TV News LIES

As head of the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Division of Mineral Resources, Bradley J. Field is a prominent figure in an agency that has promoted hydraulic fracturing as a risk-free and impeccably regulated technology with a proven track record in New York.

Perhaps it's relevant that Field also sees global warming as a good thing. Field is listed on the Global Warming Petition Project calling for the U.S. to reject international global warming agreements, while claiming there is “no convincing evidence” that manmade greenhouse gases will disrupt the earth’s climate.

The United States lags in ninth place out of 12 of the world's major economies in overall energy efficiency, a survey indicates.

The survey by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy ranked countries on a 100-point scale, using 27 metrics grouped into four major categories: national efforts, buildings, industry and transportation.

The United States is flaring so much natural gas into the atmosphere - burning it as oil-field waste rather than extracting energy from it in power plants - that it now leads the world in the growth rate at which it is trashing that energy source.

Evidence of the trend can be seen flickering in the night across western North Dakota, where new oil drilling in the Bakken shale formation there has helped propel a surge in US flaring since 2007. As is often the case, many companies find it cheaper to burn off gas that emerges in new oil fields, rather than build pipelines and facilities to collect it.

Following Japan's nuclear disaster last year there are fears the US may be heading for a nuclear catastrophe of its own.

Their owners want to keep them running, but others - from environmentalists to mainstream politicians - are deeply concerned.

The investigation focuses on the Pacific Gas & Electric nuclear facility at Diablo Canyon and two others, Vermont Yankee and Indian Point in New York.

West Coast oil refiners cut gasoline production after a fire earlier this year at a Washington state refinery, creating a supply shortage that’s left West Coast motorists now paying very high prices at a time when the rest of the nation is seeing prices plunge, according to an influential senator and a veteran energy analyst.

In a letter being sent to regulators on Thursday and obtained by McClatchy, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., calls on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate refinery operators Alon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Tesoro and BP following the shutdown of BP’s Cherry Point refinery in Washington State.

Rewind almost 60 years and the government had a similar problem: how to persuade the public to support its ambition to become a nuclear nation only nine years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

According to one Japanese university professor, that ambition was achieved with help from an unlikely source: the CIA.