TV News LIES

Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation’s geology as an invisible dumping ground.

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

There are growing signs they were mistaken.

New or expanded mountaintop removal permits would be blocked until the federal government concludes the mining technique is not contributing to increased risks of cancer, birth defects and other health problems among coalfield residents, under legislation proposed in Congress this week.

The bill aims to examine more closely the findings of a series of West Virginia University studies that found residents living near mountaintop removal sites face greater health risks than those who don't.

Less than a week after Pennsylvania farmers called for a moratorium on unconventional gas extraction, a large gathering of Pennsylvania Lutherans has also formally passed a resolution calling for a statewide halt on shale gas drilling.

While the tri-state Susquehanna River Basin Commission has taken no action to slow, stop, or even significantly regulate high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, this Lutheran Synod, based entirely in the heavily fracked Susquehanna River Basin, now stands for a moratorium.

Certain oil and gas operations that involve injecting wastewater underground can cause earthquakes, but the risk from hydraulic fracturing is generally low, said a US scientific report Friday.

The report by the National Research Council found that the most significant risk of earthquakes is linked to secondary injection of wastewater below ground to help capture remaining hydrocarbons from a petroleum reservoir.

Docks, boats and other debris from Japan's tsunami drifting onto West Coast beaches represent a trash cleanup challenge that may last for years to come.

Biologists are equally worried about the threat from invasive species attached to the debris. How big a threat remains to be seen. They fear that foreign species that arrive on our shores — crabs, barnacles, starfish, snails and plants — could establish a foothold and crowd out native creatures and plants.

A study published last weekend on Nature Climate Change claims to give the lie to the notion that if the world is warming, it’s not our fault.

With the kind of certainty that will send the Heartland Institute reaching for Plan C (“the world should focus on mitigation”), the study, The study, Human-induced global ocean warming on multidecadal timescales, ends with the bald factual statement: “We have identified a human-induced fingerprint in observed estimates of upper-ocean warming on multidecadal timescales”.

Climate change will make wildfires in the West, like those now raging in parts of Colorado and New Mexico, more frequent over the next 30 years, researchers reported on Tuesday.

More broadly, almost all of North America and most of Europe will see an increase in wildfires by the year 2100, the scientists wrote in the journal Ecosphere, a publication of the Ecological Society of America.

A report from a new institute at the State University at Buffalo asserting that state oversight has made natural gas drilling safer is causing tumult on campus and beyond, with critics arguing that the institute is biased toward industry and could undercut the university’s reputation.

The study, issued on May 15, said that state regulation in Pennsylvania had made drilling there far safer and that New York rules were even more likely to ensure safety once drilling gets under way in the state.