EJ90: Environmental News Updates in Ninety Seconds

America is getting the gift of clean air this holiday season. We applaud the President for issuing these vital Clean Air Act protections that will save up to 11,000 lives each year by ensuring that the dirtiest power plants in the nation install available control technology to clean up the dangerous pollutants that sicken entire communities.

This rule is an important first step forward that should provide Coloradans with the information they need to ensure that their drinking water is safe.

With this finding by the Environmental Protection Agency, we can confirm what residents of the gasfields have been saying all along: the chemicals used in fracking can indeed migrate into groundwater and, in fact, they have. This lays an oil and gas industry myth to rest once and for all.

If we want to protect the grizzlies of Yellowstone, we have to confront squarely the loss of whitebark pine.

Most American workers enjoy workplace protections created by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but that's not the case for farmworkers. Farmworkers get second class treatment … We must speak up for the very people who help to put the food on our tables.

For a century, billions of tons coal ash has been buried, piled and ponded without regulation and without consideration of the consequences. Coal ash ponds are threatening hundreds of communities and their drinking water, but the current approach in Congress is to turn their backs and walk away.

Fighting this battle has meant more than a dozen lawsuits, including four appeals. At least that many Earthjustice attorneys spent thousands and thousands of hours responding to spurious industry claims and defending the rule when the Bush administration did not want to do so.

Today, ordinary Americans are having an impact just as large through cumulative efforts at the local level.

While the coal ash world burns, House Republicans and their cronies are tuning their fiddles and ignoring the obvious. Coal ash is poisoning our communities.

Allowing Shell to drill in the Arctic's icy waters when it has no credible cleanup plan for an oil spill isn't just irresponsible. It's unrealistic and, frankly, insulting.

Behind that story is a story of enforcing our environmental laws, citizen activists taking the years that were necessary to pursue enforcement of those laws and the real change that enforcing our environmental laws can ultimately bring about.

... [D]espite this decision, the President's action doesn't take anything away from our litigation. Instead, it demonstrates why court action is necessary to make meaningful progress toward clean air for all.

We're hoping that this poll is a wake-up call for elected officials. It's time for them to stop representing the will of the coal industry and special interests and start representing the will of the public …

This is a disaster waiting to happen, but still the government is moving forward with Arctic Ocean drilling. Scientific integrity and government accountability have taken their familiar back seat to oil company profits and power …