[Brown pelicans, recently cleaned of oil, are held in a pen in Louisiana. Their nesting season is approaching, and the birds just last year were removed from the endangered species list. Image via AP]

Perhaps because an offshore oil well is destroying the Gulf of Mexico, today President Obama will extend a hold on applications for Arctic drilling until the end of the year. Alaska lawmakers are not happy. Meanwhile, Top Kill continues. [NYT]

Today BP is trying a "top kill" to stop the oil leaking into the Gulf. The man tasked with doing it, Pat Campbell, has some words for the well: "I'm here, I'm touching you, I'm telling you you're dead."

First the company lied was wrong about how much oil was leaking into the Gulf. Now it is saying that the siphoning tube being used is recovering over 30% less oil than was previously claimed. Surprised? [Guardian, Getty]

The owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Transocean, held survivors for nearly two days after the explosion with no outside contact at all. Was it an attempt to exhaust workers so they would sign away the company's liability?

Good news: BP says that the siphoning tube is starting to work. Bad news: The spill is heading closer to a "loop current" that would pull it into the Atlantic Ocean and up the East Coast. [WSJ, AP, Getty]

A new four-mile high cloud of ash has reportedly shot out of the the Eyjafjoll volcano in Iceland. The Institute of Earth Science said there are "no signs of the eruption ending soon." [AFP]

The company responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill wants you to know that they're working very hard to fix it. They've capped one leak! And now they're towing a concrete "dome" to the site to contain the spill.

A stormy winter has taken a toll on beaches in the Hamptons, and repair crews have worked non-stop rebuilding dunes and constructing sea walls. But this endangered bird's nesting season starts soon and crews have only until Friday to finish.

It's been 40 years since the first Earth Day, and somehow we haven't fully screwed the planet. As a favor, here is our "green" list of places that have not been totally ruined, and what you can do about it.

Birth control pills being flushed down toilets are creating a "toxic stew" that turns male fish in the Potomac River into an intersex species who carry eggs in their testes. 90% of DC's drinking water comes from the river.

Riding high on Oscar glory, the brains behind dolphin hunting documentary The Cove, along with several federal agencies, busted Santa Monica hot-spot eatery The Hump for serving endangered Sei whale meat.

This morning, an elaborate hoax briefly convinced the world that Canada was going to take the lead on carbon emissions reductions and financial aid to Africa. But... why?

The delegates at the Copenhagen climate change summit apparently don't care about the environment as much as they care about gas-guzzling limousines (1200) and private planes (140).

Supposedly eco-friendly cloth made from bamboo is in fact evil and made with toxic chemicals and you might as well wear panda-hide while driving a Humvee and shooting rockets at pretty little birdies.

Oxygen. It's a blessed, life-sustaining thing. We all need it. We all love it. And for so many years we were giving kudos to trees, whose photosynthesis takes in yucky carbon dioxide and gives us that life gas. No more!

Not surprising, but it looks like lobbyists are having homeless guys wait out lines on Capital Hill for them. This sounds like an old, unspoken trick not really worth mentioning, except CNN had someone on camera talking openly about it.

All those curly-cue planet-saving fluorescent light bulbs that Al Gore made everyone buy even though they cost $30 and cast a sickly pale glow DON'T WORK.

Barack Obama has chosen a two-term EPA head, an experimental physicist known for LASER experiments, and some woman from New Jersey to fix the environment.

The Liberation of France says an oft-noticed smell emitted by Apple's Mac Pro desktop computers is caused by a combination of toxins, including benzene, which is known to cause leukemia. The questions now have to be: What did Apple know and when did Apple know it? Posts in Apple support forums, full of Mac Pro owners complaining of the smell, indicate Apple was well-aware of how their computers smell. One owner writes, "They guy in the service center said that every Mac Pro he has set up has the smell at first, so it appears to be normal in his experience." There's no mention of benzene in the forum. Some particularly damning posts: