Walk quickly by and you might miss the coffin-sized fissure on John Yearwood’s sprawling Williamson County ranch, now ground zero in the newest effort to gut the Endangered Species Act. The small limestone cave is home, maybe, to a seldom-seen, spider-like creature with a scary-movie name: the Bone Cave harvestman. The harvestman is known to live only in Travis and Williamson counties, and that fact is key to Yearwood and his allies’ revival of a legal strategy that has been rebuffed by courts in the past — including a case a little over a decade ago involving the same species.  But with th [node:read-more:link]

An oil pipeline spill that contaminated a tributary of the Little Missouri River last December is now estimated to be three times larger than originally thought, making it one of the most significant pipeline spills in North Dakota history.Belle Fourche Pipeline Co. reports about 12,615 barrels, or 529,830 gallons, of oil spilled as a result of a pipeline leak the company now believes started on Dec. 1 and was discovered by a landowner on Dec. [node:read-more:link]

Peobody's debt-cutting plan will leave taxpayers facing a bigger bill for cleaning up nearly two dozen hazardous sites primarily in the central U.S., including a swath of northeast Oklahoma that once produced lead ore for bullets in both World Wars. The 22 properties will be shed by miner Peabody Energy Corp. when it leaves bankruptcy with a plan that shifts cleanup costs to the government. [node:read-more:link]

The latest analysis of national and global agricultural trends from the University of Missouri indicates continued financial pressure on United States farm sector. Good news in the report includes a modest recovery in grain prices in 2017. The March 2017 U.S. Baseline Briefing Book by economists at the University of Missouri provides projections for agricultural and biofuel markets, based on market information available in January. The report’s macroeconomic assumptions are based primarily on forecasts by IHS Global Insight, which suggest moderate growth in the U.S. [node:read-more:link]

Governer Hutchinson signed Arkansas House Bill 1665 adding a civil cause of action to the state's code that permits individuals to sue over the unauthorized access to non-public areas of commercial property. [node:read-more:link]

California opened another front in its fight against global warming on Thursday, launching a new strategy for slashing so-called super pollutants that have an outsize impact on the climate. The plan targets emissions such as methane from cow manure, black carbon from diesel exhaust and hydrofluorocarbons from refrigerators. Regulators at the Air Resources Board, which approved the strategy, and other government agencies will now need to write detailed rules for achieving the reductions. [node:read-more:link]

The broadband privacy rules created by the FCC last year and vigorously debated last night are in danger after the Senate voted to repeal them this morning. Among other things, the rules required ISPs to obtain consumers’ permission in order to use certain sensitive data like browsing history that they obtain through their service. Sounds like a bad idea, right? It is. I detailed why in a post last night, and plenty of Senators, including Massachusetts’ Ed Markey, who led the creation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, vociferously opposed the resolution. [node:read-more:link]

The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services says it will wind down its response against flesh-eating maggots that threaten small, endangered deer in a national wildlife refuge in the Florida Keys. The department said in a news release that the check point for New World screwworms in Key Largo will close at 7 p.m. Saturday. This comes after more than five months of aggressive response efforts and no new screwworm infestations found since January 10. New World screwworm can eat livestock and pets alive, and once cost the U.S. livestock industry millions every year. [node:read-more:link]

Even amid Brazil’s pungent stew of recent big corporate scandals, the latest is particularly stomach-turning. On Friday March 17th, in time for a traditional weekend churrasco, or barbecue, the federal police accused some of the country’s biggest meat producers of bribing health inspectors to turn a blind eye to grubby practices. These include repackaging beef past its sell-by date, making turkey ham out of soyabeans rather than actual birds and overuse of potentially harmful additives. [node:read-more:link]

The authors argue a carbon roadmap, driven by a simple rule of thumb or "carbon law" of halving emissions every decade, could catalyse disruptive innovation. Such a "carbon law," based on Moore's Law in the computer industry, applies to cities, nations and industrial sectors. The authors say fossil-fuel emissions should peak by 2020 at the latest and fall to around zero by 2050 to meet the UN's Paris Agreement's climate goal of limiting the global temperature rise to "well below 2°C" from preindustrial times. [node:read-more:link]