TV News LIES

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo must have winced as state environmental commissioner Joe Martens was grilled on fracking during budget hearings last week.

One legislator after another hacked at Martens, as he acknowledged that the state’s fracking health review wouldn’t be ready for “a few weeks,” despite being “critical” to an environmental impact statement that must be finished in a week.

The two key ingredients in a big snow: just cold-enough temperatures and a lot of moisture. Combine the chilled air converging on the East with the massive moisture coming from the Gulf of Mexico region and you've got the "perfect setup for a big storm," Kevin Trenberth, of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, told The Huffington Post in an email.

As Trenberth explained, the ideal temperature for a blizzard is just below freezing -- just cold enough to crystalize water into snow. Below that, the atmosphere's ability to hold moisture to create those snowflakes drops by 4 percent for every one degree Fahrenheit fall in temperature.

The Rheas ultimately decided to stay at home in North Carolina and retired in rural Lee County outside of Raleigh. What they didn’t realize is that the new home they bought sits above the Deep River Shale basin, an area potentially rich with deposits of natural gas that makes it the next likely location for fracking.

To make matters worse, because of two arcane laws known as split estates and forced pooling, they may not even have the right to say whether gas companies can drill on their property.

Last year's super drought ook a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn't slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate), used on crops engineered by Monsanto to resist it. More than 70 percent of all the the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the US is now genetically modified to withstand glyphosate.

Back in 2011, such weeds were already spreading fast. "Monsanto's 'Superweeds' Gallop Through Midwest," declared the headline of a post I wrote then. What's the word you use when an already-galloping horse speeds up? Because that's what's happening. Let's try this: "Monsanto's 'Superweeds' Stampede Through Midwest."

A week after the dumping of at least 20,000 gallons of toxic and potentially radioactive fracking waste into a storm drain that empties into a tributary of the Mahoning River in Youngstown, Ohio, by Hard Rock Excavating, state regulators have yet to disclose information about the quantity of waste and the chemicals involved.

Environmental advocates are urging the state to act quickly to prosecute the perpetrator and look beyond the one incident to take more aggressive steps to protect the state’s public health and environment from future threats.

The institute’s leadership has met with key figures in the Obama administration, which has signaled it will take aggressive action on global warming in the coming months. The president warned in his inaugural address last month that failure to act "would betray our children and future generations," and he’s expected to expand on the same theme in his State of the Union address next week.

There are four main areas of opportunity where the administration can act without involving Congress, Bianco said. The biggest impact could come by applying higher standards for carbon dioxide emissions to existing power plants – a politically dicey move that’s expected to meet with resistance from industry.