Cruise ship docked in Washington

Washington cruise ships dump on Canadian waters
It turns out that cruise ships subject to ship pollution standards in Alaska and Washington State have found a way to cruise around the new rules by dumping their waste in nearby Canada, a practice that's currently legal thanks to a patchwork of inconsistent and lax international cruise pollution regulations. Earthjustice is working to curtail the rude and un-neighborly practice, which mucks up the ocean and harms marine life.

New Nike ad has enviro activists kicking and screaming
A new Nike promotional ad featuring a West Virginia University football player in front of a mountaintop removal mine has ticked off environmentalists, who argue that the ad is endorsing a destructive form of strip mining. The WVU athletic department disagrees, saying that the ad is meant to honor the victims of the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in W. Virginia last April, yet that explosion occurred in an underground mine, while the ad denotes a surface mine. The devil's in the details.

Knowledge is king, and now we know more about the extent of damage coal ash sites across the country are causing to our drinking water. A new report issued today by Earthjustice, the Environmental Integrity Project and  Sierra Club offers data that documents water contaminated with arsenic and other heavy metals at 39 coal ash dumps in 21 states. The report released today builds on a similar report released in February by Earthjustice and EIP that found an additional 31 coal ash dump sites. Combined with the 67 sites the EPA already knows have contaminated water supplies, the total number of documented coal ash dumps that have contaminated water supplies climbs to 137 sites in 34 states.

The timing couldn't be better. Next Monday kicks off the first of seven public hearings the EPA is holding through September across the country on its proposal to regulate coal ash. The report released today sends a clear message: coal ash sites contaminate water supplies with arsenic and other dangerous heavy metals and we need federally enforceable safeguards to protect against this toxic threat.

The report authors dug through gigabytes of water quality monitoring data from state agencies across the country to pull together today's findings. The findings are unnerving:

<Update 8/19: The chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment said today that BP gets a failing grade for its cleanup efforts in the Gulf. He also castigated federal authorities for grossly underestimating how much oil remains from the BP spill.>

<Update 8/19: Quoting Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researchers, The Washington Post reports that a 21-mile plume of oil stretches underwater from the BP oil spill site in the Gulf. A similar report was put out by The New York Times.>

<Update 8/19: An oceanographer, from the Florida university whose scientists report that most oil from the Gulf spill still remains in the Gulf, is expected to tell a House subcommittee today that the federal government has underestimated impacts of that oil.>

Although initially slow to rush into Gulf waters and lead the clean-up of BP's oil spill, President Obama and his agencies are showing no hesitancy in rushing to clean up the public relations image of what that oil is doing to Gulf fishing and recreation. In the last few days, we've seen:

* Obama swimming along the Florida shoreline with his daughter to show just how clean and fun it is.

* EPA announcing that ¾'s of the 200 million gallons of crude have evaporated into thin air or into the tummies of hungry microbes.

* Various government authorities insisting that Gulf seafood is safe to eat—an insistence that accompanies the opening of shrimp season off the Louisiana coast on Monday.

Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—many scientists aren't jumping on the Happy-Days-Are-Here-Again bandwagon.

St. John's River algae infestation - Courtesy Jacksonville University

Florida's St. John's River is fouled this summer with green slime, and dead fish are washing up on its shores. Every time it rains, nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen poison this river and others all over Florida. The poison comes from sewage, animal manure and fertilizer.

It is a crisis big enough that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agreed in November 2009 to set the first-ever legal limits for nutrient poisoning.

But, now, polluters are trying to derail efforts to clean up Florida's waters. They arrived enmasse recently at Congress, where they met with numerous federal lawmakers to try getting a rider put on the federal appropriations bill. The rider would, unbelievably, prevent EPA from setting important new limits on nutrient pollution. The rider may be introduced in a few weeks.