government Tuesday to let people post and track cancer cases across communities, a public health effort that they say could lead to discoveries of new chemical-related cancer clusters throughout the United States as well as insights into disease management. | 03/29/11 16:27:00 By - Erika Bolstad, Barbara Barrett and Lesley Clark
The merchant shipping industry has failed a second time to short-circuit California's effort to combat the toll on the health of its population from air pollution caused by oceangoing vessels. The industry is contesting California's authority to regulate fuel used by seagoing vessels up to 24 miles off its coast. | 03/29/11 06:53:31 By - Denny Walsh
The horrors of the worlds worst nuclear accident greeted Natalia Manzurova when she arrived in the Ukraine after the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl. Speaking at the University of South Carolina at a time of increasing debate about nuclear power, the Russian scientist likened an atomic energy disaster to that of a war, with one major distinction. | 03/29/11 07:33:31 By - Sammy Fretwell
A cab driver who plans ahead, Rafael Macario had his Toyota Camry rigged to run on three different kinds of fuel. Gasoline is the most expensive, propane the most dangerous, and natural gas is his favorite. He is among a growing number of Dominicans banking on natural gas as not just a cleaner form of energy, but one that costs about a third of a gasoline fill-up. | 03/29/11 07:03:06 By - Frances Robles
Texas' environmental regulators are "the best in the country," and "Texas air quality is excellent," U.S. Rep. Joe Barton said last week during an event that highlighted the state's ongoing scrap with federal authorities over air quality. Last year, the EPA rejected the state's unique flexible permitting program as too lenient. | 03/29/11 07:43:00 By - Aman Batheja
Investors in California's Fresno County have plans to build a new nuclear reactor and ship the spent fuel to France. They face a number of hurdles, including public concerns about the nuclear crisis in Japan. | 03/28/11 15:37:24 By - John Ellis and Mark Grossi
An environmental group will tell a Senate panel Tuesday that it has identified 42 suspected clusters of cancer, birth defects and other illnesses in 13 states. | 03/28/11 15:10:00 By - Lesley Clark
The first radioactive fallout from Japan's multi-reactor nuclear accident arrived on the East Coast late last week, Progress Energy and other nuclear plant operators reported. The amounts detected so far are minuscule and pose no public health risks, nuclear experts and health officials said Sunday. | 03/28/11 07:34:36 By - John Murawski
The 104 nuclear reactors providing 20 percent of America's electric power were designed and built in the 1960s and '70s, an era when seismologists knew much less about earthquakes than they do today. | 03/23/11 18:57:00 By - Renee Schoof and Greg Gordon
A new study says that there has been a considerable decline in native fish in Lake Tahoe since 1951. According to a university press release, the study found that 58 percent of the 26 locations historically studied on the lake showed a decline of species or no native species at all. | 03/23/11 13:24:01 By - Bill Lindelof
Moments after planting a group of young trees behind his Charlane Plantation home, Chuck Leavell was already thinking of future generations of another kind of tree -- his family tree. | 03/23/11 12:57:15 By - Caryn Grant
At least 32 musk oxen in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve perished during a nasty storm surge last month, and officials are worried many more may be buried deeper in the ice and out of sight. | 03/23/11 06:36:01 By - Mike Campbell
Lawyers for Washington state and South Carolina on Tuesday accused President Barack Obama of having exceeded his constitutional power in shuttering the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. | 03/22/11 19:15:00 By - James Rosen
State regulators this morning gave Duke Energy the go-ahead to offer customers free home charging stations for plug-in electric cars. | 03/22/11 13:33:48 By - John Murawski
Calif. state Sen. Sam Blakeslee, a Republican, rebuked PG&E for not suspending license renewal activities until better earthquake mapping is completed. | 03/22/11 13:09:53 By - David Sneed
Yes, pollen is here and causing problems, thanks to nature's way of saying it is making love and lots of it. | 03/22/11 13:08:01 By - Johanna D. Wilson
Josh Rogers admits that the combination that led to the restoration of the historic house in Macon, Georgia, is a little counter-intuitive -- that green techniques can be used to restore an historic home. | 03/22/11 12:21:19 By - Phillip Ramanti
Regulators are close to finalizing approval of a design that FPL hopes to install at Turkey Point, but some are skeptical of promises of a simple, safer reactor. | 03/21/11 15:49:10 By - Curtis Morgan
Japanese workers, who are risking their lives attempting to cool a half dozen crippled nuclear reactors, managed Saturday to stabilize a storage pool that holds some of the deadliest spent fuel, halting its release of radiation, the Japanese government said. | 03/19/11 18:07:00 By - Greg Gordon
Safety questions about the Mark I model nuclear reactors that are burning out of control in Japan were first raised years ago in the U.S., by the nation's top nuclear safety official and by the General Electric engineers who helped design them. | 03/17/11 19:42:00 By - Rob Hotakainen and Greg Gordon
U.S. nuclear plants use the same sort of pools to cool spent nuclear-fuel rods as the ones now in danger of spewing radiation at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant, only the U.S. pools hold much more nuclear material. That's raising the question of whether more spent fuel should be taken out of the pools at U.S. power plants to reduce risks. | 03/17/11 19:24:00 By - Renee Schoof
Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday that the Japanese crisis hasn't shaken his confidence in nuclear power and praised President Barack Obama for moving ahead with federal loan guarantees to build new plants. | 03/17/11 17:33:00 By - James Rosen
As federal and state officials continued Wednesday to issue assurances that there was little risk to public health in North America from the nuclear crisis in Japan, the EPA announced it was stepping up its monitoring capability in Alaska, Hawaii and Guam. | 03/17/11 06:42:54 By - Richard Mauer
Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Wednesday that U.S. officials believe at least one Japanese nuclear power reactor is in "partial meltdown," and the top federal nuclear power regulator said that radiation is so high it warrants a much wider evacuation zone. | 03/16/11 20:10:00 By - Greg Gordon
As the six-day nuclear crisis worsened in Japan on Wednesday, China announced it was suspending construction to rethink its designs for nuclear plants, following the lead of Switzerland and Germany. | 03/16/11 19:21:00 By - Rob Hotakainen and David Lightman
Toxic air pollutants such as mercury, which can lower the IQ of children who get high doses early in life, will be reduced from coal-fired power plants under a major air pollution regulation that the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled Wednesday. | 03/16/11 18:11:00 By - Renee Schoof
Federal regulators, state and local emergency managers and Florida Power & Light say they may learn lessons from Japans battle to control earthquake-crippled reactors but they downplayed the possibility of a similar nuclear nightmare striking the state. | 03/16/11 06:56:40 By - Curtis Morgan
The state of Alaska is considering adding additional radiation monitors in rural areas as a precautionary measure as federal nuclear officials continue to monitor Japan's failing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. State and federal officials continued to emphasize that they did not expect harmful radiation from Japan to reach North America, including Alaska. | 03/16/11 06:37:21 By - Erika Bolstad, Rob Hotakainen and Renee Schoof
With minor levels of excess radiation detected in Tokyo and at two nearby U.S. military bases, alarm is building among Americans in Japan who fear the Japanese government and the U.S. military are underplaying the threat of contamination from four out-of-control nuclear reactors. | 03/15/11 19:14:00 By - Liz Ruskin and Warren P. Strobel
Concerns about radiation sickness in Japan are focused for now on the area about 20 miles around the quake-struck Fukushima nuclear plant, where the public has been evacuated but some workers are still fighting off a nuclear disaster. | 03/15/11 18:45:00 By - Renee Schoof
Major suppliers of pills that provide protection from radiation say they're out of stock due to panic buying, even though experts say that the Japanese nuclear catastrophe poses no health threat to Americans. | 03/15/11 18:12:00 By - Rob Hotakainen and Renee Schoof
Anna Baumhoff, owner of Homemade by Dorothys, was surprised when a state park manager came to her booth at the Buy Idaho show last month and asked for a price list. Then another state park representative showed up, and another. By the end of the day, six or seven had stopped by. Four more have called her since then. | 03/15/11 13:27:46 By - Audrey Dutton
Call it beginner's luck. Biology student Rob Gilson found a critter so rare it hadn't been seen in Mecklenburg County since 1968. A palm-sized oldfield mouse succumbed to Gilson's lure of sunflower seeds and was trapped at Cowan's Ford Wildlife Refuge on Feb. 20. | 03/15/11 13:12:52 By - Bruce Henderson
As Japan struggles to contain its radiation-leaking plants, a U.S. nuclear industry that's still looking for a renaissance braces for the domestic fallout. The reaction could begin this morning, when Duke Energy asks the N.C. Utilities Commission to endorse its decision to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new nuclear plant. In all, six new reactors are planned in North and South Carolina. | 03/15/11 07:24:33 By - Bruce Henderson
The struggle to avert disaster at a Japanese nuclear power plant has many Californians wondering about the risk of a radiation cloud crossing the Pacific. Experts weighed in on that possibility Monday. | 03/15/11 06:47:45 By - Matt Weiser
Until technicians were able to increase the bandwidth of an Alaska-based weather website early Friday, it failed as an information linchpin for hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people on the California, Oregon and Washington coasts looking for life-and-death tsunami information. | 03/11/11 20:42:00 By - Erika Bolstad
The National Data Buoy Center collects information that helps provide tsunami warnings. | 03/11/11 16:59:36 By - Donna Harris
Much of California is less vulnerable to the kind of tsunami wreckage caused Friday in Japan because the state's coastline is generally steeper, a University of California quake expert said. Ironically, he said it is the San Andreas earthquake fault that keeps California's coast so steep. | 03/11/11 15:31:02 By - Matt Weiser
A Seattle-based seafood company that operates mostly in Alaska will pay $1.9 million in penalties as well as cleanup costs for the ammonia and other waste it discharged from its processing plant in the Aleutians. | 03/09/11 18:29:00 By - Erika Bolstad
Senators said Wednesday that a bill extending exploratory leases in the Gulf of Mexico will encourage drilling — and help bring down the price of oil. | 03/09/11 18:18:00 By - Maria Recio
A survey in San Luis Obispo County, California, finds a wide variation in permit fees charged to businesses that install solar power. The Sierra Club is urging local governments to set fees just to cover costs. | 03/09/11 15:22:32 By - David Sneed
An environmental coalition filed a notice of intent to sue a Kentucky coal company for thousands of violations of the Clean Water Act. | 03/09/11 15:12:54 By - Dori Hjalmarson
Head to head on the debate over whether California should ban the Chinese delicacy shark fin soup to save sharks. | 03/09/11 14:53:17 By - Ben Boychuk and Pia Lopez
It may never be known why infant dolphins died along the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama. Scientists say it will take time to figure out, and lawsuits are keeping evidence closed off form the public. | 03/08/11 17:00:54 By - Karen Nelson
Florida's new governor wants to dismantle the agency that manages growth in the state. | 03/08/11 16:40:18 By - Craig Pittman
Jane Goodall walked quietly among dozens of adoring students Monday at Texas Christian University, posing for pictures and signing autographs as teens pushed closer for a word or a glance. The 76-year-old scientist and conservationist is an unlikely rock star to a generation whose parents were children or not even born when she began her pioneering work with chimpanzees in Tanzania in July 1960. | 03/08/11 07:29:13 By - Shirley Jinkins
U.S. District Court Judge H. Russel Holland ruled Monday against a request that he force Exxon Mobil Corp. to pay for the cleanup of oil left on the Prince William Sound shoreline from the 1989 tanker Valdez spill. | 03/08/11 06:38:01 By - Sean Cockerham
A documentary about the historic water contamination at the Marines' Camp Lejeune, N.C., will have its world premiere this spring at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. | 03/07/11 14:54:00 By - Barbara Barrett
The Modesto Centre Plaza could become a showcase for energy efficiency under a plan to spend funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. | 03/07/11 14:10:55 By - Ken Carlson
Resiliency is replacing productivity as the watchword of the U.S. Forest Service. The agency was founded in 1905 on the idea that using the science and technology of forestry could dramatically increase forest productivity and prevent a threatened timber famine. At the heart of that policy was eliminating forest fires, a goal and task the agency carried into the 1970s. | 03/07/11 13:08:49 By - Rocky Barker
Fearing for the wild salmon industry in the Northwest, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state wants to stop the Food and Drug Administration from making a quick decision on whether to approve genetically modified Atlantic salmon for human consumption. | 03/06/11 00:01:00 By - Rob Hotakainen
Kentucky Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul introduced legislation Thursday designed to force the Environmental Protection Agency to move more quickly in deciding whether to approve or veto permits that mines need to operate under the Clean Water Act. | 03/03/11 15:35:00 By - Halimah Abdullah
The eastern cougar has been declared extinct, according to a report issued Wednesday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. | 03/02/11 11:49:11 By -
An environmental group demanded Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency halt construction of a coal plant in western Kansas. Earthjustice sent a letter to Karl Brooks, EPA Region 7 administrator, making a formal demand that Brooks object to a permit issued by the state to build the Sunflower Electric Power Corp. plant. | 03/02/11 07:06:43 By - Karen Dillon
Exxon Mobil Corp. says it has paid enough for the 1989 Alaska oil spill, but a judge will hear arguments Friday that the company still owes nearly $100 million to remove oil from the Prince William Sound shoreline. | 03/02/11 06:33:10 By - Sean Cockerham
Republican governors from across the country made clear this week how much they think Obama administration initiatives interfere with their states' rights. | 03/01/11 19:35:00 By - Erika Bolstad
Spurred by the rush to develop the Arctic's offshore oil and gas riches, scientists are unlocking some mysteries about the marine environment off Alaska's northern coast. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on the icy Beaufort and Chukchi seas, resulting in major discoveries -- including the existence of commercial fish species such as Pacific cod and walleye pollock in places never before documented. | 03/01/11 06:41:57 By - Elizabeth Bluemink
The phenomenon of new born or stillborn baby dolphins washing ashore from the Gulf or the Mississippi Sound continued through the weekend and Monday. | 02/28/11 16:01:02 By - Karen Nelson
Global warming took a toll on coral reefs in 2010, endangering one of the world's key ecosystems that benefit people in countless ways. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data show that 2010, the warmest on record, was hard on corals. | 02/28/11 15:39:00 By - Renee Schoof
Caltrans is implementing an innovative way to reduce the number of wild animals killed by cars at the top of the Cuesta Grade. | 02/28/11 14:01:21 By - David Sneed
Very few living things on this Earth have been to the moon, except a handful of aging astronauts. Also on that short list are trees grown from seeds a Gulfport astronaut took with him to the moon. A number of these seeds have grown quietly here on the Coast for almost 40 years. | 02/28/11 11:44:53 By - Karen Nelson
Federal officials have begun revealing details of a multimillion-dollar project that will try to restore a threatened species of salmon to the San Joaquin River. | 02/25/11 12:35:49 By - Mark Grossi
California is finding many end uses for the estimated 40 million used and waste tires generated in the state each year. | 02/25/11 12:24:08 By - By Carlos Alcala
A Superfund site in Davis, Calif., is the first federal groundwater cleanup project powered by solar energy. | 02/25/11 12:12:40 By - Rick Daysog
NOAA will give high priority to an investigation of baby dolphin deaths in Mississippi and Alabama. | 02/24/11 16:11:51 By - Karen Nelson
Mississippi Department of Marine Resources Executive Director Bill Walker has been appointed to the Obama administrations National Ocean Councils Governance Coordinating Committee -- a group of state, local and tribal officials across the country who will work on ocean-policy issues. | 02/24/11 16:07:16 By -
Two environmental groups say the Florida governor's choice of a shipyard executive as head of the environmental protection office is illegal. | 02/24/11 15:54:23 By - Craig Pittman
Sharp debate erupted Wednesday over a new report that shows that developing the controversial Pebble copper and gold deposit in Southwest Alaska could be very profitable for its owners. | 02/24/11 06:31:52 By - Elizabeth Bluemink
A central question about the Endangered Species Act was behind the legal wrangling Wednesday in a federal courtroom: What, if anything, can be done to save polar bears as the earth warms and sea ice recedes? | 02/23/11 20:07:00 By - Erika Bolstad
The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday said new pollution controls for boilers and incinerators will save thousands of lives every year but at half the cost of an earlier proposal that industry and lawmakers had strongly criticized. | 02/23/11 18:41:00 By - Renee Schoof
The Department of Energy is looking at proposals for future use of newly cleaned land at the Hanford nuclear reservation. | 02/22/11 16:24:42 By - Annette Cary
Researchers have found 18 infant or stillborn dolphins in Mississippi and Alabama. Researchers are trying to determine the cause of deaths. | 02/22/11 16:16:46 By - Karen Nelson
Miami-Dade County is looking at cheaper alternatives to a large new water-treatment plant. The reassessment comes as Florida's new governor signals possible major changes in environmental regulation. Environmentalists fear water protections will be gutted. | 02/22/11 16:07:59 By - Martha Brannigan and Curtis Morgan
Baby dolphins, some barely three feet in length, are washing up along the Mississippi and Alabama coastlines at 10 times the normal rate of stillborn and infant deaths, researchers say. This is the first birthing season for dolphins since last year's oil spill. | 02/21/11 16:25:28 By - Karen Nelson
A lone male wolverine has been wandering the Sierra Nevada for at least three years, but is highly elusive. | 02/21/11 12:50:37 By - Tom Knudson
Another big Everglades project broke ground on Friday, a $79 million job in Southwest Florida to plug a drainage canal, install a massive pump to pulse freshwater back into thirsty wetlands and salty estuaries and rip out 100 miles of overgrown roadbed, remnants of a long-dead real estate fiasco. | 02/21/11 07:00:22 By - Curtis Morgan
Duke Energy's profits rose 23 percent in 2010. Demand was up, and rates were increased. | 02/17/11 15:27:34 By - Bruce Henderson
State lawmakers in Kentucky approved measures aimed at shielding their state's coal companies from environmental regulation. | 02/17/11 15:20:09 By - John Cheves
A veto-proof majority of the Florida state senate wants the federal government to give Florida the high-speed rail funds the governor rejected. | 02/17/11 15:12:22 By - Mark Caputo
Environmental groups said Wednesday that a 1,700-mile oil pipeline planned between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico posed safety risks and should be delayed. | 02/16/11 19:03:00 By - David Goldstein
San Joaquin River restoration would stop and Central Valley irrigation deliveries ostensibly rise under a Republican spending bill poised for House passage Thursday. | 02/16/11 18:52:18 By - Michael Doyle
Congressional Republicans this week added amendments to a spending bill that would knock out environmental protections for air, water and wilderness. | 02/16/11 17:58:00 By - Renee Schoof
Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott is rejecting federal funding for high-speed rail. | 02/16/11 13:29:07 By - Emily Nipps, Steve Bousquet and Michael C. Bender
A leadling Alaska economist says the state is saving too little of its oil wealth for future generations. | 02/16/11 13:24:07 By - Elizabeth Bluemink
Kansas has set its sights on creating 10,000 green jobs, many of them from manufacturing and assembling the parts for wind energy turbines. The states big bet on wind power has attracted a few hundred jobs so far. But even that success shows the huge challenge Kansas faces | 02/15/11 14:08:48 By - Steve Everly
Author Wendell Berry and 13 other environmental activists emerged from Kentucky's state Capitol on Monday to roars of approval and applause, ending their four-day occupation of Gov. Steve Beshear's outer office. | 02/15/11 07:17:30 By - John Cheves
A study at the University of California at Irvine has determined that safe and eco-friendly LED bulbs, commonly used in headlights, stoplights and holiday lights, contain lead, arsenic and other hazardous substances. | 02/14/11 13:03:32 By - Paige Maxwells
The Prairie State Energy Campus under construction in Washington County, Illinois, is expected to begin generation by the end of the year. | 02/14/11 11:52:49 By - Will Buss
Kentucky environmentalists plan a rally at the capitol on Monday against mountaintop removal coal mining. Author Wendell Berry and other supporters have held a sit-in at the governor's office since Friday. | 02/14/11 10:36:50 By - Shawntaye Hopkins
State officials are considering a $100 surcharge on the purchase of some new vehicles that don't meet federal fuel efficiency standards. It's one legislative proposal designed to raise more revenue and help reduce the looming, multibillion-dollar deficit. | 02/13/11 16:50:08 By - Anna M. Tinsley
Crude oil from western Canada began flowing through a controversial pipeline in Kansas last week. Supporters say that construction of the Keystone Pipeline provided an economic boon, producing money and jobs. But in Kansas, local officials along the pipeline's path think that the state sold them out — unnecessarily — to get the pipeline. | 02/13/11 00:01:00 By - David Goldstein
The Interior Department has approved 10 oil and gas exploration projects in the Gulf of Mexico since October in violation of two laws that protect whales and other marine mammals, environmental groups said Thursday. | 02/10/11 18:54:00 By - Renee Schoof
The Interior Department has approved 10 oil and gas exploration projects in the Gulf of Mexico since October in violation of two laws that protect whales and other marine mammals, environmental groups said Thursday. | 02/10/11 18:54:00 By - Renee Schoof
Environmental and consumer advocates are fighting a proposal by North Carolina electric utilities. The power companies want to make it easier to raise electricity rates to pay for new nuclear plants. An official said it's the only type of regulatory structure that would allow new plants to go ahead. | 02/10/11 11:24:52 By - John Murawski
Supporters of teh Sunflower coal plant to be built in Kanasas said it would be the cleanest in the country. A report obtained by The Kansas City Star says that's not true. | 02/10/11 11:15:40 By - Karen Dillon
A plant that will turn radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation into a solid glass form for disposal could start three years early, under a plan the Department of Energy is considering. The plant now is set to begin in 2019 treating waste left from the development of the nation's first nuclear weapons. | 02/10/11 11:32:03 By - Annette Cary
The influential chairman of the House transportation committee voiced skepticism Wednesday about California's high-speed rail plans. | 02/10/11 11:38:19 By - Michael Doyle
A gift agreement, obtained by the Herald-Leader under Kentucky's Open Records Act, shows that a new dorm at the University of Kentucky, built with a donation from the head of Alliance Coal, must have an exhibit in the lobby that will be a tribute to the coal industry. | 02/10/11 11:07:23 By - Linda B. Blackford
Republicans on the House of Representatives energy committee on Wednesday aired their proposal to block the Environmental Protection Agency from reducing greenhouse gases and to reverse the agency's scientific finding that climate change is dangerous. | 02/09/11 17:49:00 By - Renee Schoof
Since August, biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the military have been looking to kill off or drastically thin two packs of wolves -- maybe 12 animals in all -- that roam Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and around the edges of Eagle River. They say the animals have become increasingly aggressive with humans and dogs. | 02/09/11 12:00:32 By - Julia O'Malley
One of downtown Anchorage's aging office buildings is about to get an eco-friendly makeover. | 02/09/11 11:57:03 By - Elizabeth Bluemink
The federal Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that it will review the consequences of large-scale development projects, such as the proposed copper and gold Pebble mine, in Alaska's Bristol Bay watershed. The review is in response to petitions from several Southwest Alaska tribes, commercial fishing groups and other organizations opposed to Pebble. Those groups are worried about the potential impact of large-scale mining on Bristol Bay's world-class salmon runs. | 02/08/11 06:36:53 By - Elizabeth Bluemink
While scientists can only estimate the toll the Big Chill took on the army of exotic reptiles, fish and plants in the wilds of South Florida, field observations over the last year suggest nature knocked them down but not out. Some, including Burmese pythons, already are speeding down the road to recovery. | 02/07/11 18:55:58 By - Curtis Morgan
The state of California is giving money to cities that will develop high-speed rail stations in the state. | 02/07/11 11:14:50 By - Tim Sheehan
In some ways, Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed elimination of California's Land Conservation Act is just one more symbol of the state's great budget disaster. Supporters say eliminating the 46-year-old law commonly known as the Williamson Act will diminish an important source of environmental protection for 16.5 million acres and increase development pressure on farmers and ranchers. | 02/07/11 06:54:47 By - Loretta Kalb
A developer in Sacarmento is building ultra-efficient housing aimed at the middle class. Plenty of California houses have solar, but these will have something new _ batteries that can store the power. And the project is entirely financed by private investors and banks. There are no federal subsidies. | 02/04/11 12:59:31 By - Rick Daysog
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