In this issue: Special report on energy and climate change; first installment of new column 'Freelance Files' on goal setting; database helps track illegal parkland conversions; members cover sprawl, science and chickens; annual Sundance Film Festival report; and six book reviews.
"WASHINGTON, DC -- Support for global action to curb climate change is growing stronger within the G8 group of the world’s largest industrial democracies, which includes the United States and Japan."
"WASHINGTON -- A dozen states and cities and three major environmental groups have notified the Environmental Protection Agency that they plan to sue the regulator unless it issues final rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants."
"MOSCOW — It was once protected by ice. Now regulation will have to do the work."
"LONDON -- The development of low-carbon energy is progressing too slowly to limit global warming, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Wednesday."
"After a generation of effort, New England's waters are clean enough to support an oyster industry. But climate change could undermine those gains."
"CANBERRA -- The summer ice melt in parts of Antarctica is at its highest level in 1,000 years, Australian and British researchers reported on Monday, adding new evidence of the impact of global warming on sensitive Antarctic glaciers and ice shelves."
The 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting went to InsideClimate News, a 5-year-old web-only nonprofit, for its book-length feature series on the 2010 Enbridge tar-sands oil spill that fouled miles of Michigan's Kalamazoo River. InsideClimate has been one of the most aggressive media outlets covering the current spill in Mayflower, Arkansas. ExxonMobil recently threatened one of InsideClimate's reporters with arrest for trying to find a federal government press office handling the spill.
"PORTLAND, Maine -- Ocean temperatures have been higher than normal in the Gulf of Maine, creating worries among lobstermen that there could be a repeat of last spring's early harvest that resulted in a market glut, a crash in the prices fishermen get and a blockade of Maine-caught lobsters in Canada."
