Environment

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With an escalating trade war threatening to drive already low commodity prices and farm income even lower, could bioplastics be part of a sorely needed rescue mission?

A meeting scheduled by the Food and Drug Administration next week will offer a window into the debate over who should regulate the fast-growing lab-grown meat industry, which uses animal cells to produce meat grown outside the animals.

The House and Senate Agriculture committees faced the tough task of squeezing existing programs to find money to pay for other programs that the 2014 farm bill will leave unfunded when it expires Sept. 30.

Biofuel advocates blasted the Environmental Protection Agency's latest proposal to set targets for production of renewable fuels under the Renewable Fuel Standard because the agency did not try to reallocate renewable gallons left unblended when refineries were granted waivers from RFS requirements.

America's usual weather diverges from the arid U.S. West to the wet East Coast, but extreme rain events are getting more frequent, dumping more water, and this summer is a case in point.

Traditional petroleum-based plastics that can survive for centuries are piling ever deeper across once pristine beaches and ocean floors around the world. According to a report from the World Economic Forum and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, “the ocean is expected to contain one ton of plastic for every three tons of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight).”