Posts Tagged: ‘epa’

“The Lorax” was first published by Dr. Suess in 1971. This was during the dark ages of environmental protection. Keep in mind that the EPA did not open its doors until December of 1970, and at that point the amount of pollution in the United States was staggering. One of the events that brought the EPA into being was the fire on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio in June of 1969. Yes, an entire river lit on fire, as seen in this video…

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Until yesterday, you could have rightly assumed monkey trials and global warming had nothing to do with each other. But that was before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, concerned over possible emissions regulations, challenged the EPA to a global warming showdown. According to the L.A. Times, officials at the chamber said the proposed legal faceoff could be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.”

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Before a car is sold in the US, the Environmental Protection Agency conducts tests to estimate the number of miles the car gets per gallon. Learn how these tests work — and why results may vary — in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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So here’s the scoop…Volkswagen is currently running an ad on television that touts some pretty impressive mile-per-gallon stats. The commercial features a 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI Clean Diesel and if you’re not paying careful attention you just may get the impression that it gets 58 miles per gallon. That’s pretty remarkable, right? But is Volkswagen being deceptive?

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My hat is off and held humbly in my hands for the subculture of drivers who hypermile. I am something of what you might call an aggressive driver. The fast lane is meant as a pipeline for cars to shoot down at 90 mph past slower drivers who apparently have less to do or fish a lot. Those who don’t observe fast lane rules get a good shot of me in their rear-view mirror, vomiting profanity, my front fender mere inches from their rear bumpers.

This kind of driving calls for a lot of accelerating and decelerating, so I consume gas like I used to mash troves of Slim Jims I’d find hidden behind the good silver into my piehole back when I was a fat kid. Hypermilers are pretty much the exact opposite of me.

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Q: What’s better than leaving an abandoned, heavily polluted former industrial site to rot and contaminate the surrounding environment?

A: Not doing that.

As humanity has bred like rabbits, coupled with staggering advances in extending life spans, we’ve started to really build up our population and since we’re somewhat large animals, we require lots of space.

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We thought we’d defeated them during World War II — driven them from our mattresses and couches with powerful pesticides. But bed bugs are making a comeback, and you won’t just find them in squalid environments and cheap motels. Climate change, decreased use of powerful pesticides and increased international travel have brought them back to dorms, hospitals and even upscale hotels in various major cities.

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It’s not your typical most-wanted list. You won’t see a copy of it tacked up in the post office or hear John Walsh addressing its nefarious members as you flip the channels. Nevertheless, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has its own list of fugitives — people believed to be responsible for smuggling ozone-depleting coolants, discharging tons of oil-contaminated grain into the ocean and even contributing to the crash of ValuJet flight 592 in the Everglades.

The EPA established the list — complete with mug shots, case profiles and bold red-lettered “captured” stamps across select faces — in order to draw attention to environmental crimes. The New York Times reports that rashes of such crimes are the result of strengthened regulations: Suddenly, noncompliance can be very profitable. And while some of the alleged violations sound fairly intricate (Denis L. Feron installed a secret pipe in his copper refinery in order to dump pollutants into a Mississippi River tributary), others, like the grain dumping, are disturbingly simple.

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I enjoyed this NPR story about power lines and cows mostly because it created an amusing mental image of disorganized bovines. Apparently, cows have an internal magnetic compass — something once thought to be exclusive to animals like bats and rodents. This compass keeps cows aligned toward magnetic north or south while they’re resting or grazing, a tendency shared with deer.

But when cows munch or nap under high-voltage power lines, something gets messed up. A team researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany used Google Earth to observe animals under or near power lines. Instead of neat, linear cattle, the animals aligned in random directions. That is unless the power lines ran east-west, in which case the cows mustered in that direction.

I’m not only fascinated that cows can sense magnetic fields, but that power lines can change the Earth’s magnetic field — at least on a local level. Do the electric and magnetic fields (EMF) from high-voltage lines affect us, too?

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This just in: Greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. That probably sounds like old news to most folks. After all, we’ve known about global warming and its dangerous effects for years now (everything from pollution-related asthma to temperature-related outbreaks of disease).

But the obvious just became official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed “endangerment finding,” a document sent to the White House Friday. According to Reuters, labeling greenhouse gases a threat to human well-being could be the first step to regulating U.S. emissions. The potential to do so, however, has been there for a while. Back in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases — if it determined the pollutants threatened human health. While the agency’s scientists concluded that the gases did pose a risk, it kept mum with official findings until now.

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