(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – Cutting carbon dioxide emissions won’t be cheap, but delaying action on addressing global warming will be worse, both for the environment and the Midwest economy.

By Jeff Gillies, jeffgillies@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
June 8, 2009
Even today the Great Lakes landscape is bouncing back from the glaciers that retreated 10,000 years ago.
A key question researchers recently sought to answer is whether that has anything to do with fluctuating lake levels.
Here’s how it might work: The massive ice sheets pushed down the earth’s crust like a person pressing on a basketball, said Grahame Larson, professor of geology at Michigan State University.

(MI) Detroit Free Press – The Environmental Protection Agency has given Lake Michigan Carferry, owner of the SS Badger, until 2012 to change its practices — a deadline the company says it will meet. The Badger hauls people and vehicles between Ludington and Manitowoc, Wis.

(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – Wisconsin’s path to a greener energy future is anything but a breeze. Optimism abounds that the wind power sector will create jobs and help reduce the state’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Gov. Jim Doyle’s global warming task force has recommended the state move toward getting 25% of its electricity from wind power by 2025.

(MI) Bay City Times – Michigan’s solar industry has a dirty secret: It needs a lot of coal-fired power. The process of manufacturing base materials and panels to capture electricity from the sun is energy-intensive, utility officials say.

(MI) Detroit Free Press – For roughly six decades until 1980, Fighting Island in the Detroit River was a white, desolate moonscape, 80% of it covered with 20 million cubic yards of highly acidic brine waste dumped there from a soda ash plant.

(NY) The New York Times -Swimmers were told to stay out of the water on Sunday at Coney Island and nearby Manhattan Beach because of concerns about a sewage overflow.

(MI) Muskegon Chronicle – Since the early 1990s, the environmental mess that is the former Whitehall Leather Co. tannery site and adjacent Tannery Bay has been the source of many meetings, debates, deadline delays and negotiations.

(MI) Detroit Free Press – A proposed railroad-centered development just over the Livingston County line and a similar plan for land in Howell will serve as catalysts to accelerate plans for a commuter rail line between Howell and Ann Arbor, a developer and rail officials said.

(NY) The New York Times – The federal government is spending $5 billion in stimulus money to weatherize homes across the country. That is almost as much as it has spent on weatherization since the program was created in the 1970s to cut heating bills and conserve oil for low-income people.