TV News LIES

Two types of ice seals joined polar bears Dec. 21 on the list of species threatened by the loss of sea ice, which scientists say reached record low levels this year due to climate warming.

Ringed seals, the main prey of polar bears, and bearded seals in the Arctic Ocean will be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced.

In 1998, activists in Austin, Texas, filed a lawsuit to protect their local aquifer from a proposed gasoline pipeline. By the time the project was built, the operator had been forced to add $60 million in safety features, including sensor cables that could detect leaks as small as 3 gallons a day. Some say the Longhorn pipeline is the safest pipeline in Texas, or perhaps the nation.

Now a much larger pipeline - the Keystone XL - is being proposed across the Ogallala/High Plains aquifer, one of the nation's most important sources of drinking and irrigation water. Yet none of the major features that protect Austin's much smaller aquifer are included in the plan. In fact, they haven't even been discussed.

The battle over allowing hydrofracking in New York has become an increasingly embittered one, as the state Department of Environmental Conservation's missteps in managing the regulatory review of fracking. Its seeming disregard of the mass of substantive comments filed on DEC's proposals has convinced most opponents that state government is pro-fracking and is unwilling to seriously address the reality of their powerful arguments for a ban.

Then, for a moment this autumn, reality seemed to have a chance. For more than a year, health experts had pummeled state government over its refusal to do a health assessment of fracking prior to authorizing it.

Actor Mark Ruffalo, an outspoken and longtime opponent of shale gas fracking who is in southwestern Pennsylvania to work on a movie, said lawsuit settlements that prevent those involved from discussing their problems are "un-American" and infringe on the public's need to know about drilling impacts that could damage human health and the environment.

During a break in shooting scenes in Washington County last week for the movie "Fair Hill Project," Mr. Ruffalo met privately with Stephanie Hallowich, a onetime anti-fracking activist. She has been silenced by a nondisclosure agreement contained in the August 2011 settlement of a civil lawsuit against Range Resources, MarkWest Energy Partners and Williams Gas/Laurel Mountain Midstream Partners, that claimed drilling operations around her family's farm in Mount Pleasant, Washington County, had harmed their health and property value.

The most important number in history is now the annual measure of carbon emissions. That number reveals humanity's steady billion-tonne by billion-tonne march to the edge of the carbon cliff, beyond which scientists warn lies a fateful fall to catastrophic climate change.

With the global total of climate-disrupting emissions likely to come in at around 52 gigatonnes (billion metric tonnes) this year, we're already at the edge, according to new research.

Proposed regulations meant to govern fracking in California would do little to protect the state's environment, wildlife, climate and public health, according to an analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity. Fracking — currently unmonitored in California — uses huge volumes of water mixed with dangerous chemicals to blast open rock formations and extract oil and gas.

Hundreds of wells have been fracked in California in recent years. Today's draft proposal by California's Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources was supposed to be the first step in explicitly regulating this controversial practice.

In late November, while other parts of New Jersey were recovering from the superstorm, the quiet town of Paulsboro was blindsided by a very unnatural disaster. A train derailed while crossing a local bridge, sending freight cars tumbling into the water below and releasing a toxic swirl of the flammable gas known as vinyl chloride, used to make PVC plastics.

In the following days, chaos ensued as residents hurriedly evacuated. Authorities struggled to manage the emergency response, leaving people confused and frustrated by a lack of official communication about hazards.

Jane Goodall, one of the world's greatest conservationists, has made an impassioned plea for a worldwide ban on the sale of ivory to prevent the extinction of the African elephant.

Her call follows the seizure in Malaysia last week of 24 tonnes of illegal ivory and a report by conservationists warning that the illegal ivory trade now threatens governments as rebel groups use the sale of tusks to fund their wars.