SEJournal looks ahead to key issues in the coming year with this "2019 Journalists’ Guide to Energy & Environment" special report. Stay tuned as we continue to add elements to the report up through and beyond its formal launch Jan. 25 at an annual roundtable, organized by the Society of Environmental Journalists with the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
The new year will likely mean subpoenas on EPA’s FOIA response policies, as a Democrat takes the chair in the House Oversight Committee amid charges the agency is choking off politically sensitive record requests. And are new laws in a dozen states making coverage of pipeline protests a felony? That, plus air emission exemptions for animal feedlot operators and data on illegal fishing. All in the latest issue of the WatchDog.
"The Trump administration proposed on Friday major changes to the way the federal government calculates the benefits, in human health and safety, of restricting mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants."
" State environmental officials say air sampling shows there’s been a drop in the chemical benzene since the closure of the Tonawanda Coke plant in western New York."
"A Belle Chasse marine contractor given the job of stopping a 14-year-old oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is defending itself against a lawsuit alleging it’s unqualified for the work and may cause more environmental damage."
"Hundreds of thousands of homes in the Southeast may have had their wells inundated by record-level floodwater resulting from major hurricanes this year, yet only a fraction have been tested for harmful contaminants."
"Elmira High School is one of 1,290 active and 220 potential toxic legacy sites statewide, according to an analysis of state records by the Elmira Star-Gazette."
"The results landed on Nikolai Vitti’s desk on a late summer afternoon, days before Detroit’s nearly 50,000 public school students would return to class. The findings were definitive and disturbing: In initial tests, two-thirds of schools showed alarming levels of lead in the water."
"A crew of engineers in the middle of the ocean will try to fix a device that was intended to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic have coalesced into a field of debris twice the size of Texas."
"Michigan legislators were poised Tuesday to remove legal protections from many of the state’s wetlands and other inland waterways, which provide wildlife habitat and perform vital tasks such as preventing floods."
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