Environmental Protection Agency Archives

TINY TOWN A THREAT? Chicken, Alaska Focus of Armed Task Force Raid

Photo Credit: Dave Bezaire & Susi Havens-Bezaire

Some miners in Alaska want the feds to start digging for answers.

A task force including members of 10 state and federal law enforcement agencies descended on a gold mine in the tiny town of Chicken (pop. 17) last month, in what locals described as a raid.

“Imagine coming up to your diggings, only to see agents swarming over it like ants, wearing full body armor, with jackets that say “POLICE” emblazoned on them, and all packing side arms,” gold miner C.R. Hammond told the Alaska Dispatch. “How would you have felt? You would be wondering, ‘My God, what have I done now?”

A spokesman for the federal Environmental Protection Agency did not deny that agents wore body armor and carried guns, but said it was not a “raid.”

“The ongoing investigation conducted by the AK Environmental Crimes Task Force — consisting of EPA, ADEC, USFWS, ADFG, BLM, Coast Guard, FBI, Alaska State Troopers, NOAA, & US Park Service — did not result in a raid,” the statement read. “The Task Force members involved in the investigation during the week of August 19, 2013, were EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division & Bureau of Land Management’s Office of Law Enforcement & Security, in cooperation with ADEC’s Environmental Crimes Unit.”

EPA Encouraging Schools to Set-Up Snitch Patrols to Report Energy Wasters

October 8, 2012/10 Comments/in Featured, News /by Penny Starr

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is celebrating Children’s Health Month this October by providing information and health tips on its website, including the importance of energy efficiency in schools.

On the website page is a link to a 26-page EPA report entitled, “Sensible Steps to Healthier School Environment.” In the report’s chapter on Energy Efficiency, the EPA presents a box with items to help establish “Energy Efficiency Opportunities for Schools.”

One of the items in the box reads, “Educate students and staff about how their behaviors affect energy use. Some schools have created student energy patrols to monitor and inform others when energy is wasted.”

For example, the Arizona Public School’s website provides information for setting up energy patrols. The website states “emphasize social action through environmental education gives students a chance to do something about environmental problems instead of just hearing about them.”

The APS website says that patrol members can be provided with ID tags, vests and clipboards. Their responsibilities include leaving reminders to better conserve energy in rooms they find that have the lights on but are unoccupied.

Signs of imminent food crisis lead US farmers to request suspension of ethanol quotas

August 2, 2012/0 Comments/in Featured, News /by Suzanne Goldenberg

Photo credit: CraneStation

The Obama administration was urged on Monday to stop diverting grain to gas amid warnings of an “imminent food crisis” caused by America’s drought.

US government forecasts of a 4% rise in food prices for US consumers because of the drought have sharpened criticism of supports for producing fuel from corn-based ethanol.

Meanwhile, research published last week by the New England Complex Systems Institute warned of an “imminent food crisis” because of the diversion of corn stocks to ethanol.

“Necsi has warned for months that misguided food-to-ethanol conversion programs and rampant commodity speculation have created a food price bubble, leading to an inevitable spike in prices by 2013. Now it appears the “crop shock” will arrive even sooner due to drought, unless measures to curb ethanol production and rein in speculators are adopted immediately,” the researchers warned.

In the latest move, the country’s meat, dairy and poultry producers called on the Environmental Protection Agency to suspend this year’s quotas for corn ethanol production.

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