What do we make of the prospects for global action on the climate crisis, given recent events both in the U.S. Congress and in the international conversations leading up to Copenhagen? Something very peculiar is going on. Most of the major players are moving in the right direction -- toward...

In one of the most intriguing court decisions in years, the federal district judge who has presided over most of the cases involving responsibility for the damages caused by Hurricane Katrina, Stanwood Duvall, ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers was grossly negligent in shoddy oversight of the Mississippi...

I was the second witness yesterday morning as the EPA opened its hearing process on Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse pollutants. The first was from the American Petroleum Institute (API). He made one point over and over: the EPA shouldn't use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon...

Veterans Day had always been a day-off from environmentalism for me, but this year Veterans week was different. The Sierra Club was really, for the first time, a full participant -- a story that has been building slowly

Several years ago, the Sierra Club published a book by Jonathan Trouern-Trend, an...

Media coverage of last week's off-year elections has focused on Republican victories in two gubernatorial races, an upstate New York Congressional special election, and Mayor Bloomberg's reelection in New York City. Those races had in common that they were big-money contests, had very low voter turnout, and were dominated by...

...and the forest is the Tongass, it's highly unlikely that anyone will hear it -- so remote, pristine, and primeval is this temperate-rainforest treasure. The Tongass still has 9.5 million acres of roadless areas -- in all of the National Forest System there are only some 60 million, so the...

A year ago the American people voted for change. Central to what persuaded them was then-candidate Barack Obama's promise of a new way of thinking about energy and the environment, a restored respect for scientific integrity, and the leveraging of clean energy to jump start the American economy, rebuild the...

This post is long -- but it's one of my most heartfelt, so I hope you'll bear with me.

As I write this, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has begun deliberation on the Clean Energy Act, the major omnibus climate and energy bill that Committee Chair Barbara Boxer...

The California legislature is poised, it appears, to pass a new bond act that will finance changes in the state's water system. The combination of an outmoded system, mismanagement of basic ecosystems, climate change, and the current drought have created what The Economist  describes as "an economic and political...

It's really quite amazing. The main response at Tuesday's opening hearing of the Senate Environment Committee on the Clean Energy Act was that its 2020 goal -- a 20 percent reduction in U.S. emissions of greenhouse pollution -- was over-the-top ambitious. Senators, both Republican and Democrat, expressed grave concerns that...

NRDC and Sierra Club are members of the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, supporters of the clean truck program.

"Cancer alley."  That's what many Southern Californians call the 23-mile rail and truck corridor connecting our nation's largest seaport to massive distribution centers east of Downtown Los Angeles.  In California...

The intriguing thing about a conference chock full of present and former officers from the Army Corps of Engineers is that you get all the data you need, but you have to connect the dots yourself. At sessions focused on Hurricane Katrina during the Ecumenical Patriarch's Eighth Religion, Science...

Folks ask me, almost daily, "How is Obama doing?" My answer usually comes in two parts. At one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Executive Branch (even with still-incomplete teams in place) is moving with stunning speed on environmental and energy issues to make "change that works." For example, earlier this...

Richmond, VA -- Term limits -- particularly single terms -- make for very bad government. The Commonwealth of Virginia is unique -- it's the only state that has never allowed a governor to be elected for a second consecutive term, a tradition that reflects Thomas Jefferson's supposed aversion to executive...

San Francisco -- At some point we should stop letting blatantly absurd claims and lies pass unnoticed just because "everyone knows that big oil and coal don't tell the truth." So I'm periodically going to blow the whistle.

Here are two recent examples of whoppers that should have generated massive...

If you're worried about global warming, it's been a confusing week. Midweek, 150 major business executives blitzed Capitol Hill, arguing that the Congress needs to pass effective climate and energy legislation. But, in private lobbying meetings, more problems cropped up with senators who are not happy with the distribution of...

Two days ago, a district court judge upheld the results of a vote six months ago in Andrews County, Texas, about whether to use $75 million dollars in taxpayer bond receipts to construct a low-level nuclear waste dump here. The vote was agonizingly close: 642-639. There were ballot irregularities,...

It is emblematic of the past eight years that, when EPA Administrator Jackson explained, first at a dinner in San Francisco and then at Governor Schwarzenegger's Climate Summit in L.A., that her agency was actually going to use the Toxic Substances Control Act to protect Americans from dangerous chemicals,...

In a huge victory for America's fisheries and rivers, a broad spectrum of environmentalists, utilities, farmers, Native American nations, fishermen, and public agencies agreed yesterday to restore 300 miles of North America's most important salmon grounds. Four dams on the Klamath River -- Iron Gage, Copco1, Copco2, and J.C. Boyle...

San Francisco -- As the Senate slogs forward, and the Chamber of Commerce drags its feet, and the U.S. disappoints the rest of the world at the Bangkok climate talks, it's easy to get discouraged. But at the end of the day, all the hot-air CO2 emitted in political speeches...