Climate Politics

Norton Hears a Hoot

The Bush administration will ask Congress for $100 million to fund a program to encourage joint conservation efforts between private and public landowners. Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who is announcing the program today in Pennsylvania, called the “Cooperative Conservation Initiative” an effort to “empower a new generation of citizen-conservationists.” Under the initiative, the government will […]

Shark Skin Suit

Last summer, they were are our worst enemy; now they need a best friend. We’re talking about sharks, of course. The much-maligned beach marauders are now the subject of a lawsuit filed earlier this week against the U.S. government by environmental organizations. The National Audubon Society, Earthjustice, and the Ocean Conservancy claim the National Marine […]

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 […]

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 […]

Groundhog Day Quiz

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]