Environment

By Dr. Richard Swier

As previously posted on Red County

Last week marked a sad milestone:  50 days since the explosion on British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon rig triggered the oil spill that is still gushing out of control.  Sadly, almost two months into the disaster, precisely zero progress has been made in stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.      

By Stephanie Simon, for The Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2010

BOULDER, Colo.—This spring, city contractors will fan out across this well-to-do college town to unscrew light bulbs in thousands of homes and replace them with more energy-efficient models, at taxpayer expense.

By US Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK)
Ranking Member, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee

By Kent Holsinger, Contributing Editor
On December 2, 2009, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced the black-tailed prairie dog does not warrant listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The Service cited a steady increase in occupied habit and a thirty to seventy percent annual increase in population. The Service also found that increasing population trends evidenced that cropland conversion, urbanization and other habitat effects are not limiting factors for the species and sufficient habitat still exists.

It is a troubling time in America when extending Constitutional protections to the confessed 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the first amendment rights of Nalid Malik Hasan, a deranged Islamic jihadist with known ties to Al Qaeda, now charged for murdering 13 at Ft. Hood, Texas, are protected, but employees at the Environmental Protection Agency are silenced.

On March 3, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 opinion in Summers v. Earth Island Institute, et. al. Plaintiffs, five environmental groups, challenged a 238 acre salvage timber sale in the Seqoia National Forest. Citing the “proper--and properly limited--role of the courts in a democratic society,” Justice Scalia delivered the majority opinion which held plaintiffs had no standing to challenge the U.S. Forest Service regulations absent a showing of a concrete injury related to a particular project.

Environmental groups have begun submitting petitions and filing lawsuits to list hundreds of species at a time under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). These efforts present a marked and disturbing departure from the usual single-species petitions. If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service), or the courts, act upon these “bulk” petitions, the West could be blanketed with ESA listings of obscure plants, insects and animals before the regulated community can even appreciate the risk.