Climate Politics
All Stories
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Refuge-nix
Six GOP senators are throwing a wrench in the Bush administration’s plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. The six — Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, John McCain of Arizona, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, and Mike DeWine of Ohio — announced last […]
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An INS project threatens Southern California lands
On a sunny afternoon in Southern California, a Border Patrol agent watched as a man climbed the metal fence that divides the beach between the U.S. and Mexico. When the man dropped onto U.S. sand, the agent yelled, and the man’s friends hauled him back over to the other side of the fence. The fence […]
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The Bye Sierras
The management of California’s public forests will change radically if U.S. Forest Service Regional Forester Jack Blackwell gets his way. This week, Blackwell proposed allowing timber companies to cut more medium-sized trees from 11 million acres of forestlands in the Sierra Nevadas. The Sierras were heavily logged throughout the 1980s, destroying crucial habitat for species. […]
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Mass-ive Attack
Massachusetts, Maine, and Connecticut will sue the U.S. EPA for violating clean air laws and imperiling the health of citizens by failing to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, the states’ attorneys general announced yesterday. In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, the attorneys general will argue that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels should be regulated under the Clean […]
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Sweet Home, Alabama
A federal appeals court has ruled that Alabama is failing to adequately enforce water-pollution laws, thereby paving the way for citizens of the state to sue under the national Clean Water Act. Under the terms of that act, citizens may go to court to enforce the law only if the state has failed to prosecute […]
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Montreal Expose
The Montreal Protocol, the international treaty to protect the ozone layer, has been hailed as the most effective environmental agreement ever signed. Now, though, it’s efficacy could be jeopardized, because the Bush administration is calling for some exemptions to a part of the treaty that calls for a global ban on the pesticide methyl bromide […]
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Haden Go Seek
In a blow to environmentalists, a federal appeals court has overturned a ruling preventing the U.S. government from issuing permits to mountaintop-mining operations. The operations access coal seams by shearing off huge slabs of mountains; the increasingly common process has resulted in tons of rock and dirt being dumped into valleys and streams. Last year, […]
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydrogen
In his State of the Union address, President Bush outlined a vision of nonpolluting, hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars and promised to pony up $1.5 billion over five years to make that vision a reality. Almost everyone, from environmentalists to automakers, agrees that the transition toward hydrogen is a good thing, at least in theory: It is […]
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Penn Is Mightier Than the Sword
Following in the footsteps of nine other northeastern states, Pennsylvania went to court yesterday to block new, less stringent federal air-pollution regulations from taking effect. The Pennsylvania case is separate from one filed by the other states, but the issue is the same: the New Source Review rules of the Clean Air Act, which once […]
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Order in the Court
With a staunchly anti-environmental White House and a Republican-dominated Congress, environmentalists are turning to the third branch of government to fight their cause. Happily, the courts have presented a relatively safe haven for greens, upholding strict clean air standards the Bush administration sought to water down, blocking oil and gas exploration in the West, limiting […]
