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Weigh in on NEPA

Task force takes aim at NEPA, freaks out environmentalists

Rep. Richard Pombo meets the press in April. Photo: U.S. House of Representatives. You have to want to get to Nacogdoches, a Texas town that’s not on the way to anywhere. This eastern outpost, nearly 150 miles from Houston, is the oldest town in the state, with enough lore to fill volumes. It’s the site […]

Hybrid Fidelity

Toyota plans 10 new hybrids, invites automakers to eco-summit Toyota is developing 10 new hybrid models and aims within the next few years to be selling 1 million of the gas-electric vehicles annually worldwide. That, says the company’s U.S. head, Jim Press, will mean about 600,000 new Toyota hybrids each year on American roads, including […]

Spruce Almighty

Federal judge says Bush rule change on logging illegal The Bush administration broke the law last year when it changed the rules on logging in the Pacific Northwest, a federal judge ruled this week. The Northwest Forest Plan of 1994 requires the government to survey many proposed timber sales for the presence of rare plants […]

Two Chevrons Don’t Make a Right

Chevron may have paid agents of Nigerian military to attack villagers On Jan. 3, 1999, a number of residents of Opia, Nigeria, visited a Chevron oil rig to demand compensation for fishing gear destroyed by the oil company’s operations. On Jan. 4, Nigerian military personnel attacked and burned the villages of Opia and Ikenyan, leaving […]

Author declines to make pun, citing ‘posting rules’

The Milltown Dam at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers near Missoula, Mont., will be removed, returning the rivers to their original flow by 2009, according to an agreement reached this week.

The folks over at Environmental Economics recently ran a post connecting such dam removals with cost-benefit analyses, pointing to a Time article, archived but available in PDF here.

The case of the Milltown Dam has an interesting additional layer to it, as the dam is also the largest Superfund site in the country. Toxic waste has piled up behind the dam as a result of mining in the area, to the tune of 6.6 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment. Some waste will be completely removed while the rest will remain and be controlled at the site.

Strangely enough, $5 million of the $286.5 billion highway bill will be used to finance a park at the site, according to a New York Times article this morning.

Does respect for the former help the latter?

A while ago I posted about environmentalism and the religious worldview. I'm afraid that post was overbroad and led to a discussion about whether one can be a religious environmentalist (of course one can) and, more tediously, whether religion is "good" or "evil" overall.

But I had a more specific question in mind. Let me approach it from another direction.

This week Bush came out in favor of teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution in school science classes.

I've been debating whether to post about this. This is an environmental blog. Is it an environmental issue?

I think it is, if only indirectly, if you accept the following three propositions:

Individual legislatures take up eminent domain laws

For all the hubbub about the Supreme Court's ruling in Kelo v. City of New London -- that eminent domain could be applied to cases where "economic development" was the public use in question -- the response of state legislatures has been swift. The decision did not prevent states from making their own laws regarding the scope of eminent domain, and public opposition to the ruling has been widespread and bipartisan. An article in USA Today detailed the states' responses and had this to say:

In Washington, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said his office received more calls from constituents angry about this case than it did for the Supreme Court ruling that limited displays of the Ten Commandments on public property
...
"We don't like anybody messing with our dogs, our guns, our hunting rights or trying to take property from us," says [Alabama] state Sen. Jack Biddle, a sponsor of the law.

Reasonable people largely agree about what we should be doing

There's a short-but-great exchange today in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of peak oil. You have to subscribe to read it there, but PeakOil has reprinted it in full.

It's a conversation between James Hamilton, an economist at UC San Diego (blog here), and Robert Kaufmann of Boston U's Center for Energy & Environmental Studies (what, no blog?!). Generally speaking, Kaufmann favors government intervention in markets to prepare for peak oil, and Hamilton favors letting the free market sort it out. But neither is dogmatic or shrill, and the exchange is quite enlightening, ending in a surprising degree of agreement.

Below the fold is a play-by-play.

WSJ, USA Today highlight dangers

The Wall Street Journal astounded many in the green community last week when it launched a series on toxic chemicals with an in-depth page A1 story on endocrine disruptors, which, even in teeny-tiny amounts, muck up the functioning of human bodies, according to an ever-growing body of scientific studies.

Now USA Today is getting in on the game with "Are our products our enemy?" Here, reporter Elizabeth Weise's delightfully melodramatic lead:

Like the glint of a knife in the dark, a laboratory accident in 1998 helped scientists realize that some chemicals commonly used to make life more convenient can be health hazards.

Since what they still call "the disaster" in geneticist Pat Hunt's lab, more scientists have come to suspect that, even in tiny amounts, some of the chemicals that keep our food fresh, our hair stylish, our floors shiny and our fabrics stain-free might be confusing our hormone systems and derailing fetal development.

From what I can discern, there's not much real, breaking news in these stories; rather, the real, breaking news is these stories. Which news outlet will jump on board next?