Are settlements between environmentalists and the federal agencies they sue sweetheart deals?
Judith Lewis Mernit
Posted inGoat
Is big desert solar killing birds in Southern California?
The threat large-scale solar developments pose to tortoise in the desert Southwest has been well established, but what about the technology’s effect on birds? The question has been asked before — David Danelski of the Riverside Press Enterprise reported on it in Feburary of 2012 — but it emerged most dramatically last winter during the […]
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
Obama’s love letter to natural gas
The political and practical potential of gas in the climate fight
Posted inJune 24, 2013: Water Rights
The Latest: A gold tax in the Silver State?
BackstoryNevada’s tax on mining was set in its 1864 Constitution at “a rate not to exceed 5 percent of the net proceeds,” and never fundamentally changed — even with recently skyrocketing gold prices in a state desperate for revenue. Advocates for a higher mining tax have for years been frustrated by legislators unwilling to go […]
Posted inGoat
So long, San Onofre (in like 700 million years)
In the winter of 2005, I took a tour of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, a two-gigawatt power plant near San Clemente, Calif., 70 miles south of where I live. I was willing to entertain, if only for the sake of a story, that nuclear power offered a solution to impending climate catastrophe, as […]
Posted inGoat
Will Nevada force mining companies to pay their fair share?
The Nevada State Legislature wrapped up its biennial legislative session last Tuesday morning with a number of “good, bad or just plain weird” bills, as the Las Vegas Sun put it, headed to the desk of Gov. Brian Sandoval for approval. The Governor has already vetoed some of the proposed laws, including one that would […]
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Alaska’s populist, Sarah Palin-era oil tax gets the ax
The TransAlaska Pipeline System is in trouble. During its 1970s heyday, 2 million barrels of crude coursed through it every day from Alaska’s northernmost oilfields to the southern port in Valdez. Now that flow is down by more than two-thirds. The pipeline was not designed for lean times. If the volume of oil declines again […]
Posted inApril 15, 2013: Sacrificial Land
Sacrificial Land: Will renewable energy devour the Mojave Desert?
Over breakfast at the Crowbar Café in Shoshone, Calif., Brian Brown explains to me how he makes a living. Shoshone is a town of 31 in the Mojave Desert near the Nevada border; Brown runs his own business here, the China Ranch Date Farm. In the late summer, he strips offshoots from unproductive palm trees […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2013: Uncertain Landing
Will Los Angeles bring its cougars back from the brink?
In fall of 2011, biologists Dan Cooper and Miguel Ordeñana installed 13 remote cameras in a 4,000-acre patch of wild hills known as Griffith Park, above Los Angeles, Calif. Each month, they combed through predictable images of a near-urban ecosystem: Coyotes marking, bobcats stalking, deer browsing the chaparral. One evening last March, however, they got […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Sierra Club fights Keystone XL with civil disobedience
In 2004, Carl Pope, then-director of the Sierra Club, tangled publicly with Capt. Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Pope was steering the club towards cooperative solutions to environmental problems, collaborating with large corporations instead of fighting them. Watson, an advocate of direct action whose group blocked environmental despoilers with living bodies […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2013: Special issue: Natural resources education
Miguel Luna gives young Los Angelenos a beaker and a job
When Miguel Luna was an 8-year-old in the city of Cúcuta, Colombia, his family sometimes went days without water. The municipality would just shut it off, he recalls. “Nothing would come out of the faucets.” When the water returned, his grandmother, Hercilia, would ceremoniously drink a glass before bedtime. “She’d say to us, ‘Water is […]
Posted inDecember 10, 2012: The Evolution of Wildlife Tech
Producing more power means using more water
Locked up inside the 6 million years of sediment that makes up the Green River Formation, which extends across mostly public lands in Colorado and Utah, may be the equivalent of a few trillion barrels of oil. Even if only half of it is recoverable, the oil shale of the Mountain West could one day […]
Posted inGoat
A river of rain
Five days before the rain started in Sacramento on November 28, Marty Ralph knew what was coming: an “atmospheric river” was about to hit the West Coast of the United States. On satellite imagery, “ARs,” which carry warm water vapor up from the tropics on a mile-high current, “have a characteristic long and narrow look […]
Posted inGoat
The Nevada surprise
For the last 12 years, Nevada has had but three Representatives in the U.S. House: Two from the southern Clark County cities where 70 percent of Nevada lives and works, and another representing everybody else — all of rural Nevada from Elko in the far northwest to Pahrump on the state’s Western border with California. […]
Posted inWotr
Nevada, face down and flailing
Suddenly, this election season, state politicians in Nevada are refusing to sign the pledge – the one anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist has been foisting upon conservative candidates and lawmakers for years. It requires the faithful to swear that they will never, ever raise taxes. Many signers surely believe in it; others sign for fear of […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
As goes Nevada, so goes the nation?
Updated 10/30/12 Twenty-seven days before the general election, northern Nevada state Sen. Greg Brower pleaded a case before a roomful of ardent conservatives that sounded suspiciously moderate. “We can’t survive without any taxes and regulation,” the Washoe County Republican told a women’s club at the Nugget Hotel in Sparks. He acknowledged that he considers power-sharing […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Existential nomad: A profile of author Ruben Martinez
In Rubén Martinez’s new memoir, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West, the author examines the fertility kit that he and his wife had ordered, taking particular interest in its clean hypodermic syringes and needles. It is 2007, and the couple is living beneath northern New Mexico’s famed Black Mesa, in Velarde, […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
The politics of public health
On August 28, Utah Congressional candidate Mia Love took the podium at the Republican National Convention to riff on “personal responsibility” and the convention’s “We Built It” refrain — a distortion of President Obama’s words about how public infrastructure helps people run their businesses. Love didn’t mention Tropical Storm Isaac, which a few days before […]
Posted inJune 11, 2012: The Darkest Shade of Polygamy
Gregory Jaczko’s resignation weakens federal nuclear regulation
Two weeks before he resigned as chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on May 21, Gregory Jaczko publicly wrist-slapped Southern California Edison, whose two-gigawatt nuclear plant now sits idle on the Southern California coast. Utility spokesman Stephen Pickett had just announced that the troubled facility could be back online before midsummer. Jaczko swiftly dashed […]
Posted inMay 28, 2012: The Gila Bend Photon Club
The fading Arizona town of Gila Bend bets big on solar
One afternoon last April, I took a walk down Pima Street, the main drag that runs through Gila Bend, Ariz., linking the state highway from Phoenix with Interstate 8 to Yuma and beyond. It had been an unusual spring in the Southwestern deserts; abundant late-season rains spread carpets of green across rocky hillsides in the […]