The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is…wait…mwa-haa-haa. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Heh…hmm, well, it’s doing what it’s been doing for Messers Bush and Cheney since, well, their era began. No surprise, but, we gotta keep sloggin’ on, no?

• EPA HaHaHa

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I found the News Trust website through Scientific American, and their announcement of a collaboration designed to better aggregate environmental news reports. In fact, you can submit articles, rate them and even write your own articles to be reviewed by your peers.

• News Trust

• Scientific American

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This story from The Independent details how the UK’s export credits and guarantees department (ECGD) initially provided financial backing to Sakhalin Energy Investment Company for oil and gas drilling near Russia’s Sakhalin Island. This area is also the only documented feeding area of the Western Grey whale, which only number at about 120 individuals. The financial backing was approved, in spite of the fact that other governmental branches, such as the Foreign Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), strongly disapproved. Due to the methods of drilling for oil and gas, an accident such as an oil spill or the explosions routinely used for excavation purposes might kill or sicken the few remaining breeding females, which in turn could not be sustained for more than a few years without the whales going extinct. Indeed, the ECGD actually suppressed the objections of the other governmental agencies, and even ignored a request for the documentation by ‘Friend of the Earth’, under the freedom of information act, filed three years ago. The information was finally released from ECGD due to a court order.

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Mother Jones has an in-depth article on a private security company, Becket Brown International (BBI), spent time spying on environmental organizations such as Green Peace in the late 90’s and into 2000. I remember thinking how awful it was when I learned that the FBI was spying on all sorts of people in the 60’s and 70’s, like Martin Luther King, for instance, and other political organizations. That was when I was much younger, and thought those bad old days were long over, lost in the mists of primitive history. Hah! Now environmental groups are being spied on by the government, and private, corporate-sponsored companies with serious resources.

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Here is a little good news via TreeHugger with regard to dumping refuse into the Mediterranean Sea, it is officially now prohibited. Ok, so, why did it take so long to make it ‘official’? Well, they wanted to have a few brains behind the law, so they spent recent years establishing services to haul away trash from ports around the coast. Makes sense, right? I think most practical people know that if you want your scheme to have any hope of success, you have to try to make it easier for people to do the right thing. Oh yeah, and then when they don’t you just fine the bejesus out of them.

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Would you like to see how carbon dioxide emissions correlate with cities and population density in the US? Well, now you can. Scientists from NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE) have created high resolution maps so that scientists, citizens and politicians alike can understand that where people are, so is the highest density of CO2.

• CO2 Map

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