U.S. companies bought millions of dollars worth of stolen petroleum products from Mexico, according to Justice Department officials.

“The United States is working with the Mexican government on the theft of oil,” said Nancy Herrera, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Houston. “It’s an ongoing investigation, with one indictment so far.”

A West Virginia woman who battled mountaintop removal mining near her home has been awarded a Goldman Environmental Prize.

Maria Gunnoe has fought large coal companies since they began mining near her family’s estate. Gunnoe spent her childhood swimming and fishing in local streams, but now her house sits below a valley-fill coal waste pile.

By: Allison Winter, Patrick Reis and Ben Geman

Two decades after the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil spill haunts the Prince William Sound ecosystem, Alaskan fishing communities and the nation’s energy policy.

Shortly after midnight on March 24, 1989, the single-hulled tanker ran aground on Bligh Reef, spilling 11 million gallons of crude that soiled 1,300 miles of coastline, devastating wildlife and fisheries.

But despite years of cleanup, recovery and litigation that reached the Supreme Court — which just last year slashed a lower court’s award of punitive damages from the accident — the spill’s full impact remains unclear.

FOUR CORNERS MONUMENT — This rugged landscape of expansive mesas and towering rock formations — home to the Navajo, Hopi, Pueblo and Ute Indian tribes and a half-dozen federal monuments and parks — is poised to become an engine of electric power production for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles and other boom cities of the West.

By 2012, the Four Corners could host as many as three large coal-fired power plants generating a combined 5,300 megawatts, enough to power 4 million homes and businesses. Two of those plants would be on Navajo Nation land, burnishing the tribe’s reputation as a major regional electricity exporter.

Environmental justice activists are planning to shift a movement that has focused intensively for 25 years on fighting toxic pollution in poor communities to generating so-called green jobs for those communities.

The idea is to catch wind for the movement’s sails from a politically popular push for using renewable energy projects to boost a sagging economy and shift the nation away from fossil fuels.

“We’re focusing on spreading around the benefits of a green economy,” said Robert Verchick, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and a scholar for the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR).

Monitoring of glaciers and ice caps in Central Asia, the Tropics and in the Polar Regions needs to be urgently stepped up, scientists and the United Nations said today.

There is mounting evidence that climate change is triggering a shrinking and thinning of many glaciers world-wide which may eventually put at risk water supplies for hundreds of millions of people.

But experts are warning that data gaps exist in some vulnerable parts of the globe undermining the ability to provide precise early warning for countries and populations at risk.

A cup of coffee has a hidden cost.

If the full water requirements of a morning roast are calculated - farm irrigation, bean transportation, and the serving of the coffee - one cup requires 140 liters of water.

This notion of a product’s “water footprint” is gaining traction. Defined as the total volume of freshwater required to produce a nation’s goods and services, the tool tracks domestic water demand and the impact of consumption on water resources across the globe.

A proposal yesterday at a U.N. climate change meeting to include forests in the world carbon market pits developing countries and the G8 nations against a coalition of environmental and human rights groups.

The developing countries, which would be financially compensated for protecting forests from logging, and the G8 say the system simultaneously provides poor nations with a much-needed revenue source and prevents deforestation, which is responsible for 20 percent of global carbon emissions.

But environmental and human rights groups say the proposal would trigger a land grab that would push indigenous people out of forests, transfer land to the upper-class in developing nations at the expense of poor land owners, and flood the global carbon market, undermining world prices.

Australia must devise a program for people fleeing from neighboring islands as sea levels rise due to global warming, a leading aid organization reported Sunday.

Make Poverty History, the advocacy group that launched 2005’s Live Earth concerts, urged the Rudd administration to establish an international coalition to accept climate change refugees as their low-lying nations become uninhabitable.

Some islands are already experiencing the ill effects of rising sea levels, including salt water contamination of crops, flooding and destruction of drinking water supplies. The nation of Kiribati as well as some islands of Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands could disappear altogether.

Trailer manufacturers should be held accountable for the high levels of formaldehyde found in their products because they knew enough to be concerned, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said yesterday.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said that internal documents provided by Gulf Stream Coach Inc., the largest trailer supplier to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, proved the company knew its products contained high levels of formaldehyde and yet did nothing to inform FEMA or trailer inhabitants.

“It found pervasive formaldehyde contamination in its trailers. And it didn’t tell anyone,” Waxman said.