The Environment in Focus with Tom Pelton

President Obama pledged to take action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution during his recent State of the Union address, and now is being pressured by protesters to deny approval for a tar sands oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. Meanwhile, in Maryland, Governor O'Malley is again arguing for state legislation to help subsidize the construction of what could be America's first offshore wind farm.

A Massachusetts company has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for permission to market the world's first genetically engineered food animal, the AquaAdvantage Salmon, which would combine the DNA of three different species of fish. It would grow twice as fast as natural salmon. But some critics are fighting to stop "the frankenfish" (shown in rear, next to an Atlantic salmon.)

As the Maryland General Assembly debates whether to impose a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas, a new study adds fuel to an already explosive debate over the climate impact of "fracking." Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that between 4 percent and 9 percent of natural gas can leak into the atmosphere during extraction. These leaks could reduce or eliminate the fuel's advantage over coal as a "clean" fuel, from a climate perspective.

Coyotes, which are native to the West and Midwest, over the last three decades have been moving into Maryland and the East and multiplying in suburban and even urban environments like Baltimo