U.S. Department of State headquarters, Washington, DC (Wikimedia Commons) The release of the State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline initiates the final stage in the permitting process: the 90-day National Interest Determination. The multiple reasons to oppose granting a construction permit include an overriding national interest in [...]
New Executive Office Building, Washington, DC, houses the Office of Management and Budget Are we seeing a shift in Obama’s priorities away from using the regulatory review process to avoid picking fights with special interests? It appears that, under the new administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the backlog [...]
Is a recently posted video on the polar vortex by Obama science adviser John Holdren a sign that the White House is finally ready to unleash this powerfully articulate climate science and policy communicator, after clearly holding him back during most of the past four years? “Holdren has not been allowed to do what Holdren [...]
New Executive Office Building, Washington, DC, houses the Office of Management and Budget A new report from the Administrative Conference of the United States suggests that political interference by the White House delayed numerous federal agency rulemakings in the run-up to the 2012 election. By 2013, proposed rules on clean air and water, [...]
Exploratory offshore well, Beaufort Sea, Alaska (Photo: U.S. Minerals Management Service, Wikimedia Commons) Dr. Monnett, whose observations of drowned polar bears raised alarms about climate change, had filed a whistleblower complaint in the wake of a witch hunt investigation by the U.S. Interior Department’s Inspector General. The case has been settled with a [...]
Congratulations to EPA on appointing Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists as the agency’s new scientific integrity official. Hopefully Dr. Grifo will be able to bring about some changes as appropriate on matters of concern that she is well-aware of. […]
The United States and Canada exemplify the power of the dominant energy interests. The governments of both countries strongly support the expansion of domestic fossil energy extraction, production, and export. But the collision between climate science and energy politics, and threats to freedom of communication, are playing out differently in the two countries. “Obama and Harper [...]
What is the U.S. Climate Action Report? Why is the 6th Climate Action Report important? What happens next with the public review draft? Which countries submit National Communications to the UNFCCC? When were previous National Communications submitted? What are the required contents? What are the new Biennial Reports and their required contents? Answers to these questions and more follow. […]
The draft Sixth Climate Action Report, posted by the U.S. State Department today for a 28-day public review and comment period, contains the U.S. Government’s most detailed discussion of its actions to address climate change. This report, required every four years under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, projects U.S. greenhouse gas emissions assuming existing [...]
Apparently abandoning its attempt to purge key wolf experts from a scientific peer review of a proposal to remove protections from gray wolves, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman acknowledged that the “optics of the situation” were a problem for the agency. In Washington, DC, parlance, you have an optics problem when it appears there [...]