A turtle rescued from the Kalamazoo River is cleaned. Click to embiggen. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.)

Just under two years ago, on July 25 at 6 p.m., a pipeline carrying tar-sands oil split open in southern Michigan. Over the course of the next 17 hours, diluted bitumen -- a particularly dense form of petroleum -- spilled into the Kalamazoo River and a tributary. Estimates of the amount that spilled started at 819,000 gallons and went up, eventually topping 1,000,000. The spill made nearby residents sick: headaches, nausea, breathing difficulties. Many birds fared far worse.

It was the worst onshore spill in American history. And the entire thing was completely preventable.

Today, the National Transportation Safety Board released the results of its investigation into the spill. The San Francisco Chronicle summarizes:

Enbridge Inc. knew in 2005 that its pipeline near Marshall, a city 95 miles west of Detroit, was cracked and corroded, but it didn't perform excavations that ultimately might have prevented the rupture, NTSB investigators told the five-member board at a meeting in Washington.

Investigators also faulted Enbridge control center personnel for twice pumping more oil into the line after the spill began and failing to discover what had happened for more than 17 hours, when an employee of a natural gas company notified them.

This is a picture of a bullet train that Japan was using in the '70s. (Photo by Ben Salter.)

Continuing the recent trend of zombies in the news: High-speed rail in America isn't dead after all.

This morning, Amtrak released a proposal for a $151 billion high-speed line in the Northeast. From Talking Points Memo:

The proposed high-speed rail line would travel at top speeds of 220 miles-per-hour in some sections and be able to deliver passengers from Washington, D.C. to Boston in a little over 3 hours.

Travel times between other major Northeastern cities would be shortened even more markedly, with travel times between New York and Boston or New York and Washington, D.C. down to 94 minutes, and a little over a half-hour between New York and Philadelphia.

(Please note: Amtrak's existing high-speed rail, the Acela, is "high speed" in the sense that driving kind of fast is "high speed.")

Probably don't need to tell you to hold off on buying tickets. If Congress signs off, the soonest the line would be operational would be 2025. Also, the "if" in the preceding sentence is not only a big if, it is the Guinness Book of World Records' record-holder for biggest if in the history of ifs. If it were a building, it would be Jupiter, if Jupiter were a building.

ProPublica has been at the forefront of examining the possible negative impacts of fracking. Yesterday, they posted a story titled, "New Study: Fluids From Marcellus Shale Likely Seeping Into PA Drinking Water." Here's how it starts:

New research has concluded that salty, mineral-rich fluids deep beneath Pennsylvania's natural gas fields are likely seeping upward thousands of feet into drinking water supplies.

Though the fluids were natural and not the byproduct of drilling or hydraulic fracturing, the finding further stokes the red-hot controversy over fracking in the Marcellus Shale, suggesting that drilling waste and chemicals could migrate in ways previously thought to be impossible.

The study, conducted by scientists at Duke University and California State Polytechnic University at Pomona and released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tested drinking water wells and aquifers across Northeastern Pennsylvania. Researchers found that, in some cases, the water had mixed with brine that closely matched brine thought to be from the Marcellus Shale or areas close to it.

At FuelFix, an energy news site associated with the Houston Chronicle, a story from the Associated Press is titled, "New research shows no Marcellus Shale pollution."

New research on Marcellus Shale gas drilling in Pennsylvania may only add fuel to the debate over whether the industry poses long-term threats to drinking water.

A paper published on Monday by Duke University researchers found that gas drilling in northeastern Pennsylvania did not contaminate nearby drinking water wells with salty water, which is a byproduct of the drilling.

“These results reinforce our earlier work showing no evidence of brine contamination from shale gas exploration,” said Robert Jackson, director of Duke’s Center on Global Change and a co-author of the paper, which appeared online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So which is it? Is fracking polluting groundwater or not?

Drought-stricken Texas. (Photo by Jeff Reid.)

Students of science and agronomy are likely aware that there's a link between water and food production. (It's true; look it up.) Last week, John Upton articulated what this means for agriculture in the wake of recent heat and drought across the United States. In short: less food.

The question then becomes: What happens to food production if the United States is experiencing regular or permanent droughts?

ThinkProgress' Joe Romm looked at the likelihood of such a scenario in a post over the weekend. An excerpt:

[T]he Earth has warmed only a bit more than 1°F since the catastrophic Dust Bowl — and we are poised to warm an astounding 9-11°F this century if we stay anywhere near our current greenhouse gas emissions path.

Romm points to a series of studies that present a scenario in which the Southwestern United States is in a permanent drought starting in 2050. Granted, this isn't exactly the breadbasket. But one projection suggests that even in less arid areas, severe to extreme drought could occur biannually.

In February 1969, miners in West Virginia launched an illegal wildcat strike. The action halted extraction for half of the mines in the northern part of the state for days. The miners had one demand: end black lung disease.

The action worked. By the end of 1969, new policies went into effect in an effort to curb the disease, which results from the inhalation of coal dust and leads to long-term lung damage and impaired breathing. New exposure limits were set, and miners were offered regular chest X-rays and compensation for damage. Donald Rasmussen, a pulmonologist in West Virginia interviewed by NPR, has tested tens of thousands of miners over the past half-century.

"In 1969, I publicly proclaimed that the disease would go away before we learned all about it," he adds. "And I was dead wrong."

Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

The grass in this image is likely glued on. (Image by Earl Wilkerson.)

EPEAT (the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) is a national standard (funded in part by the EPA) that certifies electronic products as "environmentally preferable." Among other things, EPEAT considers energy consumption and recyclability in awarding products one of three levels of certification.

Last week, all of Apple's desktop and laptop computers were certified as EPEAT Gold. Today, none of the company's products appear on the index at all.

From the Wall Street Journal:

In order to meet the standards, recyclers need to be able to easily disassemble products, with common tools, to separate toxic components, like batteries. The standards were created jointly by manufacturers, including Apple, advocacy groups and government agencies. Frisbee says an Apple staff member told him at the end of June that the company no longer wanted Apple computers to be listed as EPEAT certified.

“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.”

IFixit.com suspects that design changes seen in the new MacBook are to blame.

A model offshore rig. (Photo by eschipul.)

Norway, the world's eighth-largest producer of oil, could cease all production later today. From France24:

Norway is hours away from the first complete shutdown of its oil industry in more than 25 years as the government holds off on breaking up a fight between striking offshore workers and employers, threatening exports from western Europe's top producer.

The strike by offshore workers over pensions is already in its third week, and a deadline for government intervention ahead of a planned midnight lockout of all offshore staff looms.

"The companies are now ready to close down production on the Norwegian continental shelf if the government doesn't intervene before midnight," Eli Ane Nedreskaar, a spokeswoman for the Norwegian oil industry association (OLF), told Reuters.

The sticking point is a request from offshore workers to lower their retirement age to 62. An existing strike has already cut the country's output by 13 percent.

Well, it's almost the weekend again. Weekends in July: the perfect chance to get outside, head to a park, play a game of baseball.

You should not do anything of those things this weekend if you live in basically 90 percent of America.

If you live in an area marked in orange, stock up on Popsicles.

This is Weather.com's Severe Weather Alerts map. If you click through, you can see specific warnings for wherever you live. But you'll notice one thing right away: several of these United States are going to be hot.

London, during the coal-caused "Great Smog" of 1952. (Photo courtesy of Geograph.)

Germany just set a new record in solar energy production, creating 14.7 terawatt-hours of electricity over the first six months of 2012. Solar energy covered between 10 and 50 percent of the country's peak hour demand on average every day. Nice work, Germany!

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe (and also in Germany):

Demand for coal, the dirtiest fuel for making electricity, grew 3.3 percent last year in Europe while sales of less-polluting natural gas fell 2.1 percent, the steepest drop since 2009, according to a BP Plc report.

Oh man, Europe, what happened? We thought you were cool.

But even with some European Union member nations implementing efforts to increase the cost of carbon pollution, coal is still less expensive than the alternatives. And Europe has its enablers:

Cheaper coal was made possible partly by a 49 percent jump in first-quarter imports from the U.S., Energy Information Administration data show.

The fracking boom in the U.S. has led to a big drop in coal use, meaning that we're now free to export that coal to Europe.

Ha ha. Um, sorry, guys.

Photo by Jim Maragos/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

There's a reason people focus on the preservation of coral reefs. They're an oddity (animals that look and behave like plants), a beauty (see photo above), and a ecological asset (reefs are enormously diverse ecosystems). The world has thousands of reefs in various sizes and at various levels of health.

Image courtesy of NASA.

And, according to a new study, they are all at enormous risk due to climate change.

For years, researchers have examined the expected impact of global warming on the reefs. Overfishing and pollution have long been identified as stressors for coral, with some scientists arguing that those factors are more critical threats. But a new study from researchers at Florida Institute of Technology suggests that coral has been decimated by warmer waters before.

The research from doctoral student Lauren Toth and advisor Richard Aronsen, published this week in Science, involved taking core samples from reefs, boring an aluminum pipe into dead reefs off the coast of Panama (nice work if you can get it). When they extracted the samples, they were surprised to find that two-and-a-half millennia of expected growth was missing.