EPA continues to carefully monitor BP’s use of dispersant in the Gulf. Dispersants are generally less toxic than oil and can help prevent some oil from impacting sensitive areas along the Gulf Coast. EPA believes BP should use as little dispersant as necessary and, on May 23, EPA directed BP to reduce dispersant usage by…

Tropical Storm Alex, the first storm of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season, continues to pick up steam as it crosses the western Gulf of Mexico. It has now reached hurricane proportions. It is fairly centered right now in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricanes are always a major weather related event especially for those who live…

The California Department of Toxic Substances has released a draft of new green chemistry regulations this week, which creates a new statewide process for evaluating the toxicity of chemicals used in consumer products and requires manufacturers to find safe alternatives to those chemicals used in their products. This is similar to other rules California has…

Life is confusing. When buying a product one has to consider whether it is green, inexpensive, actually works, and so forth and so on. There is also the life cycle of the product to consider. Is the product beneficial to the environment in the long run? For example, Marcal Manufacturing has just introduced new packaging…

For those without a green thumb, it takes several things to make plants (or algae grow). These are sunlight, nutrients, and water. In the middle of the ocean there is plenty of water and on the surface plenty of sunlight, the problem is lack of nutrients. For almost three decades, oceanographers have been puzzled by…

Earthquakes are often imagined as opening up large gaps in the land, sinking islands and the such. It is much harder in real life to see this change. NASA has recently released the first ever airborne radar images of the deformation in Earth’s surface caused by a major earthquake — the magnitude 7.2 temblor that…

High risk chemical processes are regulated by OSHA, EPA and many state agencies. Information about the releases from these processes are available from a number of sources. Sometimes the guidance on how other interested parties may participate is not always clear. The EPA has released interim guidance that would provide greater transparency in the agency’s…

The study of ancient climates and oceanic temperatures can lend clues as to how future climate changes might happen. An international team of researchers, led by the members of the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), has published studies of the evolution of Northern Pacific and Southern…

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has sent a letter to Congress in support of reinstating the old and lapsed Superfund polluter pays taxes. Superfund is the federal government’s program that investigates and cleans up the nation’s most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites. If reinstated, the Superfund tax would provide a stable, dedicated…

It all depends on where you are. When weather patterns change rainfall will increase some places and decrease in other places. What has the most impact is those river systems that many people depend on. Two of Asia’s major rivers are the the Brahmaputra and Indus river basins that descend from the Himalayas into India.…