‘Environment’

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley has reiterated his call for Congress to abandon climate change legislation in order to wait for an international treaty.

The company that tried and failed to construct a coal-fired power plant in Marshalltown is contemplating giving it another try, this time with natural gas.

Of the three big issues before Congress this year — health care, cap-and-trade and banking regulation reform — U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley said that cap-and-trade will be the most controversial.
“It just seems to me that the push for cap-and-trade has slowed down very dramatically since the [U.S.] House passed it on the Friday before the [...]

Protective liners, locations restrictions and groundwater monitoring are just a few of the regulations Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources would like to see implemented by the federal government in regard to coal ash disposal. But environmentalists believe if federal officials follow Iowa’s suggestions, the public will still be at risk for contaminated groundwater supplies.

More than 75,000 postcards will be delivered to the Iowa offices of U.S. Sens. Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin today by regional electric co-op leaders who want to express their concern about potential cap-and-trade legislation.

Reversing an earlier decision, Iowa’s three public universities will begin a groundwater-monitoring program at a quarry in Waterloo that they use to dump coal ash.

Student environmental activists from Iowa State University will meet with the school’s president Oct. 2 to demand that the university’s practice of disposing toxic coal ash in an unlined quarry in Waterloo be stopped.

With Iowa’s Tom Harkin taking up the late Ted Kennedy’s HELP Committee chairmanship in the U.S. Senate, an Arkansas lawmaker is taking the gavel of the Agriculture Committee. But Iowa’s two U.S. senators say that despite the shift, Iowa’s farming interests should remain well represented in the nation’s capital.

Chipped wood debris, possibly from flood-damaged Linn County homes, will soon be used to create energy at a Wisconsin biomass facility.
The contract, approved Tuesday by the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency, states that at least 6,000 tons of chipped wood debris will be sold to Michigan-based DTE Energy Services for use in a modified [...]

The death of renowned scientist Norman Borlaug last weekend yielded a bumper crop of effusive obituaries. He was credited — almost universally — with saving billions of lives, fathering “the Green Revolution,” and changing the worldwide face of agriculture forever.
I won’t pretend to know for certain whether any of those claims are false. Borlaug clearly [...]