Tag Archives: Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to weaken a Biden-era regulation that required power plants to slash pollutants, including the emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin that impairs brain development, according to an internal agency document. Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, intends to announce the proposed changes within days, according to two people who have been briefed on the agency’s plans. Mr. …

There’s a tale told about a miner who found copper cans in his garbage dump in the early days of mining. Wastewater from copper mining had flowed through his land, he said, and turned steel cans into copper. The story might be apocryphal, but the process is real, and it’s called cementation. Montana Resources, the mining company that took over …

Environmental Health Perspectives, widely considered the premier environmental health journal, has announced that it would pause acceptance of new studies for publication, as federal cuts have left its future uncertain. For more than 50 years, the journal has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to review studies on the health effects of environmental toxins — from “forever chemicals” …

In a speech broadcast to the Food and Drug Administration’s Maryland campus on Friday morning, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. introduced himself as the nation’s health secretary with a meandering speech touching on everything from birds of prey to pollution in Lake Erie to the C.I.A. Mr. Kennedy told the agency staff members, in the throes of losing 20 percent of …

The City of Fort Worth, Texas, is ending its contract with Synagro, the Goldman Sachs-backed provider of fertilizer made from sewage sludge, over concerns that “forever chemicals” in the fertilizer are contaminating local farmland and groundwater. Fort Worth this month also sued several manufacturers of the chemicals, also called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, alleging that they contaminated the …

A refinery in New Mexico that the federal government has accused of some of the worst air pollution in the country. A chemical plant in Louisiana being investigated for leaking gas from storage tanks. Idaho ranchers accused of polluting wetlands. Under President Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency took a tough approach on environmental enforcement by investigating companies for pollution, hazardous …

Good etiquette is expected at meal time in the penguin colony, but the diners with the best manners are found on a new, special island for birds of a certain age. There, geriatric African penguins don’t have to worry about younger birds bombarding the buckets of fish delivered by trainers at the New England Aquarium in Boston. “They all get …

Bill Diller, a photographer living in Huron County, Mich., had never seen a snowy owl quite like this. In January, Mr. Diller’s neighbor told him about a “red-spotted snowy owl” in the area. It’s a part of Michigan known as “the Thumb,” which becomes home to many snowy owls in the winter. People were calling the bird “Rusty.” “I had …

In a city where world-class masterpieces sit in marble temples that line the National Mall, the small museum devoted to the work of the Environmental Protection Agency, tucked away in a federal building near the White House, has not exactly inspired much fanfare. But as President Trump and Elon Musk slash and burn their way through Washington’s federal bureaucracy, this …

Rum, a diamond-shaped island off the western coast of Scotland, is home to 40 people. Most of the island — 40 square miles of mountains, peatland and heath — is a national nature reserve, with residents mainly nestled around Kinloch Bay to the east. What the Isle of Rum lacks is artificial illumination. There are no streetlights, light-flooded sports fields, …