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"Drill Baby" Attacks Climate Bill
American politics is a wonder. Let’s say you’re unhappy with the climate bill narrowly passed by the House of Representatives a while back. You think you might be able to influence the Senate and an eventual conference committee if you could get an opinion piece published in the Washington Post. Who would be your best…
Read MoreU.S. Green Reputation Slammed, Or Not
I just received a most curious press release from GfK Public Affairs and Media. GfK, one of the largest marketing research companies in the world according to its website, conducted a poll to determine the ranking of various countries as "brands." The country with the best overall reputation is Germany. The U.S. finishes seventh. As…
Read MoreDo They Love That Dirty Water?
You’d think Colorado’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, would be in the forefront to protect one of Colorado’s most valuable natural resources: our water. Unfortunately, the jury is still out on whether they will be. As has been amply detailed by Earthjustice and in a recent op-ed in the Denver Post by Trout Unlimited’s…
Read MoreGentle Persuasion
As a candidate, Barack Obama promised to "uphold and defend" the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which set out to protect nearly 60 million acres of pristine national forest lands across the country. Not long ago, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has responsibility for the Forest Service among many things, announced that he will personally review…
Read MoreLong Live Savage Rapids
The pictures are not what you’d generally call beautiful, but they’re stirring nonetheless: the early stages of the demolition of the Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River in Oregon, which has been killing salmon for decades. The demolition is the result of yeoman (yeowoman too) efforts by a cast of hundreds, including Earthjustice’s Mike…
Read MoreEPA Puts Kansas Power Plant on Hold
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has thrown a wrench into the expansion of Sunflower coal-fired power plant in Kansas. It’s the first hopeful sign out of that state since its new governor cooked up a deal allowing the expansion in May. In a letter this week, the EPA told the state and Sunflower Electric that…
Read MoreHow Many Presidents Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?
How many Presidents of the United States does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. It’s no joke. Millions of Americans have already changed their light bulbs to save energy and fight global warming. New lighting standards announced Monday will help all our homes and businesses make the switch, and as a result,…
Read MoreBrown Republicans
A good case could be made that the most important U.S. federal environmental laws are the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. And what do they have in common? They were enacted (amended since in some cases) in the early 1970s and signed into…
Read MoreA Communist Plot
Remember the John Birch Society? The virulent right-wing McCarthyist outfit born in Indianapolis in 1958? I hadn’t heard of it for years, would have guessed it had passed quietly back into the fourteenth century, but low and behold it’s still alive, kicking, screaming, and denying the fact of global warming and climate change. A quick…
Read MoreBedfellows
The Alabama-based environmental law firm Wildlaw has just announced the hiring of Mark Rey as a part-time lobbyist to work on national forest restoration projects in the Southeast and to help with land acquisition efforts. Here’s a little backstory. Wildlaw is headed by an attorney named Ray Vaughan, and it has done much good work…
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