Category «Environmental Law»

What Extremely Warm Winters Mean for the Future of the Arctic

“In an interview with Yale Environment 360, polar scientist Mark Serreze talks about the rapid changes he has witnessed over more than three decades of working in the Arctic and the future stability of the region if temperatures continue to climb…Serreze discusses how he and his colleagues gradually began to accept that human carbon emissions …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law

ProPublica – investigative report on Defense Environmental Restoration Program Sites

ProPublica – Abrahm Lustgarten: “For much of the past two years I’ve been digging into a vast, $70 billion environmental cleanup program run by the U.S. Department of Defense that tracks tens of thousands of polluted sites across the United States. In some places, old missiles and munitions were left buried beneath school grounds. In …

Subjects: Environmental Law, Government Documents, Legal Research

New air pollution database maps world’s most polluted cities

“The world’s most comprehensive air pollution database has been updated again, mapping out a picture of a global health crisis that is disparate, changing and in some places just obscure. Compiled by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the statistics on 4,300 cities reveal annual levels of particulate matter, miniscule particles in the air that can …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law

AWI researchers measure a record concentration of microplastic in arctic sea ice

The composition and layering of plastic particles found in sea ice reveal their regions of origin [24. April 2018] “Experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have recently found higher amounts of microplastic in arctic sea ice than ever before. However, the majority of particles were microscopically small. …

Subjects: Environmental Law

Emails Suggest Interior Dept. Prioritizing Fossil Fuel Interests Over Wildlife Well-Being

Pacific Standard – Records reveal that, following requests by fossil fuel industry groups, a top official at the Department of the Interior appeared to take credit for helping to delay new federal protections for a once-endangered species. “The Texas hornshell is a sleek green-gray mussel that once thrived in the Rio Grande watershed, its habitat …

Subjects: E-Mail, Energy, Environmental Law, Government Documents, Legal Research

FOIA requests reveal EPA effort to boost impact of industry sponsored research

Union of Concerned Scientists: “Newly released documents obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists under three separate Freedom of Information Act requests and first reported on by POLITICO demonstrate that the Trojan horse “secret science” proposal being floated by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt is entirely driven by politics. POLITICO writes: “Since Pruitt …

Subjects: E-Mail, E-Records, Environmental Law, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Health Care

Evidence for declining forest resilience to wildfires under climate change

Evidence for declining forest resilience to wildfires under climate change. Ecology Letters, (2018) 21: 243–252 doi: 10.1111/ele.12889 “Forest resilience to climate change is a global concern given the potential effects of increased disturbance activity, warming temperatures and increased moisture stress on plants. We used a multi-regional dataset of 1485 sites across 52 wildfires from the …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law

Boulder, Colorado latest city to sue Big Oil over climate change

Grist: “Remember those lawsuits California and New York filed against major oil producers for knowingly heating up the planet? Two counties in Colorado just teamed up with the city of Boulder to file a similar lawsuit of their own. The complaint alleges that oil companies contributed greenhouse gases to the atmosphere for decades while knowing the …

Subjects: Climate Change, Courts, Environmental Law, Legal Research