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Company Caught Illegallyl Dumping in Pittsfield, but what did we get?

According to a story in The Lowell Sun, Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office has reached a settlement with a Burlington highway-maintenance company that "allegedly illegally dumped solid waste it cleaned from catch basins and filled wetlands. Under the terms of the settlement, Gillis Brothers Inc. will restore the damaged wetlands, pay $37,500 in civil penalties and contribute $12,500 to the Mystic River Watershed Association for the construction of a rain garden at the Beebe School in Malden."

"In addition, Gillis Brothers allegedly dumped approximately three tons of catch-basin cleanings on private property in Pittsfield."

Did Pittsfield receive anything in compensation for the illegal dumping? BEAT is investigating.

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Take Action to Stop the Tar Sands Pipeline

Take action to stop the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — which would carry oil out of Canada’s vast tar sands oil fields to Texas, where it will be refined, then burned across the globe, dealing a catastrophic blow to our chance of returning earth to a stable climate.

This project requires a permit from President Obama to start construction. He will make the decision as soon as September.

Tell President Obama: Stop the Keystone XL pipeline. Click here to sign the petition.
You can also call The White House: 202-456-1111 to register your opposition to this project.

The Alberta tar sands — the 3rd largest oil field in the world — is a carbon bomb. The difficult extraction and transportation of the tar sands oil ultimately produces up to three times the carbon emissions of traditional oil. (And extreme environmental devastation along the way.)1

The Keystone XL pipeline is the fuse to this bomb — a highway to swift consumption of this dirty, dangerous crude. As if that wasn’t enough, it poses a massive spill risk in the six states along the pipeline route, including over the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides up to 30% of our nation’s agricultural water.

We. Must. Stop. This.

Tell President Obama: Stop the Keystone XL pipeline. Click here to sign the petition.
You can also call The White House: 202-456-1111 to register your opposition to this project.

Twenty leading climate scientists recently sent a letter to President Obama urging him to deny the permit.

And right now, a massive, historic daily sit-in is occurring outside the White House. The peaceful protests began on August 20th and will continue every day until September 3rd. Hundreds of people — including CREDO’s CEO Michael Kieschnick — are joining acclaimed climate activist Bill McKibben in risking arrest outside the White House.

Yet given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comment that she was "inclined" to approve Keystone XL, there is reason to be concerned.

But President Obama still has the final word. He does not have to negotiate with Congress or industry. He can still do the right thing. We need a massive, historic show of pressure to stop this pipeline. Please sign the petition and read below for other ways to get involved.

Tell President Obama: Stop the Keystone XL pipeline. Click here to sign the petition.
You can also call The White House: 202-456-1111 to register your opposition to this project.

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41,000 Violations of the Clean Water Act?!

by Waterkeeper Alliance

We all know that coal is a filthy fossil fuel that can never be clean, but can you imagine 41,000 violations of the Clean Water Act? Unfortunately, now we all can.

Working with partners at Appalachian Voices, Upper Watauga Riverkeeper, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Kentucky Riverkeeper, and Waterkeeper Alliance has exposed three coal companies for exploiting the environment with more than 41,000 violations of the Clean Water Act in the Commonwealth of Kentucky alone. With government asleep at the wheel, Waterkeeper Alliance and our partners need to enforce the law to protect waterways and communities from reckless abandon by polluters.

Because of these abuses, on Tuesday we again provided notice to the Kentucky coal company Nally and Hamilton of our intention to sue them under the Clean Water Act for their ongoing dereliction of the law. Upon review of discharge monitoring reports submitted by this company to the state, we have identified similarities indicating that the company copied identical data in permit reports month after month rather than complying with the law by disclosing the actual results of the monitoring activities. This finding heaped an additional 5,000 new violations on an already colossal 12,000 violations previously uncovered against this company at multiple sites throughout Kentucky. Read the press release for more information.

The extraction and burning of coal devastates our environmental and human health. Irresponsible mining practices are turning communities, mountains, and woodlands throughout the country into barren wastelands. While clear-cutting the old growth forests of Appalachia, this industry is blasting our mountainsides into oblivion and bulldozing the remnants into the surrounding valleys and streams.

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Carbon Recycling: Mining the Air for Fuel

A solar energy collector towers over Rich Diver, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories. The lab’s "Sunshine to Petrol" project aims to recycle carbon dioxide into fuel with renewable energy.

Photograph courtesy Randy Montoya, Sandia National Laboratory

Marianne Lavelle
For National Geographic News
Published August 10, 2011

Recycling bottles, cans, and newspapers is on any short list of simple actions for a cleaner environment. If only it were as easy to collect and reuse carbon dioxide—that greenhouse gas waste product that the world is generating in huge volume each day by burning fossil fuels.

In fact, a handful of start-up companies and researchers are aiming to do just that.

Recycling carbon dioxide is a great deal more involved than setting out separate bins for glass, aluminum, and paper. But many scientists believe that it is not only worth the effort, but a crucial endeavor. The climate change threat to the planet is now so great, they argue, that any effort to address the problem will have to include so-called "carbon negative" technologies. That means actually sucking the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and doing something productive with it.

The idea of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal power plants or oil facilities and storing it underground has gotten plenty of attention. Several pilot projects are operating or under construction, although a major project in West Virginia was abandoned last month due to cost concerns.

There has been less focus on the idea of actually reusing or recycling CO2. But science has long known that it’s possible to recombine carbon from CO2 with hydrogen from water to make hydrocarbons—in other words, to make familiar fuels such as gasoline. The problem, ironically, has been that the process requires a lot of energy.

But pioneering researchers and entrepreneurs argue the technology is close at hand for recycling CO2 back into fuel for use in today’s engines. It might even involve technology to absorb carbon dioxide directly out of the air, instead of out of coal plant flue gas. (See related story, "Out of Thin Air: The Quest to Capture Carbon Dioxide") Instead of drilling for oil to power cars and trucks, they say, we could be pulling the ingredients to make hydrocarbons out of thin air.

"You have all this CO2—it’s nasty stuff—what are you going to do with it?" asks Byron Elton, chief executive of Carbon Sciences, a Santa Barbara, California start-up. "People are saying, ‘Compress it, hide it.’ We’re saying, ‘No, give it to us and we can turn it back into gasoline.’ "

Peter Eisenberger, a physicist who founded the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is cofounder of Global Thermostat, a company that is working on technology to capture carbon dioxide from air with the aim of recycling, not storage, in mind. "In my opinion, closing the carbon cycle and having the technology to combine CO2 and hydrogen is a wonderful future," Eisenberger says. "Imagine a future where the major inputs for fuel are water and CO2."

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