TV News LIES

Lost in the uproar over silica sand mining is a serious threat to Minnesota’s environmental-review procedures with potentially far-reaching implications. And it appears no one in state government or our congressional delegation is taking this threat seriously.

In the historic Mississippi River town of Wabasha, a clever and aggressive Canadian sand company found a way to flout Minnesota’s environmental-review measures. They leased land from a railroad and then claimed exemption from state and local review, using the railroad’s federal right of pre-emption over state and local zoning laws. This longstanding privilege basically says that state and local governments cannot restrict a railroad’s right to operate in interstate commerce.

Climate change may have reached the point of no return last month.

CO2 levels in the atmosphere topped 400 parts per million on May 19, for the first time since the Pleistocene era, over 2.5 million years ago. President Barack Obama’s historic speech on climate change today highlights his growing focus on this issue for his second term.

Climate scientists have long regarded that 400 number as the symbolic threshold. One step beyond, and it would be virtually impossible to put the brake on human-generated climate change. The bad news escalated last week when the International Energy Agency reported that global emissions of carbon dioxide rose 1.4 percent in 2012, the largest annual increase on record.

The Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it has noted a rise in radioactive tritium in sea water within the port at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The density of tritium in samples of sea water doubled in the past 10 days to a record 1,100 Becquerels per liter, an indication contaminated ground water may be seeping into the Pacific Ocean, the company reported Monday.

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Elevated levels of methane and other stray gases have been found in drinking water near natural gas wells in Pennsylvania's gas-rich Marcellus shale region, according to new research. In the case of methane, concentrations were six times higher in some drinking water found within one kilometer of drilling operations.

"The bottom line is strong evidence for gas leaking into drinking water in some cases," Robert Jackson, an environmental scientist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., told NBC News. "We think the likeliest explanation is leaky wells," he added.

Photographs show Iceland has broken a two-year ban on whale hunting, the environmental group Greenpeace charged Wednesday.

"We've just received anonymous photographs showing Iceland has broken the moratorium on commercial whaling, again," Greenpeace said in a Twitter message. The group urged people to share the images "to help expose Iceland's bloody secret."

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An anti-fracking demonstration attracted more than 2,000 activists to the eastern side of the Capitol at midday Monday. Pop singer Natalie Merchant led members of the crowd in a rewritten rendition of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land."

The chorus: "New York is your land, New York is my land/From the Southern Tier to the Catskill Mountains/From the Susquehanna to the Hudson Valley/New York was made to be frack-free."