Environmental Politics

"Here comes more bad PR for climate change–denying politicians.

"TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Federal officials are declaring a fishery disaster for Florida's oyster industry in the Gulf of Mexico.

The collapse of the oyster industry last year followed a drought that reduced freshwater into Apalachicola Bay. But state officials have also blamed the lack of freshwater flow due to increased consumption in Georgia.

"WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was 'flouting the law' when it stopped work on a review of the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, despite the Obama administration’s insistence that the site be shut down."

"Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron has given his unequivocal backing to the divisive 'fracking' process used to extract shale gas from rocks, risking angering his party's supporters from more rural areas."

TransCanada and Department of Homeland Security keep close eye on activists, FOIA documents reveal."

A legislative and regulatory battle over slaughter of wild horses is dividing conservation celebrities and American Indians in the Southwest and Mountain West.

"A 27-year-old U.S. program intended to warn the public of the presence of hazardous chemicals is flawed in many states due to scant oversight and lax reporting by plant owners, a Reuters examination finds."

"WASHINGTON — As part of the climate change agenda he unveiled this year, President Obama made a commitment to significantly reduce the federal government’s dependence on fossil fuels. The government, he said in a speech in June at Georgetown University, 'must lead by example.' But just two miles from the White House stands the Capitol Power Plant, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the nation’s capital and a concrete example of the government’s inability to green its own turf."

"A year ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service was poised to use a scientifically flawed range map for the American burying beetle during a preliminary assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline's effect on the endangered insect."

"The weather is one of those topics that is fairly easy for people to agree on. Climate, however, is something else. Most of the scientists who study the Earth say our climate is changing and humans are part of what's making that happen. But to a lot of nonscientists it's still murky. This week, two of the nation's most venerable scientific institutions tried to explain it better."