When the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its revised business plan last week, headlines in the state and nation screamed gleefully about the project’s ballooning costs. “More grim news on $99 billion high-speed rail plan, as showdown looms,” lowed the Mercury News. “High-speed rail costs balloon to nearly $100B,” reveled the gotcha-happy investigative outfit California […]
Goat
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: ESA sees another day
The U.S. Supreme Court just waived its chance to rule on a constitutional challenge to the Endangered Species Act, the sixth time it’s refused to hear cases that might limit the bedrock law. The fish, endemic to the state, is two to three inches in length and resides in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Delta’s […]
Posted inGoat
Bugs in the plan
Despite the opposition of myriad conservation organizations, lawmakers, activists, and celebrities like Darryl Hannah, the Keystone XL pipeline has seemed well on its way to federal approval. Where star power has failed, however, an inch-long, carrion-dependent beetle might succeed. TransCanada conducted surveys on the beetle in 2009 and 2010, but they also trapped and moved […]
Posted inGoat
A fatal fungus, revealed
The death toll continues to mount in Eastern caves: Since the winter of 2007, when bat behavior turned erratic in upstate New York and state wildlife officials discovered thousands of bats dead in a cave near Albany, their noses smudged with a curious white substance, a million more have succumbed to a disease called white […]
Posted inGoat
Why 7 billion isn’t as scary as you think
On October 31, the human population officially hit 7 billion. Since humans have a thing for nice big round numbers, the occasion was marked with a great deal of fretting about overpopulation. And the UN’s choice of Halloween as the official date of 7 billion gave all kinds of alarmists the opportunity to declare that […]
Posted inGoat
Coal consolidation
A just-announced federal plan to merge the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement into the much-larger Bureau of Land Management is drawing mixed reactions. Some environmental groups wonder if changing the agency’s bureaucratic home will end its long-running coziness with industry. Yet critics of the proposal view it as one more attempt from the […]
Posted inGoat
Boulder’s energy future on the ballot
Glossy propaganda has been piling up in my mailbox for months in the lead up to Election Day in Boulder, Colo. Next to a frowney-faced electrical outlet, an ad warns of rate hikes and other terrors: “Municipalization means serious risks to rates and our community’s energy goals.” The slick, full-color fliers come from the Boulder Smart Energy Coalition, […]
Posted inGoat
Solar energy on public lands: The 80,000 have spoken
If the bumpy mountains that rise up between the California desert city of Twentynine Palms and the western flood plain of the Colorado River don’t look like anything else on this earth, it’s because they aren’t: The living things that flourish here can’t get a toehold anywhere else; once they’re gone from here, they’re gone […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Uranium — To mine or not to mine?
Though not as movie villain-worthy as its cousin plutonium, uranium, the naturally occurring element used to make nuclear weapons and fuel nuke plants, is just as contentious, as illustrated in this week’s headlines. On Wednesday, the Obama administration released a plan for a 20-year ban on uranium mining within a million acres of public land […]
Posted inGoat
Will Valles Caldera become a national park?
Around 3,000 elk, the second largest herd in New Mexico, spent the summer munching on Valles Caldera National Preserve grasslands before migrating to nearby Bandelier National Monument for the winter. A menagerie of other wildlife also stake claim to the collapsed volcano’s mountain forests: black bear, mountain lion, bobcat and 60 species of birds. A […]
Posted inGoat
‘Wilderness Lite’ wins the day
One of the last decades’ most scintillating (that is, in the headachey confusing sense evoked by scintillating scotoma) enviro-legal ping-pong matches may finally be drawing to a close. On Friday, a three-judge panel at the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver effectively reinstated the Clinton-era Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which banned new road […]
Posted inGoat
The hazards of nonhazardous coal ash
The morning of December 22, 2008, is etched into my journalistic memory. I was visiting my family back East and, with little to do other than surf the Interwebs, I had decided to join a new microblogging site called Twitter. I started following a number of environmental journalists and soon noticed that my feed was […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Pipeline of political posturing
Letters are flying as congressional lawmakers look to send a persuasive final word to the State Department on the Keystone XL Pipeline project in its final hour of debate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., spoke for the first time against the project in an Oct. 5 missive, but 22 House Democrats signed a letter […]
Posted inGoat
Colorado ski town zombification
In the last two months, I have been to three different “ski towns” in Western Colorado: Crested Butte, Vail, and Aspen. Each visit was my first and I approached the towns not with delusions of community-rich grandeur but with half-formed preconceptions based on my experiences in Montana’s resort communities, which tend to embrace the summer with […]
Posted inGoat
Tea Party goes local
Pam Stout’s first brush with fame came in the spring of 2010 when, after appearing in a New York Times story about the rise of the Tea Party, David Letterman invited her on his show to explain the movement. “I know nothing about the Tea Party,” he said at the outset of the interview. Stout went […]
Posted inGoat
State parks problems
State budget shortfalls have hurt many public amenities – including state parks. Starting in 2009, many Western states cut back on hours, staffing, and maintenance at their parks, and even closed some outright. Just about the only park system that didn’t suffer was Oregon’s, which uses lottery money to fund its parks. Now, in California, […]
Posted inGoat
Return of the corn
The roads that wind across the Taos Pueblo reservation pass through a cultural and environmental mosaic of a type common in the rural West, where natural beauty and human poverty overlap and sometimes blend. Here is a thicket of wild plums growing up along a lush irrigation ditch, the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising up […]
Posted inGoat
U.S. House attacks Clean Air Act
Even in these politically polarized times, one might be forgiven for presuming that breathing clean air could muster bipartisan support in Congress. But a quick look at what the House of Representatives has been up to roundly dispels such a quixotic notion. Two bills aimed at delaying new air pollution rules on cement kilns and […]
Posted inGoat
Weighing water
Updated 10-19-2011 For the past 20 years, U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger was a chief arbiter of many California water disputes, parceling water to farmers, urbanites and sensitive fish species. Appointed in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush, Wanger made more than 90 decisions in regard to California’s water before stepping down Sept. […]
Posted inGoat
Demise of the housing growth machine
In 2008, the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University released a report called Megapolitan: Arizona’s Sun Corridor. It predicted that the corridor, stretching from Nogales in the south to Prescott in the north, with Phoenix and Tucson at its heart, would more than double its population by 2040, requiring some 3.7 million […]