What's New List Serve Post Display

ARB Newsclips for June 13, 2012. This is a service of the
California Air Resources Board’s Office of Communications.  You
may need to sign in or register with individual websites to view
some of the following news articles.

AIR POLLUTION

Dispute centers on dust pollution. Los Angeles and the Owens
Valley are at war over water, with the city trying to rework a
historic agreement aimed at stopping massive dust storms that
have besieged the eastern Sierra Nevada since L.A. opened an
aqueduct 99 years ago that drained Owens Lake.  The L.A.
Department of Water and Power has spent $1.2 billion in
accordance with a 1997 agreement to combat the powder-fine dust
from a 40-square-mile area of the dry Owens Lake bed. By
introducing vegetation, gravel and flooding, the DWP has reduced
particle air pollution by 90 percent.  Posted. 
http://www.fresnobee.com/2012/06/13/2871698/dispute-centers-on-dust-pollution.html#storylink=misearch

CLIMATE CHANGE

Mitt Romney worked to combat climate change as governor. His
gubernatorial record on the environment has little in common with
his positions in the presidential race, those who knew him in
Massachusetts say. Washington — During his first 18 months as
governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney spent considerable time
hammering out a sweeping climate change plan to reduce the
state's greenhouse gas emissions. As staff briefed him on
possible measures and environmentalists pressed him to act,
Romney frequently repeated a central thought, people at those
meetings said: That climate change is occurring…Posted.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-energy-20120613,0,1068265.story

Climate Change Will Boost Wildfires Across North America And
Europe, Scientists Report. Climate change will make U.S. western
wildfires, like those now raging in parts of Colorado and New
Mexico, more frequent over the next 30 years, researchers
reported on Tuesday. More broadly, almost all of North America
and most of Europe will see wildfires more often by the year
2100, the scientists wrote in the journal Ecosphere, a
publication of the Ecological Society of America. Using
satellite-based fire records and 16 different climate change
models…Posted.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/12/climate-change-wildfires_n_1588741.html

Measuring the 'Other' Greenhouse Gases: New Method for Evaluating
Short-Lived Pollutants.  New research from Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found that levels of
methane—a potent greenhouse gas emitted from many man-made
sources, such as coal mines, landfills and livestock ranches—are
at least one-and-a-half times higher in California than
previously estimated.  Posted. 
http://eponline.com/articles/2012/06/13/measuring-the-other-greenhouse-gases-new-method-for-evaluating-short-lived-pollutants.aspx

DIESEL EMISSIONS

WHO's cancer agency: Diesel fumes cause cancer.  Diesel fumes
cause cancer, the World Health Organization's cancer agency
declared Tuesday, a ruling it said could make exhaust as
important a public health threat as secondhand smoke.  The risk
of getting cancer from diesel fumes is small, but since so many
people breathe in the fumes in some way, the science panel said
raising the status of diesel exhaust to carcinogen from "probable
carcinogen" was an important shift.  "It's on the same order of
magnitude as passive smoking," said Kurt Straif, director of the
IARC department that evaluates cancer risks. "This could be
another big push for countries to clean up exhaust from diesel
engines."  Posted.  
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gceB6aX6tJwU2J13jhSoFkkVuwyw?docId=832650ee86054088bd5563f3ef8056cf

AP Newsbreak:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-diesel-engine-exhaust-linked-with-risk-of-lung-cancer-20120612,0,7726895.story
http://www.vcstar.com/news/2012/jun/12/whos-cancer-agency-diesel-fumes-cause-cancer/
 
Diesel engine exhaust linked to increased risk of lung cancer.
The world’s most prestigious cancer research group on Tuesday
classified diesel engine exhaust as carcinogenic to humans and
concluded that exposure is associated with increased risk of lung
cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer — part of
the World Health Organization — made the announcement at a
meeting in France, finding, in part, “that diesel exhaust is a
cause of lung cancer, and also noted a positive association with
an increased risk of bladder cancer. Posted.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-diesel-engine-exhaust-linked-with-risk-of-lung-cancer-20120612,0,7726895.story
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/06/12/international/i090357D02.DTL

Court Rules for Navistar Competitors in Clean Air Case.  In a
victory for Navistar's competitors, a federal court said that the
Environmental Protection Agency should not have allowed Navistar
to pay penalties on engines that don't meet clean air standards. 
Yesterday's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit means that Navistar can no longer use
nonconformance penalties as a way to keep selling engines.  The
immediate impact of the ruling is not clear.  Posted. 
http://www.truckinginfo.com/news/news-detail.asp?news_id=77221

FUELS

Cuomo Plan Would Limit Gas Drilling to a Few Counties in New
York.  Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration is pursuing a plan
to limit the controversial drilling method known as hydraulic
fracturing to portions of several struggling New York counties
along the border with Pennsylvania, and to permit it only in
communities that express support for the technology.  The plan,
described by a senior official at the State Department of
Environmental Conservation and others with knowledge of the
administration’s strategy, would limit drilling to the deepest
areas of the Marcellus Shale rock formation, at least for the
next several years, in an effort to reduce the risk of
groundwater contamination.  Posted. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/nyregion/hydrofracking-under-cuomo-plan-would-be-restricted-to-a-few-counties.html?_r=2

US coal use falling fast; utilities switch to gas. America is
shoveling coal to the sidelines. The fuel that powered the U.S.
from the industrial revolution into the iPhone era is being
pushed aside as utilities switch to cleaner and cheaper
alternatives. The share of U.S. electricity that comes from coal
is forecast to fall below 40 percent for the year — the lowest
level since the government began collecting this data in 1949.
Four years ago, it was 50 percent. By the end of this decade, it
is likely to be near 30 percent. Posted.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/06/12/national/a130620D53.DTL&type=printable

VEHICLES

EV sales in Central and Eastern Europe to exceed 60,000 -
assuming incentives are fully in place.  The study focuses on
market forecasts for sales of electric vehicles (EVs) as well as
charging station installations in 2012-2017 in ten countries of
the Central and Eastern European region, including Bulgaria,
Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,
Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. With a population of more than
100 million people, this region is believed to witness even
stronger growth in e-mobility after 2017 as costs of EVs are
anticipated to decrease.  Posted. 
http://cars21.com/news/view/4716

HIGH-SPEED RAIL 

Brown admin tried to add CEQA measure to Calif. budget bill –
sources. The California governor's office yesterday sought
unsuccessfully to add to the state's budget bill language
protecting high-speed rail from the full force of environmental
law, green groups and others said. Leaders in both chambers
objected to the provision from Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown's
administration, observers said. The California Senate opposed
including in the spending legislation any language on high-speed
rail. Posted. http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire/print/2012/06/13/8 
BY SUBSCRIPTION ONLY

MISCELLANEOUS

Dirty soil and diabetes: Anniston's toxic legacy. Rev. Thomas
Long doesn't have any neighbors on Montrose Avenue in Anniston,
Alabama. Everyone is gone, abandoning the neighborhood after
widespread chemical contamination was discovered there in the
1990s. Long didn't want to move; he had lived in the same house
for all but one of his 64 years. Now he is stuck. Stuck on a
street with no neighbors. Stuck with a property he's convinced is
unclean. Stuck with an extraordinary load of chemicals in his
body. And stuck with diabetes. As the EPA's cleanup of Anniston
stretches into its eighth year, new research has linked the
residents' PCBs exposure to diabetes. Posted.
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2012/pollution-poverty-people-of-color-day-6-diabetes

OPINIONS

EDITORIAL: EPA’s scary-air sniffers.  Americans on their way to
work or school may soon be reaching for a new high-tech device as
they head out the door - a personal air-quality monitor. That’s
the vision of bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) who are trying to develop a portable sniffer that measures
the body’s reactions to pollution in the air. It’s bound to take
fear-mongering to a new level.  On June 6, the EPA announced “My
Air, My Health Challenge” in a call for inventors to compete for
cash prizes in building the best air monitors. Posted. 
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/12/epas-scary-air-sniffers/

Are women greener than men?  Women rank values linked to
environmental concern as more important than men do and see
environmentalism as important to protecting themselves and their
families. When it comes to caring for the environment, is there a
gender difference between men and women? A growing body of social
science research suggests yes. Women consistently rank values
strongly linked to environmental concern — things such as
altruism, personal responsibility and empathy — as more important
than men do. They also say they see environmentalism as important
to protecting themselves and their families. Posted.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-polakovic-gender-and-the-environment-20120613,0,2816430.story

BLOGS

A State-by-State Climate Map. The Heat Is On. U.S. Temperature
Trends. If those New England seasons feel far warmer these days
than they were 20 years ago, it’s because they are. So are
Florida’s, Arizona’s, and Washington State’s. A new interactive
map released by the group Climate Central summarizes the average
temperatures of each of the 48 contiguous United States for the
past 100 years. By clicking across the country (try it on the map
above), you can see that lately, temperatures are trending up no
matter where you live. But if you look closely, the story is more
complicated than a general upswing in temperatures. Posted.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/a-state-by-state-climate-map/