The EPA’s free AIRNow app for Apple or Android phones allows users to enter a Zip Code and receive the pollutant and ozone levels for more than 400 cities across the country. You can also choose to check your current location.

The app gives levels for ozone and particle pollution such as automotive exhaust and an overall assessment of “good,” “moderate,” “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” “unhealthy,” “very unhealthy” and “hazardous.”

People with heart or lung conditions, children and older adults are most at risk when particle pollution, called PM 2.5, is elevated, according to the EPA. PM 2.5 measures the number of particles 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller, about 30 times smaller in diameter than the human hair. These particles come from a wide variety of sources, including motor vehicles, wood stoves and industry.

via EPA offers free apps to check air quality, UV index – – CNN.com Blogs.

Giant piles of debris from Japan’s earthquake and tsunami scar the country’s once picturesque northeast coast — and the clear-up is hamstrung by fears the rubbish may be contaminated by radiation.

Decades-worth of waste was left behind when the waters receded in March last year after claiming more than 19,000 lives.

The survivors are desperate to rebuild, but must first get rid of more than 22 million tons of rubbish — far too much for the disaster-struck region to deal with alone.

But despite appeals to national solidarity, worries over nuclear contamination from the crippled Fukushima power plant mean virtually no one elsewhere in Japan wants the debris processed near them.

via Japanese grapple with waste mountain – IOL SciTech | IOL.co.za.

via A Vast Canadian Wilderness Poised for a Uranium Boom by Ed Struzik: Yale Environment 360.

The situation in the Youngstown area has attracted extensive national and local media attention.

The Dec. 31, 2011, earthquake shook Youngstown and reportedly was felt in several states and as far away as Ontario, Canada.

The earthquake may have awakened many more citizens to the serious health and safety issues reported by those living near fracking and injection wells and to reports of drinking-water source contamination, meeting organizers said.

via Youngstown News, Meeting will address quakes, injection wells.

Coal ash holds metals that can be toxic in high doses. But the elements most widely detected at the power plants, iron and manganese, also occur naturally and aren’t considered health risks.

State regulators now have to figure out which is affecting the wells.

via Metals found in water at coal plants | CharlotteObserver.com & The Charlotte Observer Newspaper.

Tory-run Wandsworth council plans to introduce a borough-wide “smoke control area” to stop residents lighting fires in homes. A town hall report said the move was based on the “growing contribution of domestic smoke to deteriorating air quality” in the borough. According to clean air campaigners, London has the highest levels of nitrogen dioxide particles in the air of all 27 capitals cities across the European Union.

via SOUTH LONDON PRESS TODAY | NEWS | Enjoying a coal fire in Wandsworth may soon cost you £1,000 | 2012.

During a Republican presidential primary debate last June, Michele Bachmann lit into the Environmental Protection Agency, recommending it be renamed the “job-killing organization of America.” Her fellow contenders nodded in agreement, each explaining how shutting down the EPA, or at least instituting a moratorium on regulations, would be a priority in their White House.

The GOP’s desire to kill America’s chief environmental regulator hasn’t just been grist for the bizarre sideshow that is the Republican Party’s presidential primary. Over the past year, Republicans in Congress — in actual positions of power — have succeeded in massively defunding the EPA. In March, no less than nineteen riders were floated on the floor of the House of Representatives to cut the EPA’s budget. Fifteen Republican senators even proposed deleting the EPA as a cabinet-level agency. The harshest of these legislative bombs were diffused, but the cuts that prevailed added up to the largest single year drop in EPA funding since 1981 when President Reagan (“Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do”) began his unprecedented assault on the greens.

Republicans by no means have a monopoly on the “job killer” trope. Moderate, so called-Blue Dog Democratic senators like Jay Rockefeller and Ben Nelson, who hail from states with huge corporate energy interests, have co-sponsored legislation to ditch specific EPA standards. Even President Obama recently reinforced the mythology that environmental regulations are counterproductive to economic development, saying in September that his decision to rescind ozone air-quality standards was essential to the nation’s economic recovery. Both parties also are seriously pursuing environmental deregulation of industry, and cuts to the nation’s major cleanup programs.

The problem with all of this, however, is that California’s economy is now crucially dependent on environmental regulation and remediation. This is especially true in cities where decades of industrial pollution have created an environment not only toxic to human health, but also economic investment.

In fact, cleaning up toxic sites has become a fundamental driver of the Bay Area’s economy. As a result, cutting the EPA’s budget, and possibly reducing funds for the state agency responsible for partnering in cleanup, the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), will stall job creation and condemn huge swaths of urban California as economic dead zones.

But the fallacy that environmental laws kill jobs doesn’t end there. According to economists who study the impact of regulation on markets, California’s economy will likely add more jobs and develop new vibrant sectors of activity much faster if politicians embrace ambitious environmental goals. According to this emerging school of thought, environmental regulations aren’t only pivotal for human health and environmental quality, they stimulate innovation, and innovation is the key to California’s economy.

Read the rest here.

The Yasuni National Park, known as "the lungs of the world" and one of the most bio-diverse places on earth, is under threat from oil drilling. The race is on to find the funds required to develop new sustainable energy programmes that would leave the oil – and the forest – untouched.

In the early light of dawn, the Napo River, running swiftly from its headwaters in the high Andes, swirled powerfully past the bow of our motorised canoe.

Suddenly, a dense cloud of green parrots swooped down from the canopy of the jungle and in a cackling din started scooping tiny beakfuls from the exposed muddy bank.

The heavy mineral rich clay, the birds seem to know, is an antidote to the toxins present in the seeds of the forest which are a major part of their daily diets.

via BBC News – Race to save Ecuador’s ‘lungs of the world’ park.

On November 6, 2011, Bill McKibben arrived at Washington, D.C.’s, Lafayette Park to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, designed to carry oil 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. McKibben, a Vermont writer and environmentalist, had been one of 1,252 people arrested in front of the White House in August and September, protesting the same pipeline. He’d spent two nights in the district’s Central Cell Block, and now was back with thousands more people and a bold new plan.

“We can’t literally occupy the White House,” McKibben had told his fellow protesters, “so the next best thing is to surround it.” And that’s what they would do, encircle the White House in a “giant hug” to remind President Obama of his campaign promise to “end the tyranny of oil.” McKibben wasn’t sure how many people he would need to “hug” the White House, though, and was worried that he wouldn’t have enough.

via The man who crushed the Keystone XL pipeline – Boston.com.