Climate Politics
All Stories
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Basin and Strange
The Bush administration gave the first indication yesterday of how it would work to resolve the water wars in the Klamath Basin on the Oregon-California border — and enviros immediately warned that the administration was kowtowing to farmers while giving short shrift to endangered fish. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has proposed that area farmers […]
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Mess Transit
As perhaps the most famous national park in the United States, the Grand Canyon occupies an equally vast space in our national psyche as in our national landscape. Unfortunately, it is also our national bottleneck. Each year, 5 million people flock to the park, leaving 6,000 cars to battle for 2,400 parking spaces every day […]
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This Old Coal-fired Power Plant
Even as the Bush administration works to relax clean-air regulations on coal-fired power plants, New Jersey’s biggest energy supplier agreed yesterday to spend $337 million over the next 10 years to cut emissions from two plants. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said the settlement between PSEG Power showed a “continuing commitment to enforce vigorously the […]
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Election Day Is Green Day
If the voting record is any measure, most Americans are green at heart when it comes to conservation. Last year, voters approved spending $1.7 billion for parks and open spaces, according to a tally released today by the Trust for Public Land and the Land Trust Alliance. Seventy percent of 196 local ballot measures in […]
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Coal-burning Bush
In other mining news, President Bush did not mince words about his energy plan during an address in the town of Belle, W.Va., yesterday: “We need to use coal. We got a lot of it,” he said. The president touted exploitation of domestic coal and other traditional energy resources as a way to avoid dependence […]
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Garden State, Meet the Cement State
Bad news on the environmental justice front: Poor and minority residents of Camden, N.J., aren’t having much luck with efforts to sue the state for allowing a cement factory to spew pollution in their neighborhood. The residents successfully convinced U.S. District Judge Stephen Orlofsky that the siting of the plant was discriminatory, but Orlofsky’s decision […]
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Oil the Way
California Gov. Gray Davis (D) reiterated his opposition to offshore oil drilling in his state yesterday and vowed he would fight the Bush administration all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary to stop development of 36 drilling leases granted by the federal government. Because of a moratorium imposed by the first President […]
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Fairy Fairy, Quite Contrary
The U.S. Supreme Court refused yesterday to hear a challenge to the protected status of the endangered fairy shrimp, a tiny crustacean that lives in rainwater ponds in California’s Central Valley. The decision was a boon to fans of the Endangered Species Act, but a blow to property-rights advocates, for whom the case was one […]
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A Developer’s Wet Dream
The Bush administration weakened protection for wetlands, streams, and swamps across the U.S. yesterday by making changes to the Clean Water Act, despite the objections of the U.S. EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The changes, which were proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers and approved by the White House, make it […]
