Elizabeth Shogren

Part 4 of a four-part series, Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities

Jeani Thomson has been pleading with New York state officials for more than 30 years to protect her neighborhood from the foul-smelling "blue fog" that settles in her yard. She has long suspected the source is an industrial facility about a mile from her house called Tonawanda Coke.

Part 1 of a four-part series, Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities

The system Congress set up 21 years ago to clean up toxic air pollution still leaves many communities exposed to risky concentrations of benzene, formaldehyde, mercury and many other hazardous chemicals.

The Pentagon's hunt for an alternative to petroleum has turned a lowly weed and animal fat into something indistinguishable from jet fuel and now the military is trying to kick-start a new bio-fuel industry.

"To flip the line from 'Field of Dreams', if the Navy comes, they will build it," Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said in a recent speech.

The Obama administration announced Tuesday the first ever fuel efficiency standards for larger trucks and buses. New vehicles sold in 2018 will go up to 20 percent farther on a gallon of fuel. So far, the truck manufacturing industry is welcoming the rules.

Outside the White House today, the heavyweights of the truck manufacturing industry took the microphone one after another.

"We're happy to be part of this. We really appreciate the process," says Denny Slagle, CEO of Mack Trucks.

The Obama Administration is giving school districts a waiver from some mandates of the No Child Left Behind education law.

The law requires schools to reach higher goals each year, and by 2014, it demands that every student be graded proficient in reading and math. The Obama administration, which has repeatedly called on Congress to rewrite the legislation, says the law is overly punitive.

In an announcement on Monday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan opened the door for states to avoid the penalties and deadlines of the current No Child Left Behind Law.

Automakers and the White House have reached agreement on a new fuel economy standard of 54.5 mpg for cars and light trucks, sources tell NPR. The new standard would be phased in beginning with model year 2017 and fully implemented by 2025. The president is expected to formally announce the agreement tomorrow.

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected any day now to tighten the standard for how much ozone is safe to breathe, but the level of ozone that scientists say is safe doesn't sit well with industry. The agency decision is sitting at the White House, awaiting approval.

The EPA is redoing the ozone standard set under President George W. Bush. The Bush administration's EPA ignored the advice of its own panel of outside scientific advisers. It set the standard for a healthy level of ozone in the air at 75 parts per billion.

The Environmental Protection Agency sent a strong message Thursday to power plants that burn coal. It's time to clean up dirty exhausts that travel long distances, and 75 percent of Americans will breathe healthier air as a result.

The new EPA transport rule is designed to clean up the pollution that blows from power plants into other states. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says it's about fairness.

The Environmental Protection Agency has become a target of House Republicans and of GOP presidential hopefuls. They say its rules are job killers. A new White House report finds air pollution rules from the EPA cost far more than other government regulations. But they also result in far more benefits than other government mandates.

A lot of adult environmentalists have been trying for years to focus attention on tropical rain forests in southeast Asia, but it took two teenagers to get the issue on the front page of a national newspaper and on the network news.

Four years ago, Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva started studying orangutans for a Girl Scouts project. What they learned inspired them to start a campaign to raise awareness of the damage that palm plantations are causing the great apes.

Massive stores of natural gas that lie underneath big portions of the United States offer a cleaner source of electricity to a country that relies heavily on coal, but producing all that gas also can pump lots of pollution into the air.

Environmentalists have been quietly grumbling about the Obama administration for months. Now one of the country's most prominent conservationists — former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt — is retaking the public stage to scold President Obama.

Within hours of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Glenn DaGian was on the phone.

He had retired a year earlier after working with BP and Amoco for 30 years. He wanted back in the game.

"Every day thereafter, for about a week, I kept saying, do you want my help, do you want my help?" he says.

DaGian watched from the sidelines as BP executives declared it was not their accident, blamed their contractors and made the company look arrogant and callous. The company's response has become a textbook example of how not to do crisis management.

On a coastal marsh south of New Orleans, oil still saturates a 30-foot-wide stretch. Where hip-high grass should be, the oil has formed a hard, dark mat. If you dig though that crust, you find a thick, oozy layer of oil.

"It hasn't weathered or degraded much since it came ashore in early June," says scientist Scott Zengel, a contractor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is overseeing the marsh survey crews.