Oil companies: They're kind of like pet cats, it turns out. They don't care what you want, they're only out for themselves, and they love to bury their waste wherever they feel like it. And thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, they're able to bury it via aquifer injection at hundreds of sites across the country where the EPA says the water is not "reasonably expected" to be used for drinking.

In some of America's most drought-stricken communities, this practice is polluting what little drinkable water there is left. A new report from ProPublica digs into the EPA's spotty record on issuing exemption permits for dumping in the nation's precious aquifers -- starting with the fact that the EPA itself hasn't kept great records on which permits it has issued at all.

Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation's drinking water. ...

Though hundreds of exemptions are for lower-quality water of questionable use, many allow grantees to contaminate water so pure it would barely need filtration, or that is treatable using modern technology.

The EPA is only supposed to issue exemptions if aquifers are too remote, too dirty, or too deep to supply affordable drinking water. Applicants must persuade the government that the water is not being used as drinking water and that it never will be.

Sometimes, however, the agency has issued permits for portions of reservoirs that are in use, assuming contaminants will stay within the finite area exempted.

Dead fish don't lie -- except for a lot of the ones served in restaurants.

A new study from conservation group Oceana found that 39 percent of New York restaurant fish DNA-tested by the group was mislabeled. That, combined with past studies of Los Angeles (55 percent), Boston (48 percent), and Miami (31 percent), paints a sad and even scary picture of what diners can expect when they sit down at American seafood restaurants.

Mislabeled fish was found at a range of eateries from low- to high-priced, and at every sushi spot tested. The New York Times reports:

In some cases, cheaper types of fish were substituted for expensive species. In others, fish that consumers have been urged to avoid because stocks are depleted, putting the species or a fishery at risk, was identified as a type of fish that is not threatened. Although such mislabeling violates laws protecting consumers, it is hard to detect.

Some of the findings present public health concerns. Thirteen types of fish, including tilapia and tilefish, were falsely identified as red snapper. Tilefish contains such high mercury levels that the federal Food and Drug Administration advises women who are pregnant or nursing and young children not to eat it.

Ninety-four percent of fish sold as white tuna was not tuna at all but in many cases a fish known as snake mackerel, or escolar, which contains a toxin that can cause severe diarrhea if more than a few ounces of meat are ingested.

We've reported before about the Keystone XL blockade activists, but the East Texans who own the land on which the pipeline is being constructed have been some of the project's most vocal, if less-often-pepper-sprayed, detractors. And today they actually kind of won for a change.

A Texas judge has ordered TransCanada to halt work for two weeks on the pipeline, following a lawsuit from landowner Michael Bishop claiming that TransCanada lied about transporting crude oil when it's really hauling tar-sands oil.

TransCanada's all, "Oil is oil, what's the big deal?" But the judge didn't see it that way. From the Associated Press:

Tar sands oil — or diluted bitumen — does not meet the definition as outlined in Texas and federal statutory codes which define crude oil as “liquid hydrocarbons extracted from the earth at atmospheric temperatures,” Bishop said. When tar sands are extracted in Alberta, Canada, the material is almost a solid and “has to be heated and diluted in order to even be transmitted,” he told The Associated Press exclusively.

“They lied to the American people,” Bishop said.

Texas County Court at Law Judge Jack Sinz signed a temporary restraining order and injunction Friday, saying there was sufficient cause to halt work until a hearing Dec. 19. The two-week injunction went into effect Tuesday after Michael Bishop, the landowner, posted bond.

David Dodson, a spokesman for TransCanada, said courts have already ruled that tar sands are a form of crude oil. He said the injunction will not delay the project.

Whiny kids and Republicans have a lot in common. For example, they both complained enough to weaken still relatively new USDA rules requiring school lunches to be more healthy. Some kids said they were still hungry after eating the new lunches, and Republican legislators (who often act like they’re cranky due to low blood sugar) said the government was meddling too much in local affairs, so now the USDA is lifting the cap on the amount of meats and grains permitted in school meals.

In a letter to Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) [PDF], USDA head Tom Vilsack said the meat and grain limits had been "the top operational challenge" for states and schools in implementing the new standards, in part because they had a hard time locating the "right-sized" meats, and apparently cutting the meats into the right sizes is just too much work.

From the Associated Press:

Stop appealing to climate-change deniers with science and moral arguments, folks -- it ain't gonna work. Just get them worrying about their own health and the "purity" of their local environment. At least that's how I'm reading this new study from UC Berkeley published today in the journal Psychological Science.

From the press release:

A UC Berkeley study has found that while people who identified themselves as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than their liberal counterparts, their motivation increased significantly when they read articles that stressed the need to “protect the purity of the environment” and were shown such repellant images as a person drinking dirty water, a forest filled with garbage, and a city under a cloud of smog ...

“These findings offer the prospect of pro-environmental persuasion across party lines,” said Robb Willer, a UC Berkeley social psychologist and coauthor of the study. “Reaching out to conservatives in a respectful and persuasive way is critical, because large numbers of Americans will need to support significant environment reforms if we are going to deal effectively with climate change, in particular.”

It is the best of times and the worst of times for rural America. On the one hand, they're the only ones among us who've been getting richer lately. Thanks, fracking!

From USA Today:

The nation's oil and gas boom is driving up income so fast in a few hundred small towns and rural areas that it's shifting prosperity to the nation's heartland, a USA TODAY analysis of government data shows. ...

Inflation-adjusted income is up 3.8% per person since 2007 for the 51 million in small cities, towns and rural areas.

The energy boom and strong farm prices have reversed, at least temporarily, a long-term trend of money flowing to cities. Last year, small places saw a 3% growth in income per person vs. 1.8% in urban areas.

Small-town prosperity is most noticeable in North Dakota, now the nation's No. 2 oil-producing state. Six of the top 10 counties are above the state's Bakken oil field.

"Give us a little shale, and we'll show some pretty good income growth, too," says Bill Connors, president of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce in Idaho.

Connors' comment leads us to the other hand: Rural areas without energy reserves are suffering. Across the country, poverty rates are higher in rural areas than in urban areas, according to the USDA. About half of rural counties have lost population over the last four years, and that's led to a loss of political clout as well. According to the Associated Press and TV news exit polls, rural voters accounted for only 14 percent of the Nov. 6 electorate (and more than 60 percent of them went for Mitt Romney).

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, formerly the Democratic governor of Iowa, told a Farm Journal forum last week that rural America is "becoming less and less relevant." From the Associated Press:

True story: My grandmother built her California house entirely from redwood. It's a really nice house! But it makes me pretty uncomfortable to be inside the place with its massive beams made of ancient, dead trees when we've got only 5 percent of old-growth redwood forest left standing today. And as the climate keeps heating up, those trees will be subject to new dangers -- and new potential for rebirth further north.

According to new research published in the journal Science, the California redwoods, American pines, Australian mountain ash trees, and other living giants are in danger of being lost forever if we don't change how we treat them.

Just as large-bodied animals such as elephants, tigers, and cetaceans have declined drastically in many parts of the world, a growing body of evidence suggests that large old trees could be equally imperiled.

From The Bangkok Post:

The study showed that trees were not only dying en masse in forest fires, but were also perishing at 10 times the normal rate in non-fire years. The study said it appeared to be down to a combination of rapid climate change causing drought and high temperatures, as well as rampant logging and agricultural land clearing.

"It is a very, very disturbing trend," said Bill Laurance of James Cook University.

"We are talking about the loss of the biggest living organisms on the planet, of the largest flowering plants on the planet, of organisms that play a key role in regulating and enriching our world."

Large old trees play critical ecological roles, providing nesting or sheltering cavities for up to 30 percent of all birds and animals in some ecosystems.

Some people are now taking action to save the remaining redwoods and repopulate West Coast forests with new-old trees. In Santa Cruz, activists are trying to raise millions to purchase a section of old-growth forest. And this week in Oregon, the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive began planting 250 clones from 28 of California's biggest, oldest redwoods and sequoias on the southern Oregon coast. From the Associated Press:

A company that actively dissuades its own customers from buying any stuff and transparently tracks its own environmental failings -- and still turns a profit selling clothes. No, this isn't a weird dream. It's fleece-'n-flannel purveyor Patagonia, which has built a brand, and corresponding loyalty, around sustainable, built-to-last goods, resulting in $400 million in annual revenue. It even recycles its products that you've worn out.

From Fast Company Co.Create:

Patagonia makes some of the best, and most expensive outdoor gear in the world, but the company’s mission is bigger than simply maximizing profit. The mission is: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”

That would be an easy pursuit if Patagonia didn’t care about running a great business. But therein lies the lesson. Patagonia has found a way to marry good business with its brand promise. According to Patagonia’s Director of Environmental Strategy, Jill Dumain, “If I wanted to make the most money possible, I would invest in environmentally responsible supply chains … these are the best years in our company’s history.”

Those kids today, amirite? What with their video games and their Facebooks and their grassroots organizing to create sociopolitical change. 350.org's campaign to create pressure on universities to divest from fossil fuel companies is not just rolling -- it's snowballing.

From Inside Climate News:

The goal is to turn global warming action into the moral issue of this generation.

"Bottom line, for a college or university, you do not want your institution to be on the wrong side of this issue," said Stephen Mulkey, president of Unity College in Maine.

Unity became the first college to authorize divestment using 350.org's guidelines last month. "We realized that investing in fossil fuels was an unethical position, especially considering our focus on environmental issues," Mulkey said.

That point, that fossil fuels companies are inherently unethical, is where the campaign derives its real power. From The New York Times:

Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.

But that comparison might not be the most apt. First, the student apartheid movement didn't start and finish in the 1980s -- it was a movement of the '50s, '60s, and '70s first. It also didn't really work like this.

"The divestment movement against apartheid was not aimed directly at the South African government -- it was divestment from companies that were based in South Africa and companies that were doing business in South Africa," says City University of New York historian Angus Johnston. "The idea was you would divest from companies that were doing business in South Africa to put pressure on them to pull out, which would then create not only an economic crisis in the country but also a cultural crisis. If white South Africans couldn't get McDonald's and Coca-Cola and Mercedes cars, that would press the white people of South Africa to sort of reassess the goodies they were getting from apartheid."

"That's a different sort of pressure. It's much more similar to the Israel divestment thing," he says.

The campaign for fossil fuel divestment, says Johnston, has much more in common with the campaign for tobacco divestment.

There are 52 percent more winter farmers markets operating in the U.S. this year compared to last, the Department of Agriculture announced this week. Winter markets now make up a larger share of farmers market sales throughout the year, even if they're not quite as well stocked with delicious goodies. (I miss you, summer tomatoes.)

But winter's nice too! Roasty chestnuts and hot apple cider? Yes please! Oh, and I guess I'll take that kale too.