National (U.S.)

"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.

An environmental advocacy group has charged that EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, when she headed New Jersey's environmental agency, sought to block publication of a study on the health effects of toxic chemical PFOA on grounds that it had not been sufficiently peer-reviewed. She later relented.

During the Bush administration and earlier, the Pentagon waged a war to keep EPA from regulating perchlorate, a rocket fuel that has widely contaminated drinking water, by fudging the science about its health effects. Now the defense industry is pushing the same case to the Obama Office of Management and Budget.

President Obama's nominee for the top Justice Department environmental enforcement job, Ignacia Moreno, has come under fire from EPA staff attorneys for her previous work defending GE -- a major polluter prosecuted by EPA. Backers say Moreno was tough on polluters in a previous stint at Justice.

"The White House is trying to make Americans' food safer after recent recalls of popular products like peanut butter and cookie dough."