As Congress settles in to debate how to control the primary greenhouse gas contributor, carbon dioxide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced today it’s going after sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from power plants.
The EPA is proposing regulations that would reduce air pollution, specifically smog and ozone that contribute to asthma and heart attacks, from these gases across a broad swath of the U.S.
Tags: · Clean Air Act, EPA, nitrogen oxide, Ozone, pollution, power plant, Sulfur
Here’s one more reason to bemoan the spread of kudzu throughout the southeastern United States: When the ubiquitous “vine that ate the South” isn’t gobbling up landscapes and devastating ecosystems, it also is adding to ozone pollution, a new report says.
In the May 17 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researcher John Hickman and colleagues (who worked together at Stony Brook University) concluded that kudzu is able to fix atmospheric nitrogen at a high rate, potentially altering the nitrogen cycle. Hickman, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, compared nitrogen cycling and nitrogen oxide fluxes from both invaded and unaffected soils.
Tags: · Air Pollution, Earth Institute at Columbia University, invasive species, isoprene, kudzu, nitrogen cycling, nitrogen oxide, ozone pollution, volatile organic compounds
Barbara Kessler
Andrew Winston
Danielle Nierenberg
Anthony Swift