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The Drill Baby is Back
When the history of our times is written, I bet the nomination of Sarah Palin for vice president will be seen as one of the more bizarre political aberrations in American history, which has already had plenty. One would think that the resounding repudiation she and Senator McCain suffered in the general election would have…
Read MoreOrganizing to Save the California Delta and West Coast Salmon
Northern Californians have recently launched two grassroots efforts to oppose a proposed peripheral canal that would divert water from the Sacramento River and send it around the West’s largest estuary to irrigate large industrial farms in the Central Valley and Southern California. On January 17th, Water4Fish held a panel discussion at the International Sportsmen’s Expo…
Read MoreDirty Air Raises Risk of Death; Clean Air Extends Life
First the bad news. Over the last decade, hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies from all over the world have clearly established a direct link between dirty air and increased risk of death from lung disease. In 2002, for example, California state scientists estimated that microscopic particles of airborne soot from auto exhaust cause more than…
Read MoreEPA is All Ears All of a Sudden
We haven’t gotten much good news out of the Environmental Protection Agency for eight years, but suddenly the news is huge… so big that it deserves an exclamation mark. Bear with me as I wend my way towards the punch line. President Obama and the new folks he’s put in charge at EPA are now…
Read MoreReek of the Feedlot
"Toxic emissions" sounds like a precocious 10-year-old’s euphemism for cattle reek, but that’s how the term is applied in last week’s press release on factory farm exemptions. Presumably because he wanted to go out on a wafting cloud of the odor, Bush tried to make it easier for factory farms to release unsafe levels of…
Read MoreOptimism — For the First Time in 8 Years
I joined Tuesday’s huge crowd in Washington to witness the inauguration of our 44th President. The people who traveled from all over the country had worked to elect Barack Obama and create a community of hope, optimism, and readiness to tackle the challenges, and that spirit pervaded the Mall. For me, as for so many,…
Read MoreFlorida’s Sweet Energy Mandate
Jan. 8 was a sweet day in Florida, and I’m not talking about the weather. On that day, the state’s Public Service Commission voted for a new energy mandate: the state will get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources—wind, solar, hydropower, or biomass—by 2020. “We want to be a leader in this country…
Read MoreNow We Can All Retire … Right?
Jan. 20 marked the dawn of a new day in Washington. We hope it means a clear break from the past eight years of drilling, logging, and ignoring science. So now all us enviro lawyers can retire or get real jobs because President Obama – enjoy those two words together – is going to take…
Read MoreCoal ash spills onto nation's radar
Earthjustice Press Secretary Kathleen Sutcliffe provides this report on the grave threats posed by toxic coal ash produced at our nation’s coal-fired power plants, and the quick action taken by Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans after recent coal ash spills Quick quiz, readers. The byproduct of coal-fired power plants is: a) the nation’s second largest industrial…
Read MoreSo Here We Go
Not to reveal my age or anything, but Tuesday’s was the eleventh inauguration held since I went to work for the Sierra Club. Over the next 40 years, it was always monumentally frustrating that concerns for the earth were almost altogether missing from the rhetoric during the campaign and especially the inaugural speeches. Until now.…
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