Campaign Director Jared Saylor and Policy & Legislation intern Adriane Underwood carry letters from more than 50,000 Earthjustice supporters who support protecting the Arctic.

On a muggy Tuesday morning, two polar bears lumbered south on 17th Street in Washington D.C. A walrus waved at drivers honking their horns. A sandpiper flapped its wings as it passed food trucks and coffee shops. And, 40 representatives from more than a dozen environmental groups wore bright blue shirts emblazoned with the logo “SAVE THE ARCTIC.”

Paws, wings, shirts and all, they headed towards the White House with a few things to tell the president. Joined by a few hundred activists, they gathered to deliver more than one million comments from concerned citizens, asking President Obama to stop plans by Shell Oil to drill in the remote, fragile waters of the Arctic Ocean this summer.

Photo courtesy of matthewven (flickr.com)

Investigation sets flame to chemical retardant claims
Flame retardants have long been heralded as life-saving chemicals that slow fires, but a recent investigative series by the Chicago Tribune has found that the toxic chemicals, which are found in American babies at the highest recorded levels among infants in the world, both may not be safe or prevent fire deaths. Among the discoveries that the Tribune uncovered includes a decades-long campaign of deception by the flame retardant industry that has loaded American homes with furniture treated with chemicals linked to cancer, neurological deficits, developmental problems and impaired fertility. Read the entire series here.

Air pollution protecting humans from climate change
Air pollution may be clogging up your lungs and burning your eyes, but at least it’s keeping global warming in check, reports E: The Environmental Magazine. According to research by Harvard scientists, for many decades the eastern half of the U.S. stayed cooler than the rest of the country thanks to a thick cloud of particulates that reflected incoming sunlight, helping to mitigate rising temperatures. But as levels of industrial pollution have decreased, warming has increased, inadvertently creating a perverse incentive to pollute the air. Despite the benefits, the researchers were quick to point out that they weren’t against improving air quality. After all, air pollutants like particulate matter from coal-fired power plants can embed themselves deep into the lungs and cause serious health problems, no matter how breezy the weather stays. Find out how Earthjustice is working to enforce Clean Air Act regulations to both clean up the air and reduce greenhouse gases.

As evidenced in North Carolina and other states burdened by coal ash ponds, waiting for states to effectively regulate coal ash is a lose-lose situation.

The Progress Energy plant in Asheville, NC operates two of the nation's tallest high-hazard coal-ash ponds. “High-hazard” means that if either of the pond’s decades-old earthen dams were to break, loss of life would be likely. In Asheville, such a break would completely swamp the French Broad River and Interstate 26.

Absent a dam break, these unlined ponds unfortunately still pose tremendous threats, releasing dangerous chemicals into the area’s groundwater, river and air. The people of North Carolina are tired of being exposed to toxic coal ash, and on World Water Day last March, more than 200 North Carolinians joined together for a “Clean Water, Not Coal Ash” rally against this pollution. On Coal River videographer Adams Wood captured the essence of this event in the accompanying video:

A 129-car BNSF coal train going through White Rock, B.C. (Michael Chu)

Warren Buffett is a famous gazillionaire who owns a railroad company known as BNSF Railway. BNSF Railway operates trains that transport coal from Montana and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin to shipping ports on the coast of British Columbia. The coal that is shipped via Buffett’s railway to the B.C. coast eventually gets put on big boats and sent across the Pacific to China where it is burned in poorly regulated coal power plants. These poorly regulated coal power plants emit enormous amounts of pollution that harm human health and exacerbate climate change.

All sounds pretty crummy, eh?

Fortunately, a brave group of Canadians aren’t intimidated. British Columbians for Climate Action has planned a coal protest for May 5 in White Rock, B.C. That’s where Buffett’s BNSF trains travel en route to the coal export facility at Westshore Terminals near Roberts Bank, B.C. The Canadian activists explain their upcoming action:

We're doing this because we have to. The science is solid: within the decade, if we don't work hard we are going to run out of time to avoid runaway global warming. It's not enough anymore just to go to rallies, write letters, and shut off our lights for an hour once a year. We're aware of what is at stake, and we have a moral obligation to do our best to stop the things that are destroying the planet.

Smog makes some kids sing the blues when "School's Out" (the memorable Alice Cooper tune)

“School’s out for summer!”

When I was growing up, Alice Cooper’s 1972 hit usually infiltrated my head sometime around the beginning of May, looped incessantly, and hit a feverish crescendo in the few minutes before the final bell released us to summer break. Now, many years later, a very different line completes the couplet in my head.

“Ozone is a bummer!”

A lead smelter in Missouri.
(Kbh3rd / Wikimedia)

We all know the danger that resides in lead-laden paint chips peeling off the walls of old homes. It’s well understood that lead is poisonous and, even in small doses, can harm brain function and cause learning disabilities in children. Lead also is associated with impairment of the cardiovascular, reproductive, kidney and immune systems of adults.

That's why a USA Today investigation documenting the high amounts of lead children are exposed to in several communities across the nation is so alarming. But more on that later.

In early April, Earthjustice filed a legal action on behalf of five national and local environmental groups seeking to clean up toxic lead pollution from facilities known as secondary lead smelters. These facilities, also known as battery recyclers, extract and process lead from scrap material and old batteries, exposing communities to lead, cadmium, arsenic and other toxic air pollutants. The case involves the amount of toxic air pollution going into the air in more than a dozen communities around the U.S.

The four lower Snake River dams keep salmon from prime habitat in the snowmelt waters of Idaho.

In a recent video interview, federal judge James A. Redden said four dams on the lower Snake River should go. As he explained, it’s easier to take the dams out than it was to put them in and the change is needed for salmon to survive. This is the same judge who rejected three different weak federal plans which were supposed to protect endangered Snake and Columbia River salmon from the extensive harm caused by hydroelectric dams.

Although Judge Redden stepped down last year as the judge handling the long-running salmon and dams litigation, his views carry considerable weight. Over the past decade he has read more, heard more, and weighed the alternatives and consequences of this controversy more than anyone in the region. Earthjustice has represented the fishing and conservation interests in court before Judge Redden since the mid-1990s.

Judge Redden told Idaho Public Television reporter Aaron Kunz, “I think we need to take those dams down … And I’ve never ordered them you know—or tried to order them that you’ve gotta take those dams down. But I have urged them to do some work on those dams … and they have.”

680,000 comments, being hand-delivered to the EPA. Earthjustice Legislative Representative Sarah Saylor (left) carries more than 50,000 comments from Earthjustice supporters.

When you've got food poisoning, what's the last thing on earth you want? A heaping plate of the offending dish, right? Well—new, dirty coal plants are to the planet what shrimp scampi is to a roiling belly.

Industrial carbon pollution from coal plants is making us sick, driving climate change, and intensifying the smog-filled air that triggers asthma attacks in children and seniors. But in late March, the Environmental Protection Agency aimed to settle stomachs when it released clean air standards to curb this dangerous pollution from new plants.

Already, 680,000 people have submitted public comments in support of these precedent-setting protections. The comments were delivered directly to the EPA earlier today, but do not fear if you haven't weighed in yet. We're just getting started.

The 2008 coal ash spill in Kingston, TN, motivated the EPA to propose the first ever federal rules regarding safe disposal of coal ash in 2010. (TVA)

The New York Times reported over the weekend that Common Cause, a nonprofit watchdog group, was using thousands of documents it received to bolster a claim that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) violates its nonprofit status by practicing in state and federal lobbying. ALEC, which has been in the news lately, is a corporate funded conservative group composed of lobbyists and elected officials that often drafts and votes on legislative language on a variety of issues that undermine the health and safety of the American public. Their initiatives include measures to weaken labor and environmental laws, and most notoriously, "Stand Your Ground" laws, such as the one being used as a defense in the murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.

It should come as no surprise then that ALEC also drafted and adopted a resolution pertaining to relaxed federal protections for coal ash.

Currently, no federal coal ash safeguards exist. A 2008 coal ash spill in Kingston, TN, motivated the EPA to propose the first ever federal rules regarding safe disposal of coal ash in 2010. After a lengthy public hearing process, those rules are still pending final approval.

The Grand Canyon.

We’re in!

Judge Martone of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona today granted our motion to intervene to defend the Department of the Interior’s decision to ban new uranium mining claims for 20 years across 1 million acres of public lands adjacent to the Grand Canyon.

Today’s order – read it here – means we’ll have a seat in the courtroom to protect the life-giving waters and deer, elk, condors and other wildlife found adjacent to America’s iconic National Park from an ill-considered legal attack by a uranium prospector.