National (U.S.)

"A federal appeals court yesterday upheld nearly all U.S. EPA designations of areas where airborne soot concentrations exceed national standards, rejecting challenges from state and local governments and industry groups."

""The two key arguments that the oil and gas industry is using to fight federal regulation of the natural gas drilling process called hydraulic fracturing -- that the costs would cripple their business and that state regulations are already strong -- are challenged by the same data and reports the industry is using to bolster its position."

T. Boone Pickens postponed a plan to create the world's largest wind farm in Texas. The billionaire had spent $60 million advertising his plan to combat what he calls the United States' addiction to foreign oil.

"Greenpeace activists were arrested Wednesday for scaling Mount Rushmore and hanging a banner next to the carved face of Abraham Lincoln urging President Barack Obama to get tough on climate change."

"Hydrofluorocarbons ... are ... many thousands of times more potent than CO2 as climate warming agents, and scientists say their spread could become as much as 50 percent of the global greenhouse gas problem by 2050. Yet the public is barely aware of the issue, and as the White House works to hammer out its policy, it seems to want to keep it that way."

"A coalition of environmental groups is suing federal agencies in an effort to change the location of corridors to transmit energy across Western lands."

The bark beetles devastating millions of acres of western pine forests are actually a native insect whose destruction -- like that of wildfire -- is part of a natural cycle of forest regeneration.