The wood stork, a large American wading bird, is no longer an endangered species after a successful three-decade conservation effort that has seen the population spread through the Southeast. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced Thursday that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is down-listing the wood stork from endangered to threatened under the…
Coming Clean – By Michael Brune – In his 19th-century curmudgeon’s classic, The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defined a plan as “the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.” When the EPA released its “Clean Power Plan” this month for reducing carbon pollution from power plants, the agency was clear about the results it expects…
BATON ROUGE, La. – While Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was in the nation’s capital last Saturday contemplating “a hostile takeover of Washington D.C.,” residents in his own state began a peaceful 155-mile walk from Grand Isle to the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge to show support for a lawsuit that would hold the oil and…
Coming Clean – By Michael Brune – I was honored to be invited to speak to the United Auto Workers in Detroit at their convention this week. Even though the Sierra Club and the UAW have been working together for years, some people don’t know we’re natural allies. Here are some other things you might…
A Menace to Us and CreationBy David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – Opposites appear at opposite ends of Alabama on June 5. At the upper extreme a rally in Florence is calling for tar sands mining to stop before it begins. Geologists have long known that gummy crude oil is locked into sandstone strata underlying…
By Glynn Wilson – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Coast Guard are working with the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator Office, Texas Petroleum and Forefront Emergency Management to mitigate an estimated 50-barrel crude oil spill in the Delta National Wildlife Refuge 10 miles southeast of Venice, in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. A silver…
By Glynn Wilson – At the behest of President Obama and after months of planning and public feedback, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released the much anticipated Clean Power Plan proposal on Monday. It seeks to cut carbon pollution from existing coal-fired power plants — the largest source of carbon pollution in the country —…
President Barack Obama set an ambitious goal two years ago to attract 100 million international visitors to the United States each year by the end of 2021. More than 70 million travelers from around the world visited the U.S. in the last year alone — and they spent more than $180 billion. “That’s huge, and…
Coming Clean – By Michael Brune – For more than a century, presidents have been using the Antiquities Act to save our national treasures, and President Obama’s just-announced designation of the Organ Mountains — Desert Peaks National Monument in southern New Mexico — shows exactly why this law is so indispensable. At nearly 500,000 acres…
We recently received this note from Albert Blok, Clinical Research Coordinator at American Educational Research Association, and publish it here as a letter to the editor. Editor: I’m a research coordinator for the Association of American Universities. Recently, I was visiting your site for research purposes, and came across a resource that no longer works.…
A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea. The study presents multiple lines of evidence, incorporating…
U.S. Rail System Needs an Upgrade – By Adam Federman – When residents in the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic describe the scene after an oil-train derailed and then exploded there last July, they say the burning petroleum was like a wall of fire, or a river of fire. The blaze, which burned for 36 hours,…
Glynn Wilson – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is now seeking public comment on what information could be reported and disclosed about chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations. As we reported in-depth two years ago, when the Alabama division of the U.S. Forest proposed opening up large tracts of the Talladega National Forest to natural…
By Glynn Wilson – The Obama Administration released the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment report on Tuesday, May 6, calling it “the most authoritative and comprehensive source of scientific information to date about climate-change impacts across all U.S. regions and on critical sectors of the economy.” The report, a key part of President Obama’s so-called…
By Glynn Wilson – It was July 5, 2010, while BP’s Deepwater Horizon was still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico and I was watching helpless from Gulf Shores, Alabama, that I began to ask the question: Where Oh Where Have All the Wildlife Gone? Are most of the birds already dead from the oil,…
Birmingham Company Agrees to Sell Property to Alabama State Docks – By Glynn Wilson – In an unusual turnaround from its ambition to build a new coal handling export terminal along the riverfront in Mobile, Alabama, Walter Energy has reached an agreement “in principle” with the State Port Authority to sell both the Blue Creek…
By David Underhill – MOBILE, Ala. – The first foreign substance flowing into Mobile’s drinking water from the new crude oil pipeline is not oil. It’s mud — and whatever welding and other construction debris got stirred into the disturbed earth of the pipe’s broad right-of-way through the watershed of the metro area’s reservoir Big…
By Glynn Wilson – The United States Supreme Court upheld the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the air pollution from coal-fired power plants on Tuesday in a ruling that is being hailed as a major victory for the environment but a political setback for the Obama administration. The 6-to-2 ruling upholds the…
By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — While many local and state governments across the country are joining the federal government in turning away from the development of fossil fuel production in favor of clean, renewable energy to fight climate change due to global warming and create the good, high paying jobs of the future,…
Delays Vote for Two More Weeks – By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — The Mobile City Council heard debate for three hours at Government Plaza on Earth Day about whether to overturn the Planning Commission’s approval of Walter Energy’s Blue Creek Coal handling terminal along the city’s riverfront, but the only vote was to…
