Environment update

EPA delays rule on industrial emissions. The regulation to limit pollutants at power plants at major industrial facilities is suspended after protests from industry. It is the Obama administration's latest concession on the environment.

Making Sense of a Toxic World

In the 2012 campaign, environmentalists don't matter. That's the message President Obama is sending as the administration caters to smokestack and other industries.

Considering the future of Louisiana's levees. Put in place to protect land along the Mississippi, the system has also been funneling sediment from the delta, to be replaced by seawater. New Orleans could be practically an island by 2100, scientists say.

From 1932 to 2000, about 1,900 square miles of land were lost and replaced by seawater. At the current rate, scientists say, more than 500 additional square miles will be gone by 2050. By 2100, they say, New Orleans could be little more than an island.
If there's one thing environmentalists, politicians and locals like those living in Pointe-aux-Chenes agree on, this year's floods have proved that something has to change.
"Right now there's a historic flood carrying record amounts of sediment, and we have no way to capture any of it," David Muth of the National Wildlife Federation said at a conference this month in New Orleans that brought together scientists, politicians and lobbyists to discuss ways of reversing land loss. "It is ridiculous that we're sitting here and all that sediment is going past, and most of it is going to be lost."

Mississippi flooding: Let the river run. What began on the upper Missouri River in 1951 is playing out this month in the flooding of the lower Mississippi and dozens of communities in its delta.

Had we not built dams on the Missouri, had we refrained from building homes and cities on Missouri River floodplains, periodic floods would have occurred, but without the catastrophic consequences we see today. Floods would have replenished the river bottoms with alluvial silts (producing bumper crops) and deposited nutrients on the barrier islands in the gulf. Those islands, which once protected New Orleans from violent gulf storms, have vanished in the 50 years since the dams were built. This double-whammy — New Orleans vulnerable to storms from the gulf side, and the lower Mississippi and its delta vulnerable to flooding from the upstream side — can be laid at the feet of Pick-Sloan.