October 19 News: TransCanada Shuts Down Keystone Pipeline Due To ‘Possible Safety Issues’

First published on ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which was recently named one of Time magazine’s Top 25 blogs of 2010.

TransCanada Corp. has temporarily shut down its existing 2,100-mile Keystone pipeline after tests showed possible safety issues, a federal agency said Thursday. [Associated Press]

An undersea camera confirms that an oil slick discovered in the Gulf of Mexico came from a 100-ton device on the seafloor that BP had used several weeks after the 2010 oil spill in a failed attempt to cap its runaway Macondo well, the U.S. Coast Guard  said Thursday. [Fuel Fix]

Coal has improbably risen to become one of the top issues of the presidential campaign, with dueling ads about coal in swing states and attacks by each candidate on the other’s position. [Wall Street Journal]

Washington Post Wonk Blog takes a look back at how Obama and John McCain talked about this issue in the previous election. The tone was strikingly different. [Washington Post]

Although electric vehicles have not taken off as some had hoped, there are now enough of them on the road that some behavioral differences between drivers of all-electric models and plug-in hybrids have become evident, in addition to those between E.V. users and owners of conventional models. [New York Times]

Next week, Newsweek will reveal its fourth annual Green Rankings. First, however, The Daily Beast is ranking the greenest legislators across America—to identify the ecofriendly politicians to parallel these ecofriendly companies. [Daily Beast]

United Nations Certified Emission Reduction credits for December declined to a record as greenhouse-gas cutting projects in developing countries boosted their requests for supply near all-time highs. [Businessweek]

A California businessman chartered a fishing boat in July, loaded it with 100 tons of iron dust and cruised through Pacific waters off western Canada, spewing his cargo into the sea in an ecological experiment that has outraged scientists and government officials. [New York Times]

Since the summer, forecasters have called for El Nino to develop this fall, but so far, it has defied such predictions. El Nino’s baffling behavior has left NOAA forecasters scratching their heads and unable to make a solid call about what kind of winter to expect over large parts of the United States. [Weather Gang]

Why did Earth take five million years to recover from the Permian extinction, versus a few hundred thousand after other mass extinctions? Apparently, it was just too darned hot. [National Geographic]