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Delight and Dismay over Coal
Contradictory actions by the coal industry this week illustrate how treacherous the road is to a clean energy future for America. On Tuesday, to our delight, developers of the proposed Highwood coal-fired power plant in Montana surrendered and announced that they would instead build natural gas and wind-powered generating plants. The credit for this should…
Read More"Long Live Mineral King…"
After writing a blog item about the storied Mineral King valley, I crafted an essay about it for the High Country News. The news is that it is about to be declared America’s newest wilderness. Here’s how I started the HCN article: "A half-million abandoned mines litter the American West, many dribbling poisons into rivers…
Read MoreThe 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…
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