Overnight Energy: EPA chief takes aim at Obama’s environmental record.
PRUITT TAKES ON OBAMA: Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt slammed former President Obama’s environmental record on Thursday, saying he fell victim to "poor leadership" and "poor focus."
But when you look at air attainment in this country, we’re at 40 percent non-attainment right now on ozone," he said, referencing areas of the country that have failed to reduce ozone pollution levels.
Pruitt’s criticism of Obama’s environmental record comes as he faces backlash to his own policies, including Trump administration efforts to reverse Obama-era climate change and water quality regulations and proposed budget cuts that greens say would hamstring the agency’s regulatory powers.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Thursday that "the system worked as it should and all are safe" at Hanford, where the roof of a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed on Tuesday.
PENCE TO MONTANA COAL MINE: Vice President Mike Pence will campaign for Montana congressional candidate Greg Gianforte on Friday, on a trip that will also see him venture into one of the state’s coal mines.
WASHINGTON AG VOWS TO PROTECT MONUMENTS: Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) is vowing legal action against the Trump administration if the president tries to rescind national monuments within his state’s borders.
Ferguson, who grabbed national headlines by challenging Trump’s travel ban in court earlier this year, sent a letter to Zinke saying that the administration has no authority to undo or reduce the size of monument designations.
The Interior Department started accepting comments on Zinke’s review of dozens of national monument designations going back two decades, including the Hanford Reach National Monument in Washington.
Check out Thursday’s stories … -Maryland approves two offshore wind farms -Judge approves $1.2B Volkswagen settlement -Pence campaigns for Montana special election candidate -EPA chief: Obama was no ‘environmental savior’ -Workers repair hole in Washington nuclear site tunnel Please send tips and comments to Timothy Cama, tcama@thehill.com; and Devin Henry, dhenry@thehill.com.

Daikon’s $5 million Alabama water pollution payment approved.
Business cricket book Cash TV apple India Cricket Bank Ealing british festival Britain London War iphone htc Arsenal Leeds Lambeth Birmingham football Coventry Brent trailer Cardiff Manchaster United Leeds Shropshire Rupert Murdoch Sheffield Wiltshire Northumberland Wales United Kingdom Kirklees County Durham Nottingham Wirral UNITED KINGDOM ISIS radio ISIS windows events Croydon Leicester amazon Bristol Labour China Money Wakefield UK Liverpool movie Cornwall Barnet Glasgow politics Leicester Manchaster Parliament Europe Islam Gaza ipad Iran Wigan Bromley Cheshire East nokia Syria Bieber intel Wandsworth Bradford Newham Sandwell finance Liberal Democrats Mortgage Ukraine theatre Pakistan classical music Black Friday samsung Doncaster google Scotland Israel Terror Dudley Enfield sony Manchester David Cameron Diana FIFA crisis USA TUC cinema David Lammy Walmart East Riding of Yorkshire Hockey Twitter The Queen Tumblr UKIP Ebola Vladimir Putin UK Weather RSS Royal Mail hauwei Tesco Pinterest F1 Star Wars Olympics 2016 Swansea City Van Gaal Lewis Hamilton West Ham Toro Rosso Trump UEFA Tony Abbott Facebook

Editor’s note: This column was originally published in summer 2016.
This weekly column about dog training publishes on Fridays in the Steamboat Today.
Our parks and trails are increasingly polluted as this product is leached into the ground.
According to the EPA, this contaminant is as toxic to the environment as chemical and oil spills and is the number 1 cause of water pollution.
This is our only way to contain the spread of contamination to our planet.
Editor’s note: This column was originally published in summer 2016.
This weekly column about dog training publishes on Fridays in the Steamboat Today.
Our parks and trails are increasingly polluted as this product is leached into the ground.
According to the EPA, this contaminant is as toxic to the environment as chemical and oil spills and is the number 1 cause of water pollution.
This is our only way to contain the spread of contamination to our planet.

Out with the fossils and fossil fuels.
To the editor, Please exercise your power to determine our energy future, protect our only planet and foster the development of healthy, job-producing industries on your La Plata Electric Association ballot.
We love our precious world, and realize that the stakes are too high to continue on the path favored by incumbent LPEA president, Davin Montoya.
Montoya has expertise in a past when fossil fuel technology made sense.
This damage includes air and water pollution; increased respiratory problems for young and old; and severe, economy-damaging weather impacts like drought.
Montoya has opposed efforts to foster a local, job-producing energy industry.
Renewable energy prices are plummeting and will dominate the energy market within five years.
Kim Martin isn’t afraid of new clean technologies and sees their potential to stimulate our economy and protect our lives and environment.
A hard worker, Kim navigates complex policy issues well because of her many years of community service.
Kim Martin, LPEA Board in District 2!

The EPA is good for our health.
When the first Earth Day was celebrated April 22, 1970, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was a poster child for the problems the environment faced.
If ever there was a “dead” river, the Cuyahoga was it.
The EPA was established in December 1970 and following that a wide range of environmental regulations were passed by Congress, including the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (commonly called the Clean Water Act).
While people can debate how much illness has been prevented, even with regulation the health impact of current pollution is staggering.
A Cornell University 2007 study noted that about 3 million tons of toxic chemicals are released into the environment that have been shown to cause cancer, birth defects and have other health impacts.
Industries claim these regulations force them to close factories and move to countries with less stringent environmental standards.
Trying to sort out the truth is difficult because many studies funded by industry or environmental groups emphasize the costs or benefits to their advantage.
Prior to the environmental regulations put in place over the last 45 years, the health and environmental burdens of pollution were paid by individuals whose health was impacted and by the government as a whole when trying to provide essentials like clean drinking water.
Environmental regulations since 1970 basically held industries responsible for the cost of their actions.

Water Management and Water Pollution Paper Write a 750- to 1,050-word paper on water management and water pollution.
How does one affect the other?.
Water Management and Water Pollution Paper Write a 750- to 1,050-word paper on water management and water pollution.
How does one affect the other?
What form of water issues could lead to pollution?
What types of water pollution are there?
Are there specific types of soil conservation that would help reduce water pollution?
(You may use two or more related articles.)
Relate the article(s) to course topics, explain why the article(s) is of interest, indicate your agreement or disagreement, and provide reasons for your opinion.
Submit your paper to your instructor.

How did Vizakhapatnam become India’s third cleanest city?.
Visakhapatnam, a city in Andra Pradesh where WSUP has been working since 2015, was declared the third cleanest city of India – two places up from last year and a dramatic turnaround from two years ago when it was ranked 44th.
How did Vizag manage to continue to rise up the rankings?
WSUP has observed strong political leadership on the issues of sanitation and waste management, particularly from the city’s Municipal Commissioner Mr Hari Narayanan and the former Municipal Commissioner, Mr Praveen Kumar.
Rapid progress on tackling open defecation – the city was declared Open Defecation Free (ODF) in December 2016 – could not have been achieved without this leadership.
WSUP, which has provided technical assistance to the Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC) through its WSUP Advisory consulting arm, believes that the ward by ward approach to tackling open defecation was a significant factor behind the city’s success.
Ward-level coordination committees were set up to manage the work in each ward, and these in turn then engaged women’s groups to identify problematic areas, patrol so-called ‘hot-spots’ where people were defecating in the open, and promote the uptake of toilets.
Read more on the innovations behind Visakhapatnam’s achievements: Making “Citywide Manageable: A ward-by-ward approach to eliminating open defecation in Visakhaptnam, India – blog published on washfunders.org.
A ward-by-ward approach to eliminating open defecation – report published by WSUP.
Being Bold for Change in Sanitation – an article exploring how women played a leadership role in the drive to clean up the city.

Letter: Forest, water supply at risk.
The plan from the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service opens eastern reaches of the Wayne National Forest, abutting the Ohio River near Marietta and its watersheds, to industrialization.
Ohioans may recall that in May 2014, a well-head failure caused 100 barrels of drilling mud to spill into a tributary creek of the Ohio River near Beverly, Ohio, contaminating the creek with the drilling mud and crude oil.
The incident killed 70,000 fish along 5 miles of creek.
And in March 2016, a truck hauling drilling wastewater overturned in eastern Ohio, sending thousands of gallons of toxic water into a nearby creek and contaminating a drinking water reservoir in Barnesville in Belmont County.
Most recently, Energy Transfer Partners — the same Texas company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline — spilled an estimated 2 million gallons of drilling fluid from its Rover Pipeline in two separate incidents in Richland and Stark counties.
By opening national forest lands to fracking, the plan will enable wholesale industrialization of entire watersheds, including national forest land and adjacent property.
And for wildlife such as river otters, bobcats and the endangered Indiana bat, the habitat destruction and devastation caused by fracking will make their survival and recovery that much more difficult.
For that reason, a coalition of groups last week sued to block it.
Ohio’s only national forest deserves better than being bulldozed for oil industry profits.

Last Friday, nine scientists have been dismissed from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ‘s 18-person Board of Scientific Counselors—ostensibly to include more voices from regulated industries, though the scientists say their work was apolitical and did not involve regulations, as reported in The Atlantic (link is external).
Preparing response to natural Pandemics and biological terrorism are among the strategic responsibilities of the EPA scientific board, which Trump has decided to fire (at least half of them).
Behind the decision to dismiss the nine scientific counselors is Scott Pruitt, the controversial new Administrator of the EPA, appointed by Trump.
The head of the EPA has said he is not convinced carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of climate change and wants Congress to weigh in on whether CO2 should be regulated.
In the past years, Republican lawmakers have frequently criticized the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) for its recommendation that the EPA impose much stricter curbs on smog-forming ozone.
Most of the members of EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors were appointed in the second term of Obama’s mandate and expected to be kept on for another term.
However, they were not political appointees, but scientific appointees.
“Today, I was Trumped,” tweeted Robert Richardson, an ecological economist and an associate professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Community Sustainability.
By the way, on Wednesday the United States government announced that is postponing an important meeting scheduled for Tuesday to determine whether the country should or should not withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, a matter that President Donald Trump promised to decide this month.
Environment

(INDIANAPOLIS) – Indiana companies wishing to join the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s (IDEM) Environmental Stewardship Program (ESP) have until May 31st to complete and submit their applications.
Any business that is regulated by IDEM is eligible, regardless of type of business, size or complexity.
To qualify, companies must demonstrate that they have the following: Standard of environmental compliance Implemented and will maintain an environmental management system (EMS) Committed to continuous environmental improvement ESP is a statewide program that provides incentives and recognition for industrial operations that go above and beyond environmental requirements for preventing air, land and water pollution.
To become an ESP member, businesses must maintain an exemplary compliance record, certify the company has adopted and implemented an approved environmental management system, and commit to specific measures for continued improvement in their environmental performance.
ESP members must report to IDEM on their environmental initiatives every year and reapply for ESP membership every three years.
Information, including annual performance reports, is available on the IDEM website at www.idem.IN.gov/prevention/2359.htm.
About IDEM IDEM (www.idem.IN.gov) implements federal and state regulations regarding the environment.
Through compliance assistance, incentive programs and educational outreach, the agency encourages and aids businesses and citizens in protecting Hoosiers and our environment.
Have a question or comment about a news story?
Send it to comments@wbiw.com