Recently in Human health and environmental impacts Category

The US Chamber of Commerce says it wants to put the science of climate change on trial. It has petitioned the US Environmental Protection Agency to hold a public hearing to weigh the evidence about the claimed impacts of climate change on human mortality, health and the environment, and on extreme weather events.

It would be the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century, reported the LA Times, quoting Chamber officials. ""It would be evolution versus creationism," said William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs.

LUST may be the sexiest name ever given to a government program. And under the federal stimulus package approved this year, the initiative is set to receive a $200 million boost.

But in what could be taken as a sign that bureaucrats indeed have a sense of humor, LUST is actually a clean enterprise devoted to fighting a dirty problem.

Spillers beware: Some oil-spill investigations may one day involve a different and perhaps better kind of chemical fingerprinting, if investigators pick up on and decide to use research done at Environment Canada.

The work shows that one particular family of molecules, bicyclic sesquiterpanes, may be better suited to identifying some oils and some refined products than families currently in use

In the age of robber barons and buccaneer capitalism, the captains of industry and the mill owners lived upwind and upstream from the pollution that poured from their factories, untroubled by bothersome regulations.

Less fortunate were the workers who lived cheek-by-jowl with the factories and mills in a miasma of poisonous pollutants. More than a century later, the CEOs of major industries might not even live in the same time zone of the facilities they run. But despite government-imposed regulations unimaginable 100 years ago, hundreds of thousands are people are still subjected to health risks from the air toxics emitted by industrial facilities. And those populations are disproportionaly minority and poor.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill into Alaska's Prince William Sound twenty years ago was a product of complacency, government and industry negligence, and human failure.

"The State of Alaska, the federal government, the oil industry - they had all become complacent," said Valdez tour boat operator Stan Stephens. "Things had been going pretty well and nobody wanted to spend money if there were no problems."

The Exxon Valdez grounded on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound nineteen years ago, causing the worst oil spill in US maritime history, but the accounts of the sheer negligence that night of Joseph Hazelwood, the tanker's captain, are still breathtaking.

The tanker was traveling outbound when Hazelwood was cleared by the Coast Guard to cross the inbound lane to less icy water. But that move put the tanker in the path of the reef, requiring a turn back into the shipping lane.

A couple of notes here on Earth Day, about morality, energy economics and going green:

Elizabeth (Chris) Mobaldi's afflictions are of biblical proportions: fatigue, headaches, bloody stools, rashes, welts, blisters, a speech disorder, pituitary tumors and a swollen gallbladder that had to be removed.

"Several times Chris said, 'something is killing me living in this house,' so we packed up and abandoned the house (in Rifle, Colorado), in 2004 after trying to sell it for years," her husband Steve told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee October 31. Chris Mobaldi's problems began within weeks after drilling operations began on property 3,000 feet from her home."We now believe the oil and gas industry is to blame," Steve Mobaldi said.