President Barack Obama

This morning, the President tried to yank the rug out from under years of work by Earthjustice and our clients to clean up deadly smog in our air. In 2008, weak national standards for ozone, or smog, were adopted by the Bush administration, standards that the EPA’s own scientists said would not protect public health. Thousands of lives and tens of thousands of cases of asthma are at stake. Led by attorney David Baron, we sued on behalf of the American Lung Association, EDF, NRDC and others.

A major new poll released today reveals some shocking truths about public opinions on mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia.

The polling, conducted by the Democratic Lake Research Partners and Republican Bellwether Research & Consulting and funded by Earthjustice, Appalachian Mountain Advocates (formerly the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment), and the Sierra Club was done between July 25 and 28 and sampled the opinions of 1,315 registered voters in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee on the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining and clean water protections.

The poll reveals beyond the shadow of a doubt that the people of America’s coal country—West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia—don’t like mountaintop removal mining and they don’t want it to continue at the expense of their homes, health, communities, families, and future.

The strong majority of Appalachians opposes mountaintop removal mining—57 percent, compared to 20 percent who support the practice—and this opposition soars no matter the political party. Independents, Democrats, Republicans and Tea Partiers alike have shown intense disapproval of this destructive form of mining. The will of Appalachians is transcendent: people from all education levels, political orientations, and all four states oppose mountaintop removal by strong margins.

Part of The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy (1773) by Domenico Tiepolo.

If you've ever suspected that Congress thinks of corporate polluters first and the polluted public last, the debacle unfolding in Washington, D.C. this week should leave you with little doubt—and a bitter taste. Many of our elected leaders have hijacked the process by which we fund government agencies to sack the environment like Odysseus did Troy.

The Trojan Horse that is the federal appropriations bill is filled with an unprecedented number of anti-environmental "riders"—provisions added to a piece of legislation that have little to no connection with the subject of the bill itself. And just as the Greeks sought to extinguish the fires of life in Troy, these riders are meant to run down the bedrock environmental protections that were created to keep our environment clean and our imperiled wildlife safe from extinction.

One egregious effort—dubbed the Extinction Rider—would paralyze the nation's ability to protect hundreds of species and turn the decision-making about endangered wildlife into a one-way street where protections can only be weakened, never strengthened.

This is an absolutely inappropriate way to set new policy. It demeans the democratic process and indicates that such extreme measures can't stand on their own—instead, they have to be slipped as stowaways into a must-pass bill.

Up and down the Rockies, in Texas, across much of the northeast, and perhaps soon in your community, engaged citizens are coming together to prevent the harms of rampant gas development.

Last week,  I sat with just such a group in Gunnison County, Co., a beautiful place in the mountains that is confronting rapidly expanding  drilling and fracking for gas. People took time away from work and family to gather and talk about what to do.

Follow along as I walk us up the steep learning curve about natural gas that Earthjustice, the environmental community and the nation are navigating. The curve suddenly steepened a few years ago when natural gas advocates started promoting their fuel as a refreshing alternative to coal and oil, and a bridge to a clean energy future.

If we have learned anything along the way, it is this: the clean reputation of natural gas is good PR, but lousy science.
 
For decades, Earthjustice has worked to protect special places on our public lands from being pockmarked by gas development. Our litigation has helped protect such treasures as the Wyoming Range south of the Tetons, Otero Mesa in southern New Mexico, the Roan Plateau in western Colorado, and some of the spectacular red rock country near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah.
 
Despite some improvements by the Obama administration in leasing and drilling policies, we are forced to keep fighting some of these battles. We’ve come to know that gas development can fragment wildlife habitat and industrialize a pristine landscape, and we’ve worked on federal and state rules to reduce those impacts.

Nobody gets through a day without breathing. Not executives in the coal-fired power and cement industries, which are polluting our air daily. Not the legion of lobbyists they hire to patrol the halls of Congress in defense of dirty air. And not the members of Congress who, hand-in-hand with these special interests, are marching the Clean Air Act off a cliff.

At the very same time that these women and men draw breath, they are working to derail and delay clean air protections with a vigor that suggests there isn't a set of functioning lungs between them.

To confront this audacity, Earthjustice helped to bring a diverse group of doctors, nurses, faith and tribal leaders, and environmental justice advocates to Washington, D.C. earlier this month for an event dubbed 50 States United for Healthy Air. These 80 Clean Air Ambassadors, who came from all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, met with members of Congress, the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to defend our right to breathe. Rev. Dr. Michael Stinson, one of the ambassadors, stated their purpose clearly: "We are people from all 50 states with a passion for one issue—clean air."

As part of an online storytelling project, Earthjustice staff asked the ambassadors to express in a sentence what clean air is to them. Their sentences read like axioms, as they elucidate core realities and challenges of this issue.

One year ago, the BP oil spill had just started turning the Gulf of Mexico's blue waters to the color of rust. Triggered on April 20, 2010 by a well-rig explosion that killed 11 people, the spill would gush more than 200 million gallons of crude oil—the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

Before the well was finally capped three months later, untold numbers of birds, dolphins, sea turtles and other wildlife had perished in the muck, or possibly from the chemicals used to disperse it. Along the Gulf coast, communities suffered as tourism dropped and fishing seasons closed. Anxiety soared amid debates over the spill's price tag—including who would pay for it. While it is undeniable that the spill has caused and will continue to cause massive damage to Gulf ecosystems and communities, we won't understand the full impact for years.

One thing, however, is clear: the BP spill brought more to the surface than just crude oil. It exposed a culture of corruption in the federal agency tasked with issuing and overseeing permits to drill for oil in our nation's coastal waters. The Minerals Management Service systematically disregarded bedrock environmental protections by granting the oil industry exemptions to these laws and allowing BP and other companies to drill without concrete plans to clean up oil in the event of a large spill. This helps explain why it took BP a full three months—and numerous failed attempts—to cap the well. It simply wasn't prepared.

House Speaker John Boehner

As the threat of a total federal government shutdown hangs over the country, leaders in Congress and the White House continue eleventh-hour emergency negotiations to reach a compromise before time runs out on keeping our government funded and averting a costly and potentially disastrous government shutdown.

According to press reports this morning, the thing holding up any deal—and what will cause a shutdown if it happens—is not the dollar figure of budget cuts but the forcefulness of Republicans to use this budget bill as a vehicle to carry two unrelated political demands: blocks on clean air protections and reproductive rights for women..

“The two main issues holding this matter up are the choice of women, reproductive rights, and clean air,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told The Hill this morning. “These matters have no place in a budget bill.”

It is with deep regret that we must announce that Earthjustice was forced to step down as the courtroom lawyer for wolves in the Northern Rockies in the two cases related to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s action to remove or reduce their Endangered Species Act protections. This action was not our choice, but a course of action compelled by our ethical responsibilities to our clients.

Our passion for the wolf is greater than ever. Our years of advocacy, along with our able partners, to promote wolf recovery and our successful legal battle against politically motivated and premature delisting of the wolves are some of our proudest achievements. Our attorneys have devoted tens of thousands of hours to this cause and would still be doing so, but for the conflict of interest among our clients that has compelled us to withdraw as counsel at this juncture.

As lawyers, there can come a point where we can no longer represent multiple clients in litigation because the clients’ interests become adverse to one another. There has been a divergence of positions among our clients in the litigation challenging the delisting of gray wolves; some favor settling the case, while others do not. That divergence has forced us to withdraw as counsel.

Arctic ice adds to high risk of drilling oil

Despite obvious differences, the icy Arctic Ocean and the warm, deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico have an important commonality: we aren’t prepared to safely drill for oil in either place. Last year’s Gulf spill – which killed 11 rig workers and fouled waters that nourish ecosystems and economies alike – is a harsh illustration of that simple fact.

And yet, the Gulf spill’s oily sheen has been a Rorschach test for the nation, eliciting support for and opposition to high-risk offshore drilling. Thankfully, the critical need to slow down and assess our preparedness to drill safely in deepwater and sensitive areas like the Arctic was underscored last week by the findings of President Obama’s Oil Spill Commission.

The commission was clear: the Gulf spill was a preventable disaster caused by mistakes made while drilling in high-risk conditions for which neither industry nor government were prepared. And the industry is still not prepared, the commission emphasized. There are huge gaps in our understanding of how to drill in deepwater and sensitive areas like the Arctic without endangering human safety and environmental protection.