February 18th, 2010

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Congressmen Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) are asking for more information about the chemicals used to extract natural gas wells.

Urban gas well outside a mall in North Texas

Today, the two lawmakers sent letters to eight oil and natural gas companies requesting details of the ingredients used in hydraulic fracturing, a method of accessing natural gas deposits by blasting or fracturing the rock with a high pressure injection of water treated with chemicals.

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October 23rd, 2009

Green Right Now Reports

One could count a thousand ways humans have soiled the planet, from shearing off mountaintops to mine coal to dredging the bottom of the ocean with heavy, coral-destroying equipment.

Congress zeroed in on one needless waste stream, this past week introducing legislation in both houses to stop cruise ships from releasing untreated sewage into the ocean.

The Senate’s Clean Cruise Ship Act, proposed by Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) would extend the Clean Water Act to regulate the millions of gallons of waste water from cruise ships. The net effect would be a ban on the release of raw, untreated sewage.

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December 23rd, 2008

By Tom Kessler
Green Right Now

ExxonMobil Corporation’s pipeline subsidiary has agreed to plead guilty and pay more than $6 million in fines and other charges for a 15,000-gallon spill of diesel oil into the Mystic River from ExxonMobil’s oil terminal in Everett, Mass.

The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it had filed charges in federal court that ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of ExxonMobil Corporation, violated the criminal provisions of the Clean Water Act. The plea agreement is subject to court approval.

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December 18th, 2008

By Barbara KesslerGreen Right Now

What happens when regulation takes a holiday? Financial institutions run amok, industry encroaches on national parks, endangered wildlife is left in the lurch, and apparently, too, the nation’s water is put at risk.

This week, two Congressional leaders, Henry Waxman, (D-Calif.) and James Oberstar (D-Minn.) unveiled the results of their joint investigation into the Clean Water Act, which shows that there has been a recent, dangerous lack of enforcement of the Clean Water Act.

In a letter to President Elect Barack Obama, the two lawmakers explained that since a 2006 Supreme Court decision narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act, making it more difficult to assemble a case against clean water violators, hundreds of enforcement actions have been stalled or sidelined.
All told, the report discovered that some 500 potential clean water cases have been dropped or put on hold since the court’s ruling in Rapanos v. United States, a case that asked whether certain wetlands that empty into a river in Michigan were subject to federal clean water protections. That decline in enforcement represents roughly a halving of enforcement actions.

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