What an outstanding story (HCN, 9/19/11, “Lost Opportunity”). I moved to Montana eight years ago and have seen only snapshots of the full picture. This story is a well-balanced portrayal of a rarely seen, dirty underbelly here in Montana. It avoids the simple sound-bite friendly rhetoric that too often dominates discussion of environmental issues in […]
Climate change
Posted inGoat
Friday news roundup: Sulfide statutes and Jesus statues
EPA reinstates reporting requirements for a poisonous gas To the relief of citizen advocacy groups (and the irritation of industry), the Environmental Protection Agency finalized its decision last week to lift a 17-year-long Administrative Stay on Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reporting requirements for hydrogen sulfide — a poisonous gas that smells like rotten eggs and […]
Posted inGoat
Mapping the West … in air polluters
If you happen to glance over the fantastic air pollution investigation jointly released by National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity this week (along with a handful of other cooperating media outlets that did regional stories), you might think to yourself: “Thank (insert deity here) I don’t live in the Midwest, East or […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Utah’s ancient Lake Bonneville holds clues to the West’s changing climate
A curious horizontal line runs across the range — a notch cut into the mountains like a railroad bed, visible from many miles away. It snakes around every gully and ridge, 600 feet above the playa where the Donners hauled their wagons. Floating Island Mountain, visible to the east above a perpetual mirage, also shows […]
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 inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Lake Bonneville
The lake covered most of northwest Utah — and some parts of Idaho and Nevada — 15,000 years ago. Today, all that remains of Bonneville is the Great Salt Lake.
Posted inRange
How coal is already congesting Washington’s railways
By Eric de Place, Sightline.org This post is part of the research project: The Dirt on Coal Washington’s rail system is congested in places. Adding dozens of coal trains each day, without also big new capacity improvements, could cripple the system with gridlock. All that is common knowledge. Less well-known is this: coal shipments are […]
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 inWotr
The foul air outside my window
I think it’s fair to say that most of the Washington, D.C., politicians attacking clean-air safeguards don’t have the same view out their front windows as the families in my small community of 300 people. We look out on four polluting smokestacks, a small mountain of coal ash, and seeping wastewater ponds. All are part […]
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 inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Praise for Brad Tyer’s “Lost Opportunity”
Gorgeous article (HCN, 9/19/11). Insightful and sophisticated; layered in scope; ethical and pragmatic; beautifully written. Emily DePrangTucson, Arizona Top-shelf journalism. It’s almost cruel to have to wait a year for the book after reading such astute reporting and beautiful prose. Keila SzpallerMissoula, Montana Phenomenal story. Deeply reported, deeply personal, too. I’d like to see more […]
Posted inGoat
Too much poop can be hazardous to your health
Should large quantities of manure from giant commercial farms be considered hazardous waste? They’re not right now, and at least 14 members of Congress want to keep it that way. The group, which includes Idaho Representative Mike Simpson (R), recently signed on to the Superfund Common Sense Act, a bill that would prevent the Environmental […]
Posted inRange
Feeling the wasteful weight of the electronics age
A university campus like the one where I work is a fine place to receive constant reminders of one’s age. For years, decades really, I paid no heed to older colleagues who complained that they had little in common with their undergraduate students. Now, however, I fully recognize that although I diligently work at keeping […]
Posted inGoat
A small victory for Libby
Rarely has good news emerged from Libby, Mont., in recent decades. Hundreds of residents of the small town have died and thousands more have been sickened from exposure to asbestos fibers, which spread from a local vermiculite mine throughout the community, ending up lodged in people’s lungs. Kids used to play in mine waste, and […]
Posted inGoat
The costs of climate change
From California beachside communities to remote villages in subarctic Alaska, the impacts of climate change are becoming ever more tangible, as shown by two government studies released this week. “Sea-level rise is here and we need to start planning for it,” said Philip King, associate professor of economics at San Francisco State University, in the […]
Posted inRange
Mega myths of the Keystone XL pipeline
By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearing House Among hundreds of protestors who spent three days in jail in Washington D.C. for publicly opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,700-mile-long conduit planned to carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries, was Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org. When he was released from the […]
Posted inRange
This is your brain on climate change
By Anne Fahey, Sightline.org Remember those old anti-drug television commercials with an egg sizzling in a frying pan? Here’s a new twist: This is your brain. This is your brain on climate change. I’ve written before that with or without multimillion dollar campaigns to discredit climate science (and scientists), our brains don’t seem very well equipped to fathom the scope […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
EPA aims to clean up polluted air in Western gas fields
In gas patches East to West, tales of tainted water wells have garnered widespread media attention, putting hydraulic fracturing — broadly credited for the natural gas industry’s meteoric expansion of late — at the center of one of the country’s hottest environmental fights. But despite reams of circumstantial evidence, incontrovertible proof that fracking itself — […]
Posted inBlog
Extreme weather makes us pay attention to climate
This seems to be one of those times of the year when the weather forces us to pay it some special attention. It’s hurricane season, for one, and as I wrote this Irene was threatening the Caribbean and the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. Here in the low desert of Arizona we’re enduring what is likely to […]
Posted inRange
Why Washington’s only coal-fired power plant is having a bad year
By Clark Williams Derry, Sightline.org While I was looking for some other information, I ran across the most recent coal consumption stats from the US Energy Information Administration. And from all indications it’s been a very strange, very bad year for the Transalta coal-fired power plant in Centralia, WA. Take a look: The bars represent consumption […]