NOAA and its federal and state trustee partners today urged the public to provide comments on a draft plan to restore the Gulf after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The plan outlines and describes 44 proposed restoration projects, totaling approximately $627 million.

 

The plan was released by the Natural Resource Damage Assessment Trustees for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, nine federal and state agencies that act on behalf of the public to restore resources directly or indirectly harmed by oil released into the environment following the spill.

 

 

OTTAWA -- Canada’s oil spill response lacks federal leadership and isn’t prepared for disasters in high-risk areas like southern B.C., according to a federal panel.

 

The panel’s report, released Tuesday, was based on existing tanker volume, not the increased numbers of tankers involved if the Northern Gateway pipeline is built or the Kinder Morgan pipeline to Burnaby is twinned.

 

The panelists called on Ottawa to remove the cap on industry-funded compensation in the event of a massive spill, which is set at $1.3 billion.

 

 

As a result of the fracking revolution, North America has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world's largest producer of oil and gas. This, despite endless protests from environmentalists. But does drilling for natural gas really cause pollution levels to skyrocket?

 

A team of geochemistry researchers affiliated with Concordia University, l'Université du Québec à Montréal, l'Institut national de la recherche scientifique, and the GEOTOP research group has just completed the first detailed study to examine the natural quality of groundwater prior to fracking.

 

The resulting report, commissioned by the Strategic Environmental Assessment Committee on Shale Gas, provides a benchmark for naturally occurring levels of pollution. This will help scientists prove definitively whether fracking causes groundwater pollution by establishing the concentrations of methane, ethane, propane, helium and radon found in the groundwater in a location where fracking has yet to occur -- the low-lying areas surrounding the St. Lawrence River, between Montréal and Québec.

 

 

While the Oxford University Press honored "selfies" as its 2013 Word of the Year, celebrating those quickly snapped self-portraits, Merriam-Webster is taking a more academic approach to its annual linguistic spotlight.

 

The dictionary has declared "science" its 2013 Word of the Year. The honor is based on increased interest as measured by the number of people looking up a word over time. If you haven't looked it up online, here's how Merriam-Webster defines science: "knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation."