Yahoo! Picks - bringing you the best of the Web since 1995

Hazardous rankings accumulate every day on the web site for Superfund365. Cleanup costs mount. And "visualizations" of contaminants unfold like beautiful, terrifying fans.

A location deemed by the EPA as a "Superfund" location is one that has been lost to "heavily contaminated toxic waste." The team behind Superfund365 will visit a different Superfund site every day for a year and present that catastrophe's chemical makeup on the Web. We wrote about the endeavor several weeks ago. Now, we check in with Brooke Singer, the director and producer of the project, to find out how it's going...

Hey, Brooke. Tell us how Superfund365 came about.

For a little over a year now I have been working on a documentary with cinematographer Brian Rigney Hubbard about the EPA and the aftermath of 9/11 in New York City. Specifically, we are looking at the extent of toxic contamination and the federal response (or lack thereof).

The health consequences of WTC dust are now being reported and New York representatives are pushing for legislation to pay for adequate health care, both short and long term, for the first responders and residents of Lower Manhattan. We have been examining a slightly different angle, which includes the internal debates and struggles post-9/11 inside the EPA, the agency charged with handling the environmental consequences of a national terrorist attack.

The agency was by no means unified behind the head administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, who stated just seven days after the WTC collapse that the air was safe to breathe and life could resume as normal in Lower Manhattan. For example, Robert J. Martin, the former National Ombudsman of the EPA, described to us in an interview how several people within the EPA were discussing declaring all of Lower Manhattan a Superfund site after 9/11...

Inquiries by EPA employees into exactly how the EPA should respond to the catastrophic environmental dimension of the WTC collapse were prematurely halted when Whitman made her statement that everything was OK.

After our interview with Martin, I did a lot of research into Superfund. I knew that it was quite serious to say that Lower Manhattan should have been declared a Superfund site… and I wanted to know exactly what that meant. Superfund365 is the result of that research. The documentary process is rather lengthy and launching shorter projects along the way keeps me charged and engaged. We have also released a video short called "800 Steps Apart" that highlights another portion of our research. Read the full profile...

This "updated environmentalist's guide" from The Sierra Club provides brief profiles of the globe's largest oil and gas companies and ranks them according to their actions. From Citgo to Sunoco, each conglomerate comes under scrutiny for its "black marks," stance on global warming, and green initiatives. Some of the "green" details surprised us: ExxonMobil has donated more than $1 million to saving tigers. Shell leads the world in distributing biofuels. And BP no longer lobbies to open up the Arctic reserve. But the list of "black" details makes for one long, sorry tale of spilt oil, violations of emissions caps, associations with brutal governments, and at least one deadly pipeline explosion. Yet, as long as we drive cars that gulp fossil fuels, we need these firms. Knowing that, it doesn't hurt to have a clear understanding of their corporate record. Maybe it will help to determine where you fill up next time your car needs gas.

If the Earth had lungs, an x-ray of them would resemble that of a chronic smoker. Using data from the World Factbook and the United Nations, this site by designer David Bleja elegantly contrasts the globe's real-time dioxide emission levels with each country's birth and death rates. A deep red color lights up to show countries currently emitting 1,000 tones of C0₂. All the usual industrial nations are there, such as the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, India, and much of Western Europe. Small golden suns highlight a recent birth, while brown circles note a death. In the left corner, you'll see a tally of how many humans have come into the world and how many have left it since you've been watching, as well as how much C0₂ has escaped into the atmosphere. The data may not be pretty, but the presentation is stylish and smart. And it may make you think before you take another puff from that tailpipe.