By Jennifer Langston, Sightline.org Attention Puget Sound Energy customers: Don’t feel bad if you missed the connection between your electricity bills and today’s headlines about reducing air pollution in scenic Montana. It’s not obvious. But news that the federal government wants owners of the Colstrip coal plant to invest in expensive new equipment to reduce […]
Climate change
Posted inGoat
Swiss, salt flats and the sublime
Crown Burgers’ parking lot, in downtown Salt Lake City, is filled at lunchtime with the smoky aroma of burgers and grease and exhaust pouring out of the long line of cars waiting for some grub. It was not my choice for dining, but it seemed like the appropriate place to go given the company: A […]
Posted inGoat
Bark beetles in double-time
Bark beetles have always been part of Western forests, cycling from massive outbreaks into periods of low activity. But the current beetle outbreak is unprecedented – it has killed 30 million acres of lodgepole, ponderosa, jack pine and whitebark so far, in a swath from New Mexico up into Canada and even Alaska. Now, scientists […]
Posted inGoat
Catching up on carbon capture projects
On a recent bike ride home from Paonia’s Paradise Theater, where the evening film was Melancholia, Lars Von Trier’s surreal goodbye to planet Earth, I observed the starry Colorado sky like a born-again tramp and only slightly avoided succumbing to the dolor from the film’s creeping commentary on humanity’s desperate plight against a doomed existence. […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2012: The Zombies of Teton County
Two degrees warmer and rising: A review of A Great Aridness
A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American SouthwestWilliam deBuys384 pages, hardcover: $27.95.Oxford University Press, 2011. Cracking open yet another book about climate change requires a certain amount of resolve. Most readers already know the facts: In the past 50 years, average temperatures in the United States have risen 2 degrees […]
Posted inRange
Climate debate hearkens back to days of the bison
An old bison bone on my desk has me thinking about air pollution, climate change and the American mind. You remember the basics from history class: Tens of millions of bison roamed the Great Plains. Along came Manifest Destiny and market hunters shot them for hides, tongues and just to get the great beasts out […]
Posted inGoat
Uncontrolled release
This scintillating-looking snippet of paperwork was pulled from the PR portion of a materials containment plan filed with the state of Colorado by Suncor Energy’s oil refinery in Commerce City, which produces about 90,000 barrels a day of gasoline, diesel and asphalt. It was supplied to High Country News by Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians, […]
Posted inRange
Risks remain from uranium mining near the Grand Canyon
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House When the 20-year withdrawal of nearly one million acres of public land from uranium development near the Grand Canyon was finalized last month, reaction was mixed. Conservationists, who’d been warning of contamination of surface and groundwater flowing into the Colorado River from mining activity, mostly exhaled in relief. (Never mind the […]
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: reporter spies and Bryce Canyon coal mine
Annals of paranoia Vigilantes in Nevada cracked an alleged Los Angeles Times spy network last weekend, revealing the identity of an undercover ‘reporter,’ Ashley Powers. Disguised beneath her press pass issued by the Clark County GOP and madly scratching words in a suspicious yellow notepad, the proud, alert citizens of Nevada precinct #1721 properly “uncovered” […]
Posted inWotr
Your trash is my treasure
It’s garbage day as the new year moves along, and the streets of Crested Butte in western Colorado are lined with black plastic bags filled with kitchen gadgets, coffee pots and designer bedding. Last year’s unwanted items sit abandoned at the curb to make way for this year’s must-haves. You can tell a lot about […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 2012: Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote
Beauty and the Beast
It is a dead place — boned with black, sentinel tree trunks, veined with unspeakably polluted water, laid bare under a paste-white sky. There is no sense of space or time, only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — Uranium Tailings No. 12, taken at Ontario’s Elliot Lake in 1995, part […]
Posted inGoat
Coal: curbed but not crushed
updated Dec. 29, 2011 For many Christmases to come, we Westerners are likely to have coal in our stockings. Or at least in our power plants. About 45 percent of our electricity is produced by burning coal. And even if our own demand dropped drastically, China is an emerging market for Western coal. Nonetheless, several […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2011: Perilous Passages
The year 2011, in apocalyptic weather events
Worried that the world may end in 2012 à la the alleged Mayan prophecies? You might want to get your head out of those New Age clouds and look around: 2011 was plenty apocalyptic worldwide and in the West. Here’s a month-by-month roundup of the region’s freakiest climate and weather events. January 2011 is ushered […]
Posted inDecember 12, 2011: Out on a limb
Polluted air, coming soon to Glacier National Park
Glacier National Park is next in line for hazy, polluted air (HCN, 11/14/11, “Out of the haze”). Oil and gas development along Glacier’s eastern border with the Blackfeet Reservation is increasing drastically. Nearly all of the Blackfeet land is leased to oil and gas companies. Park officials and Superintendent Chas Cartwright are concerned with potential […]
Posted inGoat
The bright side of the Berkeley Pit
Updated Jan. 5, 2012 It is a dead place. Stitched with skeletal plants and sentinel tree trunks, riven by rills of cloudy, unspeakably polluted water, laid bare against a paste sky. There is no sense of space or time here; only pure, absolute quiet. It is one of my favorite images — “Uranium Tailings No. […]
Posted inGoat
The age of disturbance
When my East Coast-based family rented a condo in Breckenridge, Colo. for our family vacation in June this year, my dad couldn’t stop exclaiming over the dead trees. Scores of lodgepole pines, killed by the bark beetle epidemic, lined pretty much every road we drove down or bike path we pedaled on. A recent report […]
Posted inRange
Helping prepare the West for harder, drier times
They don’t call it the Wild West for nothing. From crippling droughts to raging fires, the region is no stranger to natural disasters. But will it be able to weather the storm ahead? And natural disasters aren’t the only way climate change is leaving its mark in the West. Rising temperatures are allowing pests like the […]
Posted inWotr
Breathing clean air comes in second in Congress
Even in these politically polarized times, one might think that breathing clean air could muster some bipartisan support in Congress. A quick look at the bills the House of Representatives has been passing lately should dispel that naïve notion. Three bills aimed at delaying new air pollution rules on coal-fired power plants, cement kilns and […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: After 10,000 years
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Wanting to climb one last mountain before winter shuts down the high country until June, on Veteran’s Day I headed with my buddy Steve to Mount Augusta, a 10,000-foot peak in the remote Clan […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Clean air regulations protect park views by targeting coal plants
An interpretive plaque at the Park Point overlook in southwest Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park identifies the landscape’s near and distant features. Sleeping Ute Mountain frames Montezuma Valley to the west. Farther east rise the Carrizo Mountains, then the Chuska Range near the Arizona-New Mexico border. In the foreground, a volcanic relic called Shiprock juts […]