Articles filed under Environment

New York Times
WASHINGTON, July 5 — After a concerted lobbying effort by property developers, mine owners and farm groups, the Bush administration scaled back proposed guidelines for enforcing a key Supreme Court ruling governing protected wetlands and streams.

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Los Angeles Times
The bald eagle may be soaring back from near-extinction, but hundreds of other imperiled species are foundering, as the federal agency charged with protecting them has sunk into legal, bureaucratic and political turmoil.

In the last six years, the Bush administration has added fewer species to the endangered list than any other since the law was enacted in 1973.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --Ponds that have provided summertime water in the high arctic for thousands of years are drying up as global warming advances, Canadian researchers say. Falling water levels and changes in chemistry in the ponds first were noticed in the 1990s, and by last July some of the ponds that dot the landscape were dry, according to a report in Tuesday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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AlterNet
How important are owls in the scheme of things? How important are forests? What do most Americans know about forests?

The answer to the last question is that most Americans think that the majority of forests are managed by the Forest Service or the Park Service. Most Americans also think that those forests are protected from logging.

Both answers are wrong.

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Baltimore Sun
No one in the cadre of national environmental activists seemed much surprised to learn last week that Vice President Dick Cheney is orchestrating the rollback in federal protections that marks the Bush administration's stewardship of America's natural resources.

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New York Times
Nashville

WE — the human species — have arrived at a moment of decision. It is unprecedented and even laughable for us to imagine that we could actually make a conscious choice as a species, but that is nevertheless the challenge that is before us.

Our home — Earth — is in danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — As the Environmental Protection Agency deliberated on whether to allow California to implement its greenhouse gas law, another federal agency sought to mobilize state and federal lawmakers against the state's petition, documents show.

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Independent
US public opinion is rapidly waking up to the threat posed by global warming, despite the best efforts of the Bush Administration and much of industry to deny the problem.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — West Coast Democrats called for a hearing Wednesday into the role federal policy may have played in the 2002 die-off of about 70,000 salmon near the California-Oregon border.

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BBC
Tens of millions of people could be driven from their homes by encroaching deserts, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, a report says.

The study by the United Nations University suggests climate change is making desertification "the greatest environmental challenge of our times".

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, aiming to put an end to the debate over whether global warming is actually occurring, passed legislation recognizing the "reality" of climate change and providing money to work on the problem.

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Salon
From the "I don't think anybody could have predicted it" Department, the fourth installment of the Washington Post's four-part series on Dick Cheney tells the tale of the vice president's intervention in a dispute between government officials trying to protect endangered species and thousands of Republican farmers and ranchers.

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Washington Post
The decision by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) this month to open most of Colorado's Roan Plateau to massive natural gas development removes any lingering doubts that the Bush administration has converted the agency into a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil and gas industry.

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New York Times
MOUNT HOOD, Ore.

Most Americans don’t own a summer home on Cape Cod, or a McMansion in the Rockies, but they have this birthright: an area more than four times the size of France. If you’re a citizen, you own it — about 565 million acres.

The deed on a big part of this public land inheritance dates to a pair of Republican class warriors from a hundred years ago: President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the Forest Service.

(Paid Subscription Required)

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New York Times
Last week, the Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp and startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds in America: several kinds of sparrows, the Northern bobwhite, the Eastern meadowlark, the common grackle and the common tern. The average decline of the 20 species in the Audubon Society’s report is 68 percent.

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Wired
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The populations of nearly two dozen common American birds - the fence-sitting meadowlark, the frenetic Rufous hummingbird and the whippoorwill with its haunting call - are half what they were 40 years ago, a new analysis found.
The northern bobwhite and its familiar wake-up whistle once seemed to be everywhere in the East. Last Christmas, volunteer bird counters could find only three of them and only 18 Eastern meadowlarks in Massachusetts.

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Independent
America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.

From the mountains and desert of the West, now into an eighth consecutive dry year, to the wheat farms of Alabama, where crops are failing because of rainfall levels 12 inches lower than usual, to the vast soupy expanse of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, which has become so dry it actually caught fire a couple of weeks ago, a continent is crying out for water.

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Washington Post
NEW YORK -- To the long list of evils being blamed on global warming -- hurricanes, heat waves, melting ice caps -- tack on the smaller interior of Steve Benesoczky's cab. Inside, his passengers can already feel the squeeze of climate change in their knees.

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Washington Post
THERE IS a bald attempt in Congress to short-circuit California's effort to regulate tailpipe emissions -- with Democrats leading the charge. A bill from the chairman of the House energy and air quality subcommittee, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va. -- or is that D-Big Coal?), would halt recent moves by states to limit the emission of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. He insists, "This is not an attack on California." Color us unconvinced.

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Boston Globe
PRESIDENT BUSH claims that his sudden and dramatic about-face on climate change is motivated by the emergence of new scientific findings. I would like to believe that it is so. However, I suspect that things are not as simple as that.

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Huffington Post
I can think of three billion reasons why President Bush should agree to take action on climate change at this week's G8 Summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, one for every person in the world living on less than two dollars a day. These people are not responsible for global warming, but they will pay the highest price if wealthy countries refuse to do their fair share.

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Telegraph
Tony Blair's hopes of securing a landmark deal on climate change at his last G8 summit faded yesterday when the United States rejected any binding targets for reducing greenhouse gases.

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Der Spiegel
Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz doesn't think much of the G-8 summit -- and even less of US President George W. Bush. In a conversation with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Stiglitz, an economist and critic of globalization, reveals that he has some hopes for the summit in Heiligendamm nonetheless.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Stiglitz, you are considered an intellectual icon of the critics of globalization. Is this embarrassing to you or are you proud of this role?

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MSNBC
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is drastically scaling back efforts to measure global warming from space, just as the president tries to convince the world the U.S. is ready to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gases.

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Boston Globe
THE RACE to reduce carbon emissions before climate change irremediably alters life on earth will hold center stage at the summit of industrial nations this week in the German resort of Heiligendamm. The central drama on the Group of Eight stage promises to be President Bush's refusal to include the United States in a consensus on setting targets and timetables for significant reductions in greenhouse gases and serious efforts to conserve energy.

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Independent
Tony Blair may have only a little more than three weeks left in office, but that gives him plenty of time for his greatest ever international triumph, or for his biggest betrayal yet. How he handles his relationship with President George Bush over the next week is likely to determine whether or not the world will seize the best (and quite possibly the last) chance of tackling global warming before it is too late.

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Guardian
Britain today warns George Bush that talks on climate change must take place within a United Nations framework and not in an ad hoc process as floated last week by the President.

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Telegraph
Shortly after arriving at the office in Washington on Thursday, courtesy of my gas-guzzling SUV - living the American Dream now entails owning a large Japanese car - I was telephoned by a Telegraph foreign desk anxious to hear my thoughts on global warming.

Or, more precisely, my views on the climate-change speech President George W Bush was in the process of delivering. Fumbling for the remote control, I began commenting sagely as I tried to find out what on earth my bosses were talking about.

No luck. Sky News was breathlessly carrying the hot-button news live, but CNN was reporting on a tuberculosis scare and plans by an actor and retired senator called Fred Thompson to run for president.

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Washington Post
The White House yesterday showed that it still knows how to play the American press like a harp.

President Bush yesterday put forth a new proposal on climate change that is most newsworthy for its attempt to muddy the debate about the issue and derail European and U.N. plans for strict caps on emissions. Bush's proposal calls for a new round of international meetings that would nearly outlast his presidency. The purpose of the meetings would not be to set caps on emissions, but to establish what the White House -- uncorking a bold new euphemism -- calls "aspirational goals."

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Der Spiegel
In presenting his own proposal to deal with greenhouse gas emissions just days before next week's G-8 summit, Bush is trying to look like a leader on climate change in the hope of outmaneuvering Europe and his critics. But his plan is purposely vague and his ideas stale.

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Washington Post
Yesterday, as the temperature pushed toward 90 degrees in the capital, global warming caused a meltdown in the Bush administration's message machine.

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New York Times
President Bush has been feeling the heat on global warming. He’s been feeling it from Congress, from state governors, from the business community and, most recently and powerfully, from America’s closest foreign allies, who are fed up with his passivity on the issue and desperate for him to show some real leadership.

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Guardian
George Bush yesterday threw international efforts to control climate change into confusion with a proposal to create a "new global framework" to curb greenhouse gas emissions as an alternative to a planned UN process.

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NRDC
WASHINGTON (May 31, 2007) – The vague, voluntary global warming goal announced today by President Bush confirms again that the administration continues to lag far behind leading American businesses and a growing list of leaders in both political parties that are pressing for concrete legal limits to cut global warming pollution according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

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Center for American Progress
President Bush’s do nothing policy on global warming continues despite our Allies’ best efforts to spur U.S. reductions. At next week’s G8 summit, Germany and our other allies will once again implore him to join them in slashing global warming pollution. President Bush’s speech today indicates that he will snub them again next week.

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Der Spiegel
US President George W. Bush has unveiled plans for combating climate change, calling for the 15 worst emitters of greenhouse gases to meet and agree on emissions goals by 2008. The proposal could be intended to block Merkel's plans for the G-8 summit next week.

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Hindustan Times
President George W Bush is under pressure from European allies to give ground on climate change at next week's meeting of the world's richest countries, but policy experts say prospects for a breakthrough are slim.

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Seattle PI
The Bush administration has spent time and money looking at various stratagems to undo a valid Clinton administration rule protecting roadless areas. Congress should put its foot down on the shenanigans.

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One Thousand Reasons
There is no shortage of political pundits now wading into the discussion of global warming, despite the scientific complexity of the field. One of the latest entries is Alexander Cockburn. I have read Cockburn regularly over the years, and while I recognized him as a very talented polemicist whose acerbic screeds I could tolerate when directed to the likes of Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara and Augusto Pinochet, his latest foray into the field of man-made global warming is scientifically dreadful, and hence irresponsible, and reflects journalism and public service at its worst. Were it not for the importance of global warming, we could easily dismiss his writing. But Cockburn has a sizeable reading audience through “The Nation” and his own publication, “Counterpunch.” And since educating the public on this matter is crucial if we are to do something about global warming, Cockburn needs to be taken to task for his dishonesty and slipshod journalism.

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AlterNet
LONDON, May 25 (Reuters) - The United States has rejected Germany's bid to get the Group of Eight to agree to tough cuts in climate warming carbon emissions, according to a draft of the communique to be presented to next month's meeting.

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CBS News
The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the U.S. museum.

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Washington Post
It's bad enough that the federal government has yet to take the threat of global warming seriously, but it borders on malfeasance for it to block the efforts of states such as California and Connecticut that are trying to protect the public's health and welfare.

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New York Times
The mayors of some of the world’s biggest cities have every reason to feel especially anxious about climate change. Their populations are the biggest polluters but also among the most vulnerable to weather-related catastrophes. And they are far ahead of their national governments in giving urgency to global warming.

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Independent
As Tony Blair left Washington yesterday for his last visit as Prime Minister, the Bush administration was acting to scupper international efforts to combat climate change.

Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr Blair had basked in the apparent support of President George Bush for his stated aim of avoiding catastrophic global warming. But it seems his appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

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New York Times
Confronted with soaring gasoline prices, a Congress growing more restless by the day about oil dependency and a Supreme Court demanding executive action on global warming emissions, President Bush stepped before the cameras in the Rose Garden the other day and said, essentially, nothing.

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Washington Post
ONE OF THE benefits of being in the second tier of presidential candidates is feeling freer to promote worthy ideas that might seem too risky to a front-runner. That may be the case with Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), whose plan to tackle climate change involves a bold move for any politician: a new tax -- in this case, on carbon emissions. "You cannot be serious about acting on the urgent threat of global warming, about making us less captive to Middle East oil, or investing in renewable energy, unless you have a corporate carbon tax that eliminates the last incentive there is to pollute -- that it's cheaper," Mr. Dodd said in a speech last month.

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Reuters
BONN, Germany (Reuters) - U.S. and Russian greenhouse gas emissions rose in 2005, more than cancelling out a dip in the European Union's emissions despite growing calls to limit global warming, official data shows.

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Center for Biological Diversity
WASHINGTON— Today marks exactly one year since the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service last protected any new U.S. species under the Endangered Species Act. Fittingly, on this same day, the House Natural Resources Committee is holding important oversight hearings on implementation of the Endangered Species Act by a recalcitrant Bush administration. The last time the agency went an entire year without protecting a single species was in 1981, when the infamous James Watt was Secretary of Interior. There are currently 279 highly imperiled species that are designated as candidates for listing as threatened or endangered and that face potential extinction.

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The Exile
Nothing drove home Russia's place in the growing pollution-trading business better than what one carbon finance guy told me at a conference last week sponsored by Gazprom and the World Bank. We were on drink number three or four at the reception when he dropped the green pretense and came clean.

"I don't know if climate change is caused by burning coal or sun flares or what," said the Moscow-based carbon cowboy. "And I don't really give a shit. Russia is the most energy inefficient country around, and carbon is the most volatile market ever. There's a lot of opportunity to make money."

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New York Times
Yesterday’s report on global warming from the world’s most authoritative voice on climate change asserts that significant progress toward stabilizing and reducing global warming emissions can be achieved at a relatively low cost using known technologies. This is a hugely important message to policy makers everywhere, not least those in the United States Congress. Many of them have been paralyzed by fears — assiduously cultivated by the Bush administration — that a full-scale attack on climate change could cripple the economy.

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Hindustan Times
Climate experts and representatives from 105 countries on Friday released a 24-page report on means of mitigating the worse impacts of global warming after five days of heated debates to reach a consensus on the document.

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NRDC
WASHINGTON (April 4, 2007) – A radical reactionary who believes in allowing arsenic in drinking water and that smog is actually beneficial because it can protect people from sunburn has been appointed by President Bush to the position of administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA is little known to the public, but has enormous power to weaken, delay and eliminate hard-won regulations designed to protect the public in the workplace, on the road and at home, according to public health and policy experts at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

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Huffington Post
For those looking for a refresher on exponology, a casual field of study I created for my upcoming book Hyperhighway to Hell devoted to political and mathematical exponents, check here and here for the goods. But know that, at its heart, exponology is interested in examining the ways (and means) situations can accelerate in a hurry, sometimes catastrophically. Speaking of, here's another entry fit for the source list.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a Bush administration appeal defending its rule that would allow older factories, refineries and coal-burning power plants to upgrade their facilities without installing the most modern pollution controls.

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New York Times
Weeks after the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling that the federal government could and probably should regulate greenhouse gases, pressure for decisive action continues to build.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's chief environmental officer came under fire from the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill this morning for failing to act more aggressively to address global warming in response to the Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gas emissions are subject to federal regulation.

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New York Times
Toronto

DOES climate change threaten international peace and security? The British government thinks it does. As this month’s head of the United Nations Security Council, Britain convened a debate on the matter last Tuesday. One in four United Nations member countries joined the discussion — a record for this kind of thematic debate.

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New York Times
People who give short shrift to environmental matters pay attention when national security becomes part of the conversation. So the debate over global warming took a useful turn this week as diplomats and retired military officers drew persuasive connections between climate change and the very real potential for regional upheavals.

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Mongabay
The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the 0.8 percent growth in greenhouse gas emissions in 2005 showed the Bush Administration was serious about addressing climate change.

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Washington Post
Climate change will exact a major cost on North America's timber industry and could drive as much as 40 percent of its plant and animal species to extinction in a matter of decades, according to a new report from an international panel.

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Washington Post
In front of the Capitol they gathered, a thick semicircle of a couple hundred people -- mostly students, some parents with small children and a smattering of graying others. They crowded around a stage and carried signs that said, "Stop Global Warming."

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New York Times
A little over four years ago, when the forces of deregulation were riding high, this page observed that the federal courts could turn out to be the last, best hope for slowing the Bush administration’s assault on the body of bipartisan environmental law established over the last four decades and, by extension, on the environment itself.

As things have turned out, this is pretty much what has happened.

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AlterNet
So Newsweek is running an opinion piece about global warming titled: "Why So Gloomy?" The piece is authored by Richard Lindzen, a well-known meteorologist, and his thesis about the potential melt-down of our climate can be boiled down to this: Don't worry, be happy!

At the bottom of the article, is this brief biographical sketch of the author:

Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

Sounds like he's on the up-and-up, no?

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Vanity Fair
Rush Limbaugh, he's got the life. His days flick through the slot like postcards from paradise. Where most gab-show hosts report for duty at radio studios where candy bars get stuck in the vending machine and the carpeting is a certain industrial shade of indifference, Limbaugh—a man, a mission, a mighty wind—has carved out his own principality in Florida's Palm Beach, a lion preserve where he can roam undisturbed. Drinking in the rays, puffing on those big-shot cigars, riding the range in a golf cart—he's got the complete Jackie Gleason how-sweet-it-is package deal. But just as the Great One suffered from melancholia aggravated by alcohol, Limbaugh's indulgence in his own creature comforts hasn't been able to insulate him from the demons within.

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The Guardian
The drafting of reports by the world's pre-eminent group of climate scientists is an odd process. For months scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing gets published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel's reports are conservative - even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific document can be.

Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in and seek to excise from the summaries anything that threatens their interests.

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Thomas Paine's Corner
The documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, has been referred to so much over the past week I had to research some of its claims. The film is very persuasive to be sure with a list of scientists as long as your arm. This all seems very promising compared to the film put out by the CBC called Global Warming, Doomsday Called Off where there were very few scientists involved.

However, some of the primary data used in TGGWS comes from Dr. John Christy, the same scientist that was found to have flawed data when using weather balloons to measure the temperature of the troposphere. When the upgraded satellites were again used to measure the temperature of the troposphere, it was found that the discrepancies in the old readings were to the negative and the troposphere was actually warmer than measured.

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Huffington Post
No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb.

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New York Times
Last week began with a Supreme Court decision declaring that the federal government had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and all but ordering the Bush administration to do so. It ended with a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world’s authoritative voice on global warming — warning that failure to contain these emissions will have disastrous environmental effects, especially in poorer countries, which are least able to defend themselves and their people against the consequences of climate change.

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Washington Post
Some sections of a grim scientific assessment of the impact of global warming on human, animal and plant life issued in Brussels yesterday were softened at the insistence of officials from China and the United States, participants in the negotiations said.

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US News & World Report
Toward the end of his first 100 days in office, President George W. Bush suspended proposed Clinton administration regulations to clamp down on arsenic in drinking water, arguing that more study was needed. His action drew the ire of Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. "I sent Arsenic and Old Lace over to the White House with a note that says, 'Don't you know arsenic kills? Watch the movie,'" she tells U.S. News. "I never got an answer." In the end, Bush allowed the Clinton rule to take effect. Democrats notched a win, but arsenic proved to be just the opening salvo in a red-faced battle over all things green.

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Independent
Two months ago the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change gave us chapter and verse on the science of global warming. And now the new IPCC report spells out the effect this heating of the earth will have on the planet's inhabitants.

This synthesis of the work of 2,500 scientists tells us that climate change is already having a significant effect on our environment. Animals, plants and water systems are under pressure now.

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MSNBC
BRUSSELS, Belgium - Top climate experts warned Friday that global warming will cause faster and wider damage than previously forecast, ranging from hunger in Africa and Asia to extinctions and rising ocean levels.

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USA Today
Earth is spinning toward many points of no return from the damage of global warming, after which disease, desolation and famine are inevitable, say scientists involved in an international report due Friday on the effects of climate change.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, April 3 — A day after the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases, President Bush said he thought that the measures he had taken so far were sufficient.

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Baltimore Sun
The Supreme Court's rebuke Monday of President Bush's policy on global warming appropriately rejected the administration's absurd argument that it doesn't have the authority to regulate greenhouse emissions.

But the real impact of the high court's unexpectedly strong stand in support of carbon dioxide curbs to combat global warming will likely be in Congress, where lawmakers now have a powerful case for federal action. And affected industries should be newly motivated to cooperate, if only to avoid a patchwork of state legislation.

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ABC News
Within two or three decades, there could be one and a half billion people without enough water, according to a new report on the impacts of global warming.

Such droughts would produce "refugee crises like we've never seen," as one of the study's lead authors told ABC News.

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New York Times
It would be hard to overstate the importance of yesterday’s ruling by the Supreme Court that the federal government has the authority to regulate the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by motor vehicles.

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Washington Post
The Supreme Court rebuked the Bush administration yesterday for refusing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, siding with environmentalists in the court's first examination of the phenomenon of global warming.

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AlterNet
BRUSSELS, April 2 (Reuters) - The European Union accused the United States and Australia on Monday of hampering international efforts to tackle climate change.

"We expect ... the United States to cooperate closer and not to continue having a negative attitude in international negotiations," Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas told delegates at a United Nations-sponsored meeting to review a report on the regional effects of rising global temperatures.

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MSNBC
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday to explain why it has refused to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from cars, putting the Bush administration under pressure from an unusual coalition of environmental groups and leaders of the auto industry to move quickly on global warming.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, March 30 — A federal judge in California on Friday overturned the Bush administration’s revised rules for management of the country’s 155 national forests, saying that the federal Forest Service violated the basic laws ensuring that forest ecosystems have environmental safeguards.

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Grist
On Wednesday, the Inspector General's office at the Department of Interior released a report showing that a Bush appointee who lacked any background in natural science had "bullied, insulted, and harassed the professional staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to change documents and alter biological reporting regarding the Endangered Species Program." She had been "heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and reshaping ... scientific reports from the field."

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Thomas Paine's Corner
It's funny how a huge chunk of the world's population finally does realize that the planet is in trouble, but there is not a lot of action being taken. There are theories and possible solutions being worked on but some are not viable due to the time or economic constraints.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — A Bush administration official broke federal rules and could face administrative sanctions for leaking non-public federal information about endangered species to private industry groups, the agency's internal watchdog found.

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New York Times
Mountaintop mining is a cheap and ruthlessly efficient way to mine coal: soil and rock are scraped away by enormous machines to expose the buried coal seam, then dumped down the mountainside into the valleys and streams below.

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New York Times
HELENA, Mont., March 28 — Seven former directors of the National Park Service have called on the secretary of the interior not to approve plans that would continue allowing as many as 720 snowmobiles a day at Yellowstone National Park.

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Huffington Post
It's just not sound science.

Yeah, that's what I expected to hear when I went to a Federalist Society's event that featured Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Well, that's not what he said. I'm not really sure what he said, actually. And I think that's the point.

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Los Angeles Times
Bush administration officials said Tuesday that they were reviewing proposed changes to the way the 34-year-old Endangered Species Act is enforced, a move that critics say would weaken the law in ways that a Republican majority in Congress was unable to do.

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New York Times
Al Gore held his first hearing on global warming about 25 years ago, when he was a member of the House of Representatives, and a quarter century later Congress seems to be listening to him. Apart from the usual dinosaurs — James Inhofe, who took great glee in pointing out that Mr. Gore had a big house that used lots of energy, and Trent Lott, who dismissed the former vice president’s ideas as “garbage” — Mr. Gore received a strong welcome from the two Congressional committees that will frame any legislation to deal with the warming threat.

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Yahoo News
HOBART (Reuters) - Rising sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets are at upper limits of projections, leaving some human population centers already unable to cope, top world scientists say as they analyze latest satellite data.

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Guardian
It was a bittersweet homecoming. The last time Al Gore was in Congress was in January 2001, to see George Bush confirmed as president after a vitriolic election campaign and count. One of the reasons he lost was his lack of passion, having listened to advice from campaign managers to focus on the economy and avoid the one issue that animates him: the environment.

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New York Times
Former Vice President Al Gore, rejecting complaints by Republican lawmakers that he was waging an alarmist war on coal and oil use, insisted before Congressional panels today that human-caused global warming constitutes a “planetary emergency” requiring an aggressive federal response.

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Washington Post
Al Gore wowed moviegoers and Hollywood elites with his Oscar-winning documentary on global warming. Today he faces a far tougher audience in Congress.

The 2000 Democratic presidential nominee will testify about the urgency of addressing climate change in two appearances on Capitol Hill before panels that include skeptics of the sort that Gore probably hasn't met on the red carpet.

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Guardian
The Bush administration ran a systematic campaign to play down the dangers of climate change, demanding hundreds of politically motivated changes to scientific reports and muzzling a pre-eminent expert on global warming, Congress was told yesterday.

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New York Times
If President Bush requires any more proof that he sits on the wrong side of the global warming debate, he should listen to his own scientists. An internal draft of a report the administration will soon forward to the United Nations shows that his program of voluntary reductions has done little to stop the rise in greenhouse gases generated in this country.

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New York Times
For a couple of years, there have been encouraging signs that conservative Christians are starting to take environmental matters seriously — especially global warming. But in a recent letter, several of the most prominent leaders of the conservative Christian wing of the Republican Party, including James Dobson, Gary Bauer and Paul Weyrich, told the policy director of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Rev. Richard Cizik, to shut up already about global warming.

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Washington Post
Two senior House Democrats demanded yesterday that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne turn over documents to Congress in order to determine whether the administration was preventing federal scientists traveling abroad from discussing how global warming affects polar bears.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — Setting up a confrontation with President Bush over spending, the Democratic-controlled House on Friday approved a bill that would increase funding for clean-water projects, such as those aimed at preventing beach pollution.

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Der Spiegel
"Ambitious." "Credible." "Qualitative difference." German Chancellor Angela Merkel was full of praise on Friday for the climate change agreement reached at the European Union spring summit. She said she is personally "very satisfied" -- even "happy" -- about the compromise.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso went even further in extolling the deal. He spoke of an "historic result" at the press conference called to announce that Europe's 27 member states had reached consensus.

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Center for Biological Diversity
ANCHORAGE, Alaska– Today the Center for Biological Diversity denounced a Bush administration directive restricting the ability of government scientists traveling abroad to discuss global warming, sea ice, and polar bears. The memo requires employees traveling in situations where these topics could arise to submit a statement of assurance that the employee understands “the administration’s position on these issues,” and will not be speaking on, or responding to, questions about them.

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TruthDig
Nothing screams “I (heart) global warming” quite like a romp around Capitol Hill in your bikini top at Christmastime. I speak from experience; this past holiday season, high on Coppertone and early-blooming cherry trees, I found myself all too eager to tryst with the infamous 21st-century menace—never mind that he’d recently melted the heart of the Ayles Ice Shelf, screwed 2,000 polar bears in the Beaufort Sea and sweet-talked the pasty male congressional interns into prematurely bearing their chests on the National Mall in January. Do I regret my indulgence? No. Have I repented? Yes. My cure? A blustery island called Great Britain.

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Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON -- More than two dozen evangelical leaders are seeking the ouster of Rev. Richard Cizik from the National Association of Evangelicals because of his "relentless campaign" against global warming.

In a March 1 letter to L. Roy Taylor, chairman of the NAE board, Focus on the Family Chairman James Dobson and others said the NAE vice president's activism on global warming is "demoralizing" the evangelical umbrella group.

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New York Times
The Bush administration estimates that emissions by the United States of gases that contribute to global warming will grow nearly as fast through the next decade as they did the previous decade, according to a long-delayed report being completed for the United Nations.

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New York Times
Urbana, Ill.

WHEN Hollywood filmmakers want to heighten the tension of an insect fear film, they just arrange for millions of killer bees to appear out of nowhere to threaten a vulnerable group of people — over the years, these have included children in a school bus, celebrants at a Mardi Gras parade and people living near a nuclear power plant.

But people from all demographic groups across the country are facing a much more frightening real-life situation: the disappearance of millions of bees. This winter, in more than 20 states, beekeepers have noticed that their honeybees have mysteriously vanished, leaving behind no clues as to their whereabouts. There are no tell-tale dead bodies either inside colonies or out in front of hives, where bees typically deposit corpses of dead nestmates.

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Washington Post
The scientific debate about whether there is a global warming problem is pretty much over. A leading international group of climate scientists reported last month that the evidence for global warming is "unequivocal" and that the likelihood it is caused by humans is more than 90 percent. Skeptical researchers will continue to question the data, but this isn't a "call both sides for comment" issue anymore. For mainstream science, it's settled.

The question now is what to do about global warming.

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Science Daily
The western United States has experienced increasing drought conditions in recent years -- and conditions may worsen if global climate change models are accurate -- yet the country is doing little to prepare for potential catastrophe, say a group of scientists.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States has come under heavy criticism, including from people who live almost on top of the world.

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NRDC
WASHINGTON (February 28, 2007) -- The Environmental Protection Agency has failed to protect the public from exposure to two highly toxic pesticides -- DDVP (dichlorvos) and carbaryl -- found in common household products that have been demonstrated in laboratory studies to cause severe neurological and developmental harm, according to a lawsuit filed today by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

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Informed Comment
That the Al Gore film "An Inconvenient Truth" was legitimized by an Oscar Sunday night for "Best Documentary" has wider implications for the future of the United States than it might seem, though admittedly it is a small step.

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Los Angeles Times
CORDOVA, ALASKA — Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus in his 25 years working the frigid waters of Prince William Sound.

The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the Gulf of Mexico. Alaska was way too cold.

But the sound was gradually warming.

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New York Times
Last Wednesday, members of the Rainforest Action Network, a scrappy little advocacy group, assembled in New York outside the Citigroup Center, where Merrill Lynch has a branch office. Dressed in top hats, carrying bags of coal and calling themselves “Billionaires for Coal,” the group was protesting what it felt was the hypocrisy of a giant investment bank that proclaims a devout commitment to “environmental excellence” even as it provides financing for dirty power plants.

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Boston Globe
ALBANY, N.Y. --Massachusetts and eight other states have sued the Bush administration for what officials claim is a failure to regulate mercury and other pollutants from cement plants.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — For decades, Sen. Ted Stevens has battled environmentalists, but the Alaska Republican now finds himself in an unusual spot: pushing tougher fuel-economy standards for cars.

Amid heightened concerns over global warming and U.S. dependence on foreign oil, Stevens is one of a number of lawmakers shifting gears in the debate over whether Congress should mandate stricter miles-per-gallon rules.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — President Bush is widely considered one of the world's most prominent skeptics of global warming. But to hear White House officials tell it, the world's view of him is wrong.

In recent days, White House officials have made a special effort to argue that Bush has always been concerned about climate change. Moreover, they say, he has long acknowledged that human activity may be a significant factor.

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New York Times
Whenever President Bush is being hammered for his environmental policies, as he has been recently for his timid approach to global warming, he heads for a national park to reveal a hidden kinship with nature and, in effect, to promise a new day.

He did so again last week, visiting Shenandoah National Park to announce a sizable increase in the National Park Service’s budget.

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Boston Globe
On the day that the latest report on global warming was released, I went out and bought a light bulb. OK, an environmentally friendly, compact fluorescent light bulb.

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Huffington Post
Last week the release of the IPCC Report by the world's 2500 top climatologists closed the scientific debate on global warming once and for all with a grave warning about its apocalyptical consequences to human civilization.

ExxonMobil Corporation reacted by publishing a paid advertisement on the New York Times Op-Ed page and a recent comment on Huffington Post announcing "Plan B." After years of denial the oil giant finally acknowledged the role of fossil fuel emissions in global warming, pledged to stop funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the country's most visible global warming denier, and boasted of its own efforts to deal with the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

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Wired
WASHINGTON -- Congress continued to probe allegations on Wednesday that the Bush administration tried to muzzle government scientists on climate change and suppress scientific research, including a comprehensive report in 2000 on global warming's impact on the United States.

During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers weighed in with harsh words for an administration that has come under fire in the 110th Congress for its stance on climate change.

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Washington Post
You could be excused for thinking that we'll soon do something serious about global warming. Last Friday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- an international group of scientists -- concluded that, to a 90 percent probability, human activity is warming the Earth. Earlier, Democratic congressional leaders made global warming legislation a top priority; and 10 big U.S. companies (including General Electric and DuPont) endorsed federal regulation. Strong action seems at hand.

Don't be fooled. The dirty secret about global warming is this: We have no solution.

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The Nation
Viewers of Fox News, listeners to Rush Limbaugh and all the other sorry deadenders who choose Bush administration propaganda over perspective will be shocked to learn that the debate about global warming has been over for a long time.

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Science Daily
Global studies by IGBP show that human-driven environmental changes are affecting many parts of the Earth’s system, in addition to its climate. For example:

Half of Earth’s land surface is now domesticated for direct human use.

75 percent of the world’s fisheries are fully or over-exploited.

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The Age
THIS is how the world ends: not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a PowerPoint presentation.

The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, unveiled in the grey UNESCO headquarters in Paris, was concise and to the point. But the graphs and charts projected onto a vast screen, above the heads of the assembled scientists, were even more concise.

They showed how global temperatures have soared and how they would go further in the immediate future. The words "hell" and "handcart" came to mind.

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Independent
The Bush administration - out of touch with much of the world and much of the nation over climate change - has been put under even greater pressure to take action to deal with global warming as a result of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's findings.

As Washington continues to refuse to impose limits on carbon emissions - even while governments at state level are taking action in this area - Mr Bush was urged to adopt a new policy immediately.

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Guardian
The world's scientists yesterday gave their starkest warning yet that a failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions will bring devastating climate change within a few decades.

Average temperatures could increase by as much as 6.4C by the end of the century if emissions continue to rise, with a rise of 4C most likely, according to the final report of an expert panel set up by the UN to study the problem. The forecast is higher than previous estimates, because scientists have discovered that Earth's land and oceans are becoming less able to absorb carbon dioxide.

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Los Angeles Times
CAN YOU SAY "smoke and mirrors"? Instead of accepting mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions, the Bush administration now proposes to combat global warming through the deployment of giant mirrors that reflect sunlight back into outer space.

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Guardian
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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Washington Post
With the release of the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tomorrow, the fourth since the organization's founding in 1988, many will be looking for what's new. How have estimates of sea-level rise changed? How soon will we achieve a doubling of carbon dioxide levels?

Scientists and journalists focus on novelty, because both are largely about discovery. But from a policy perspective, what matters is not what's new but what's old. What matters are not the details that may have shifted since the last report, or that may shift again in the next one, but that the broad framework is established beyond a reasonable doubt. Although few people realize it, this framework has been in place for nearly half a century, and scientists have been trying to alert us to its importance for almost that long.

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Time
There are several ways to send a message. You can be bold and yell from a rooftop. You can be subtle and mention a theory in passing. Or if you really mean business, you can make a motion picture and, in order to reach even more people, organize an army to disseminate its message.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — Following through on the Democratic Party's pledge to conduct aggressive oversight, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) headed toward a possible confrontation Tuesday with the White House over his demands for documents that could show whether the Bush administration interfered with the work of government climate scientists to downplay the dangers of global warming.

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Guardian
George Bush proposes to deal with climate change by means of smoke and mirrors. So what's new? Only that it is no longer just a metaphor. After six years of obfuscation and denial, the US now insists that we find ways to block some of the sunlight reaching the earth. This means launching either mirrors or clouds of small particles into the atmosphere.

The demand appears in a recent US memo to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It describes "modifying solar radiance" as "important insurance" against the threat of climate change. A more accurate description might be important insurance against the need to cut emissions.

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BBC
Mountain glaciers are shrinking three times faster than they were in the 1980s, scientists have announced.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service, which continuously studies a sample of 30 glaciers around the world, says the acceleration is down to climate change.

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Huffington Post
In a quarter-page advertorial in Thursday's New York Times, ExxonMobil launched a new greenwashing campaign to salvage its earned reputation as Earth's number one global warming villain. For over a decade the giant oil company has waged a successful multi-million dollar propaganda campaign to deceive the public about global warming. Using phony think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, scientists-for-hire called biostitutes, slick public relations firms, and their indentured servants in the political process, they have intentionally defrauded the public by promoting the notion that global warming is a hoax or a sketchy theory that requires more study.

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Boston Globe
NEW YORK --Maybe it's the weird winter weather, or the newly Democratic Congress.

Maybe it's the news reports about starving polar bears, or the Oscar nomination for Al Gore's global warming cri de coeur, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Whatever the reason, years of resistance to the reality of climate change are suddenly melting away like the soon-to-be-history snows of Kilimanjaro.

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Washington Post
It was just a couple of dozen words out of more than 5,000, uttered so fast that many in the audience missed them at first. But President Bush's commitment to fight global warming in his State of the Union address this week has echoed around the world and provoked debate about whether he is shifting his view of climate change.

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Guardian
The US government wants the world's scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be "important insurance" against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday.

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Reuters
OSLO (Reuters) - World sea levels will keep rising for more than 1,000 years even if governments manage to slow a projected surge in temperatures this century blamed on greenhouse gases, a draft U.N. climate report says.

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AlterNet
People like to think of the courtroom as a crucible of justice, but to me it's always seemed a diluter of passions. The atmosphere is restrained, so respectful and genteel it's easy to forget that people's lives hang in the balance. The system has a way of straining out emotion. It is designed to objectify, to control the soaring passions that created the need for the courtroom in the first place.

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Independent (UK)
Environmentalists are unimpressed with George Bush's pledge to develop alternative sources of energy - accusing him of failing to confront the real issues driving climate change.

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Independent (UK)
And so, at last and at least, the words come. The evidence is now so thuddingly inescapable that even George W. Bush - a man who, when pricked, bleeds oil - has acknowledged "the serious challenge of global climate change" in his State of the Union address. It is only a rhetorical concession, another excuse to fiddle as the West Antarctic ice-sheet melts - but it is also a crux moment in the history of global warming denial.

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NRDC
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Jan. 22, 2007) - A diverse group of U.S.-based businesses and leading environmental organizations today called on the federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to achieve significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. The group said any delay in action to control emissions increases the risk of unavoidable consequences that could necessitate even steeper reductions in the future.

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Washington Post
Last week the administration embarrassed itself on climate change, and today will be excruciating. A confluence of forces -- the Democratic takeover of Congress, freak winter weather, Al Gore's documentary on global warming -- has conspired to create an exciting moment in the climate debate. But the Bush team seems determined to be a wallflower, and to step on its own toes as it watches.

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Guardian
Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

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New York Times
You don’t have to be a space or climate expert to recognize that this country’s ability to track climate and environmental changes from space is heading in the wrong direction. At a time when concerns about global warming are rising, the Bush administration is sharply reducing the number of satellites that can measure the impact of rising temperatures and a host of other environmental trends.

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Boston Globe
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Major corporations are joining environmental groups to press President Bush and Congress to address climate change more rapidly, news reports said on Friday.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 — The climate here has definitely changed.

Legislation to control global warming that once had a passionate but quixotic ring to it, is now serious business. Congressional Democrats are increasingly determined to wrest control of the issue from the White House and impose the mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions that most smokestack industries have long opposed.

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AlterNet
WASHINGTON, Jan 17 (Reuters) -The head of the U.S. Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee on Wednesday said she could take a piecemeal approach to tackling U.S. greenhouse gas emissions rather than a single bill, with the aim of putting the first-ever mandatory caps on U.S. emissions.

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ABC News
WASHINGTON Jan 17, 2007 (AP)— House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, intent on putting global warming atop the Democratic agenda, is shaking up traditional committee fiefdoms dominated by some of Congress' oldest and most powerful members.

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Times (UK)
Climate change is as great a threat to the world as international terrorism and nuclear war, Professor Stephen Hawking said yesterday.

The cosmologist and mathematician said that the twin dangers of global warming and nuclear proliferation needed to be tackled urgently.

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Boston Globe
TUCSON, Ariz. --Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff waived environmental rules Friday to clear the way for a border fence to be constructed along the Mexican border.

The move circumvented a series of laws, from the Endangered Species Act to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, outraging environmentalists.

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Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Six U.S. senators, including potential 2008 presidential contenders from both major parties, unveiled legislation on Friday that would force power plants and industry to curb heat-trapping greenhouse gases, seeking to cut emissions to one-third of 2000 levels by 2050.

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Thomas Paine's Corner
1. The Great Emergency: Global Warming, Mass Death and Resource Wars in the 21st Century

"We are the watchers. We are the witnesses. We see what has gone before. We see what happens now, at this dangerous moment in human history. We see what's going to happen, what will surely happen unless we come together---we, the Peoples of all Nations---to restore peace, harmony and balance to the Earth, our Mother." --Chief Arvol Looking Horse, from White Buffalo Teachings

At the Sundance Film Festival Al Gore declared, "We have a category five denial of this issue [global warming]. I believe our political system is broken, however, I have optimism and hope. A rebellion is gathering." But rebellion isn’t what Al Gore is fostering. Speaking at NYU against what one commentator called a “stately backdrop of American flags,” Gore’s comments were focused on “uplift,” and calls to action slathered in a “thick layer of patriotism” and good old capitalist know-how. He seemed oblivious to irony, saying of the US, “Our natural role is to be the pace car in the race to stop global warming."

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Washington Post
Last year was the warmest in the continental United States in the past 112 years -- capping a nine-year warming streak "unprecedented in the historical record" that was driven in part by the burning of fossil fuels, the government reported yesterday.

According to the government's National Climatic Data Center, the record-breaking warmth -- which caused daffodils and cherry trees to bloom throughout the East on New Year's Day -- was the result of both unusual regional weather patterns and the long-term effects of the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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Baltimore Sun
On Dec. 27, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced a proposal to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act because of the loss of its sea ice habitat from global warming. This proposal marks the first legally binding admission by the Bush administration of the reality of global warming.

The significance of the polar bear decision has not been missed by those who stand to benefit from a continuation of the administration's head-in-the-sand approach to global warming.

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Washington Post
SEATTLE -- After years of close association with the Republican Party and hard-nosed opposition to federal land-use regulation, the National Rifle Association is being pressured by its membership to distance itself from President Bush's energy policies that have opened more public land for oil and gas drilling and limited access to hunters and anglers.

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Washington Post
THE BUSH administration has done everything in its power to do as little as possible about climate change. Yet the reality of global warming has a way of intruding even on the most willfully heedless of politicians. Not even an administration dead set against mandatory curbs on carbon emissions can deny that the habitat of the polar bear, as Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne put it the other day, "may literally be melting." In response, the administration is proposing to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

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Los Angeles Times
LAST JULY, with ships off Hawaii poised to begin one of the Navy's largest training exercises, a federal judge in Los Angeles temporarily halted use of a dangerous type of military sonar — called midfrequency active sonar, or MFA sonar, used to detect submarines — that has been linked to mass strandings and deaths of whales around the world.

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New York Times
Here are a few bulletins from planet Earth:

Dec. 12 — Exhaustive computer simulations carried out at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., suggest that the Arctic Ocean will be mostly open water in the summer of 2040 — several decades earlier than expected. Scientists attribute the loss of summer ice largely to the buildup of carbon dioxide and other man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

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ABC News
Jan. 3, 2007 — A new report details what it calls an "enormously successful" disinformation campaign by ExxonMobil that used tobacco-industry tactics to fund groups who cast doubts and deceive the public on the scientific consensus regarding global warming.

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New York Times
The long history of Congressional bipartisan cooperation on environmental issues dating back to Richard Nixon has been seriously challenged only twice. The first time was in 1995, when the Gingrich Republicans swept into Washington determined to roll back environmental laws, a threat averted by President Bill Clinton’s veto pen and the exertions of a group of moderate Republicans. The second challenge occurred during the Congress that has now thankfully drawn to a close.

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Scotsman
ITS collapse was so violent that it was picked up by earthquake monitors 150 miles away - a thundering warning to the world that the Arctic was heating up faster than scientists had imagined.

A giant ice shelf, covering 41 square miles, had broken off from the Canadian mainland and floated off into the sea.

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MSNBC
TORONTO - A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a “major” reason for the event.

The Ayles Ice Shelf — all 41 square miles of it — broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.

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Los Angeles Times
CONSIDER THE humble polar bear: Ursus maritimus to the scientists who admire it for its intelligence. Now consider President Bush, who might be classified as Executum obstreperum by the thousands of scientists who say his administration fails to appreciate the gravity of global warming. Is it possible that the polar bear can do what the scientists cannot?

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Independent (UK)
The administration of George Bush is not exactly known for its responsible stewardship of the environment. Lest we forget, Mr Bush is the President who wanted to open a protected part of Alaska to oil prospecting, until the plan was scuppered by Congress. He is the President, too, who - in an early act of defying the international consensus - reversed his predecessor's acceptance of the Kyoto treaty even before Congress had refused to ratify it. And he has given every impression of believing that global warming is not a threat - at least not one that the US needs to help avert.

So why is it that, two years before leaving office, the Bush administration has suddenly decided to embrace the cause of the polar bear?

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Time
There is a limit to the pugnacity of any Administration. Richard Nixon reached it in Cambodia; John F. Kennedy reached it at the Bay of Pigs. Until now, Pres. George W. Bush may never have encountered an eye he wasn't willing to at least consider poking. But even for him, the polar bear may have finally proven to be a fight too far.

In a move that is delighting environmentalists, the Department of Interior is announcing a new proposal to designate the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The move settles a lawsuit brought by three environmental groups — the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace and the Center for Biological Diversity — and while the resolution itself was not a stunner, the implications of it are: The government must effectively own up to global warming as the likely cause of the problem. For a White House that has long questioned whether human-influenced climate change exists at all, this is a shift not just in policy, but in the very foundations of its environmental orthodoxy.

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New York Times
MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — The standoff here between farmers and environmentalists was familiar in the modern West.

With salmon and wildlife dwindling in the Skagit River Delta, some environmentalists had argued since the 1980s that local farms should be turned back into wetlands. Farmers here feared that preachy outsiders would strip them of their land and heritage.

This year, though, the standoff ended — at least for three longtime farmers in this fertile valley, who began collaborating with their former enemies to preserve wildlife and their livelihoods.

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Boston Globe
THE REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. warned that "our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." There are few matters of international importance that could have more dire consequences than being silent about the dangers of global warming.

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Truthdig
Americans can adapt, one supposes, to an Alaska without polar bears, a New Hampshire without fall colors and a Florida without its bottom third. But most would probably like to save these things for their descendants. A recent Time/ABC poll found that 88 percent of Americans think global warming threatens future generations.

President Bush was never one to lose sleep over future generations—just look at his budget deficits. Add in another matter he’s supremely indifferent to, the environment, and we have the Bush policy on global warming. That is, do zero to cut U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. Actually, do less than zero. His early doubting that humans even play a role in climate change demoralized those trying to grapple with the problem.

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Boston Globe
ALBANY, N.Y. --Connecticut joined more than a dozen states in suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Monday to lower soot levels from smokestacks and exhaust pipes, a move the state officials argue would save thousands of lives.

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AJC
While the political debate in the United States over global warming spins in mindless circles, scientific evidence that man-made gases are dangerously heating the planet keeps piling up.

Consistent with alarming trends that cannot be explained by natural temperature variations, international climate agencies have concluded that 2006 will likely end up as the fifth- or sixth-warmest year on record since 1880, when such statistics were first compiled. In this country during that same period, above-average temperatures throughout most of this year are on track to make it the third-warmest.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Forest Service no longer will give close environmental scrutiny to its long-term plans for America's national forests and grasslands.

It also no longer will allow the public to appeal on long-term plans for those forests, but instead will invite participation in planning from the outset.

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Boston Globe
NARO MORU, Kenya --Rivers of ice at the Equator -- foretold in the 2nd century, found in the 19th -- are now melting away in this new century, returning to the realm of lore and fading photographs.

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Wired
Our love of driving is killing us. While we think of car crashes as causing fatalities, the production and transportation of fuel also significantly undermines public health.

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Boston Globe
SAN FRANCISCO --Some of the scientists who first advanced the controversial "nuclear winter" theory more than two decades ago have come up with another bleak forecast: Even a regional nuclear war would devastate the environment.

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New York Times
New studies project that the Arctic Ocean could be mostly open water in summer by 2040 — several decades earlier than previously expected — partly as a result of global warming caused by emissions of greenhouse gases.

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New York Times
The Environmental Protection Agency disclosed last week that it had revised — stood on their head is more like it — procedures it has used for 25 years to set standards for air pollutants like soot and lead. The administration said the change will streamline decision making. Perhaps it will. It will also have the further effect of decreasing the role of science in policy making while increasing the influence of the agency’s political appointees.

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Washington Post
THE LAST hearing on global climate change chaired by Sen. James M. Inhofe provided an excellent and public tutorial on why Americans should be grateful that it was, in fact, his last. The departing chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has occupied a unique perch from which to take action on climate change. Instead, he has used his time at the committee's helm to cast spurious doubts on the problem even as the scientific consensus about its reality and severity has gelled. Last week, the Oklahoma Republican held a hearing to denounce the real villain in the debate: the media.

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Los Angeles Times
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday streamlined the way it updates regulations for the nation's worst air pollutants, a move that drew immediate charges that officials are trying to quash scientific review to benefit industry at the expense of public health.

The changes, some of which closely mirror requests by the American Petroleum Institute and Battery Council International industry groups, include shortening what is now an exhaustive scientific review, and replacing recommendations prepared by career scientists and reviewed by independent advisors with a "policy paper" crafted by senior White House appointees at the agency.

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San Francisco Chronicle
They say that when gas prices drop, SUV sales surge.

Conversely, they say that when gas prices jump above three bucks a gallon and hover there for a while and everyone is slapped upside the head once again with the painful and obvious reminder that oh yeah we are in the midst of a brutal and losing war over waning petroleum deposits and we are heating up the planet like maniac monkeys and we are really really not paying close enough attention to what all those hurricanes and eroded glaciers and crying trees are trying to tell us, well, that's when our conscience finally kicks in and more people consider buying a Prius and maybe an organic salad, just in case.

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Thomas Paine's Corner
In the beginning the Earth was without form, inanimate objects lay dormant, chemicals worked their magic; then the miracle of a single cell, and life began to evolve. Individual cells grouped themselves accordingly, and then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, life gave birth to awareness, a consciousness that soon began to turn inward upon itself, a self-reflective tour de force, the commencement of an ever-evolving, always-expanding, mind, one that would soon turn “the stolen fruit of the Tree of its own Knowledge” against the very breeding ground of its own birth.

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Seattle PI
One of the hallmarks of the Bush administration's six-year effort to undercut environmental protection has been its contempt for the free flow of information.

Early on, the White House rewrote conclusions of the Environmental Protection Agency's scientists on global warming. Then it refused to disclose which companies and lobbyists helped draft its energy policy. Now it is seeking to weaken the Toxic Release Inventory, the 20-year-old law that requires polluters to disclose publicly the extent of their pollution.

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MSNBC
VIENNA, Austria - Europe's Alpine region is going through its warmest period in 1,300 years, the head of an extensive climate study said Tuesday.

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AlterNet
Though there are no wild penguins in North America, an environmental group is asking the US government to consider several species endangered -- a move that could help activists compel the government to act against global warming.

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The Nation
When the producers of Al Gore's essential documentary about the climate crisis, An Inconvenient Truth, offered 50,000 free copies of the DVD to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) to be used in the classroom, they didn't get the response they expected.

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Boston Globe
SAN FRANCISCO --A federal judge has ruled that a Clinton-era ban on road construction in national forests applies to hundreds of oil and gas leases sold by the Bush administration.

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YubaNet
In an unprecedented action, representatives for more than 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are calling on Congress to take immediate action against global warming, according to a petition released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The petition also calls for an end to censorship of agency scientists and other specialists on topics of climate change and the effects of air pollution.

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Washington Post
Under pressure from Democratic senators, the Bush administration has modified its proposal to ease public reporting requirements for companies that handle or release toxic chemicals.

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New York Times
The Bush administration has been on a six-year campaign to expand its powers, often beyond what the Constitution allows. So it is odd to hear it claim that it lacks the power to slow global warming by limiting the emission of harmful gases. But that is just what it will argue to the Supreme Court tomorrow, in what may be the most important environmental case in many years.

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Deutsche Welle
The rate at which humans are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has more than doubled since the 1990s according to a new Australian study.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration pleased farmers and frustrated environmentalists Monday by declaring that pesticides can be sprayed into and over waters without first obtaining special permits.

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Washington Post
ON WEDNESDAY, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in what could prove to be one of the most fateful environmental cases in a generation -- or not, depending on what the justices do with it. Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency is a challenge by states and environmental groups to the Bush administration's refusal to regulate greenhouse gases as pollution.

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Washington Post
SEATTLE -- As the Bush administration debates much of the world about what to do about global warming, butterflies and ski-lift operators, polar bears and hydroelectric planners are on the move.

In their separate ways, wild creatures, business executives and regional planners are responding to climate changes that are rapidly recalibrating their chances for survival, for profit and for effective delivery of public services.

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Washington Post
While the political debate over global warming continues, top executives at many of the nation's largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.

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CBS News
(AP) The Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that pesticides can be applied over and near bodies of water without a permit under the federal Clean Water Act.

The decision brought immediate criticism from an environmental watchdog group and from a senator involved in environmental issues. They said it would make it easier to pollute the nation's lakes and streams.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --Air quality regulators in at least 22 states have concluded that the Bush administration's approach to cutting mercury pollution from coal-burning power plants is too weak and are pursuing tougher measures of their own.

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Der Spiegel
EU climate policy is gearing up to confront the US. Imports from countries that refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol could be subject to punitive tariff duties -- a new measure intended to pressure the Bush Administration. A climate tax on flights may also be introduced.

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Guardian
Within the glorified game of musical chairs that will take place on January 3, when the Democrats finally take control of Congress, one of the more interesting changeovers has largely gone unnoticed.

It involves a change in the leadership of one of the Senate committees, the Senate environmental public works committee. And in years to come, it could be looked back on as a shift of supreme significance.

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BBC
UN chief Kofi Annan has criticised a "frightening lack of leadership" in tackling global warming, at a major UN climate summit in Nairobi.

Mr Annan told delegates the phenomenon was as grave a threat as conflict, poverty and the spread of weapons.

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Boston Globe
SAN FRANCISCO --Environmentalists sued the Bush administration Tuesday for failing to produce a report on global warming's impact on the country's environment, economy and public health.

The plaintiffs claim the government must complete such a report every four years under the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The plaintiffs say the last report was due in November 2004.

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ABC News
WASHINGTON Nov 14, 2006 (AP)— The Democrats who will steer environment issues in the new Congress are polar opposites of their Republican predecessors, but changing environmental policy is like turning around an aircraft carrier it's very slow.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — Last week’s election whipsawed the Congressional committees that are crucial battlegrounds for environmental and energy legislation. But even many environmentalists believe that an ambitious new agenda is unlikely.

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