TV News LIES

Smokey the Bear thought he smelled a fire in the woods. But as he approached the clearing and saw a giant derrick jutting out into the sky, he realized that what his nose had picked up was the scent of hydrocarbons. It was another piece of evidence that the increasingly widespread method of oil and gas extraction known as fracking was poisoning the environment that he and his human friends depend on. He decided something must be done.

At least that’s the way that artist, Occupy Wall Street veteran and environmental activist Lopi LaRoe sees it. But last week she received a letter threatening her with jail time and thousands of dollars in fines for enlisting Smokey to the anti-fracking cause.

Duke Energy and government regulators have been hiding a not-so-little secret from the people of the Carolinas. Duke’s Oconee nuclear power plant—three aged nuclear reactors 30 miles from Greenville, SC—is at risk of a meltdown should an upstream dam fail.

If that were to happen, a meltdown of all three reactors on the scale of the Fukushima meltdowns and subsequent containment failure are virtual certainties according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) documents obtained by Greenpeace.

A mid-level appeals court on today said local governments in New York can ban hydraulic fracturing and shale-gas drilling within their borders, delivering a major blow to the natural-gas industry and landowners who had sought to have the bans overturned.

The state Appellate Division ruled unanimously in favor of the Tompkins County town of Dryden and the Otsego County town of Middlefield, both of which passed zoning laws that prohibit natural-gas drilling. The rulings upheld decisions last year from a lower court.

The s

A new rule set for approval by the North Carolina Mining and Energy Commission requiring some disclosure of chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing has been withdrawn at the request of industry giant Halliburton.

The state commission had been set to vote on the new rule Friday. The standard spells out which chemicals operators must publicly disclose when drilling natural gas wells.

Something appears to be amiss at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico's food chain.

Oil buried in sediments in the shallow waters of the Gulf is triggering genetic reactions in the gills and livers of local populations of killifish, a ubiquitous prey for marine species vital to the region's economy, according to a study published this week in the review Environmental Science & Technology. Researchers linked those genetic changes to cardiovascular problems, reproductive failures, and weakened and listless offspring.

For many, the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline is about national energy strategy and global climate change. For residents of the Manchester neighborhood in Houston, it’s also about what will be processed and spewed into the air in their backyards.

Activist Doug Fahlbusch recently brought some attention to the community when he held up a sign at a Valero-sponsored golf tournament that said, “TAR SANDS SPILL. ANSWER MANCHESTER.” That protest got him carried away from the links by security guards and arrested.