Seems like all we do lately when it comes to our government is contemplate the unprecedented. So it’s almost a relief to find familiar ground. Almost. The Department of Homeland Security says it will bypass environmental and other laws to “ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads” near San Diego, prototypes and a first…
The Trump administration has sown major confusion around the Paris Agreement — what it is, what it does, and what it has meant for the United States. Luckily, a lot of smart people are writing to correct the record, and to put both the climate accord and Trump’s withdrawal from it in perspective.
The last time that I saw Dean Baker as a well man, it was 2008. His frantic pacing in the back of a hearing room in the Nevada State Legislature in Carson stopped as he suddenly fled to the hallway and struggled to throw open what turned out to be a permanently sealed window. I…
Do you know the old exchange? “The future is on the horizon,” one person says, brightly. “The horizon is an imaginary point that moves as you approach it,” a second retorts. At the end of last month, President Trump directed the Department of Interior to review several of the national monuments designated by previous administrations under the…
DONALD Trump’s ascendancy to the White House has been good to Cadiz, Inc, a private company whose scheme to sell Mojave Desert groundwater to Southern California cities has soared from the brink of bankruptcy to viability in six short months.
If the rush since January 20th to gut the country’s environmental laws and scientific agencies makes no sense to you, allow Jane Mayer to explain. Since her landmark 2010 New Yorker profile of the siblings who control Koch Industries, Mayer has been piecing together the story of a five-decade-long movement dedicated to dismantling much of…
A fast way to slow global warming is to chase methane. A potent greenhouse gas, in the short term, it warms the planet as much as 86 times more efficiently than does carbon dioxide, even if it only persists for a couple of decades or less. But methane is hard to chase.
Ryan Zinke’s Interior Department has issued a press release announcing the opening up of all currently unleased federally-owned areas of the Gulf of Mexico: 73 million acres. The Department is planning these sales over the next five years with the first sale to take place in August of this year. Excluded from this sale of leases…
A budget proposal for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration leaked to the Washington Post would slash coastal science and resilience programs. It would limit natural disaster preparation and research. It would limit data gathering, including satellites, which can help communities prepare for extreme weather. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a lot of jobs…
Yum, lead. In a nation hypersensitive about bugs in food, yesterday’s action on the part of new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke would have you think America’s hunters aren’t bothered by a little lead in their goose* or venison. Yesterday, on his first day on the job, Zinke signed Secretarial Order 3346, rescinding the Obama Administration’s ban…
