TV News LIES

A pioneer in cleaning up toxic messes, Thomas Schruben long suspected major oil companies of being paid twice for dealing with leaks from underground fuel storage tanks - once from government funds and again, secretly, from insurance companies.

Schruben, a detail-oriented Maryland environmental engineer who helped draft government pollution rules going back 30 years, looked for a lawyer to help ferret out what he believed could in some cases be fraud. He found a partner in Dennis Pantazis, a buoyant, mustachioed son of Greek immigrants in Alabama known for bringing environmental and civil rights cases.

"Together we started unraveling the mystery," Schruben said.

Climate change is likely to be a factor in the extreme weather that has hit much of the UK in recent months, the Met Office's chief scientist has said.

Dame Julia Slingo said the variable UK climate meant there was "no definitive answer" to what caused the storms. "But all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change," she added.

"There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events."

There's been a surge in earthquakes in the U.S. over the last few years. In Texas, there are 10 times the number of earthquakes now than just a few years ago.

Scientists say it's likely linked to the boom in oil and gas activity, meaning that people who never felt the ground shake are starting to.

Here's how Pat Jones of Snyder, Texas, describes the earthquake that struck her town in 2010: "It just sounded like some car hit the back of our house. We got up and checked around and we didn't see anything or hear anything else."

Environmentalists and residents of North Carolina and Virginia are anxiously waiting for toxicity test results from the Dan River, where tens of thousands of tons of coal ash spilled earlier this week. Danville's city manager has released a statement saying that while preliminary findings indicate the area drinking water is safe, they await final confirmation. North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources has yet to provide an official determination, but people around the Dan River report that the spill was having visible and adverse effects.

The spill originated from a 27-acre pond of coal ash and slurry — the waste product of burning coal — at a defunct Duke Energy power plant along the Dan River in Eden, N.C.

Clayton Williams, the 1990 Republican gubernatorial candidate in Texas, once said about rape that, "as long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

Obviously, that was an incredibly insane and ignorant comment. Fast-forward 24 years, and people are using that same insane rationale with the Keystone XL pipeline.

They're saying that as long as it's inevitable, we should just accept it and learn to love it.

And they're also saying that America is a fossil fuel dependent nation and that the Keystone pipeline will help lower gas prices in America and make us more energy independent.

America's oil and gas rush is depleting water supplies in the driest and most drought-prone areas of the country, from Texas to California, new research has found.

Of the nearly 40,000 oil and gas wells drilled since 2011, three-quarters were located in areas where water is scarce, and 55% were in areas experiencing drought, the report by the Ceres investor network found.

Fracking those wells used 97bn gallons of water, raising new concerns about unforeseen costs of America's energy rush.

The ubiquitous shallow icy lakes that dominate Alaska's Arctic coastal plain have undergone a significant change in recent decades.

These lakes, many of which are no more than 3m deep, melt earlier in the season and retain open water conditions for much longer. And 20 years of satellite radar also now show that far fewer will freeze right through to the bottom in winter.

The results of the space-borne survey are published in The Cryosphere.

Crews continued to work Friday to stop natural gas flowing from a drilling rig off the Louisiana coast, and the Coast Guard said workers had managed to cut the flow in half.
Officials lost control of the rig Thursday, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. No injuries or pollution have been reported.

BSEE said most crew members were evacuated from the rig, which was drilling in 262 feet of water about 108 miles southwest of Lafayette.

The rig operator is EnVen Energy Ventures of Metairie, La.