A previously announced decision to place a hold on solar project applications in six states has been reversed by the Bureau of Land Management. It seems that a little public opinion pressure can still be a persuasive force.

The Bureau of Land Management on Wednesday said it reversed an earlier decision freezing solar project applications in six Western states and would accept new applications.
“We heard the concerns expressed…about waiting to consider new applications and we are taking action,” BLM Director James Caswell said in a statement.

The concerns being expressed had a lot to do with the contrasting treatment of applications for oil and gas exploration in many of the same states.

Three stories in the news this morning taken together form a picture of a United States that is lagging behind when it comes to addressing the problems of global warming and climate change, and also showcase the importance of U.S. politics when it comes to international agreements.

First, here’s an article from the AP detailing how, when it comes dealing with global warming, the U.S. has been the worst of an at best mediocre bunch.

The U.S. government has done the least among the world’s eight biggest economies to address global warming, a study released Thursday found.

The G8 Climate Scorecards 2008, released Thursday ahead of next week’s gathering of the Group of Eight on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, also found that none of the eight countries are making improvements large enough to prevent temperature increases that scientists think would cause catastrophic climate changes.

No really good news there for anyone, the best countries, Britain, France , and Germany, are about half where they should be, and the study doesn’t include rapidly developing countries like China, India, and Brazil. But it doe3s show the U>S> seriously behind the other developed countries.

Next, Reuters explicitly links the G8 climate talks with the up-coming U.S. presidential elections.

G8 leaders could well cobble together some agreement next week on goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but bolder progress in climate change talks will probably have to wait until a new U.S president takes office.

The Bush Administration has so far refused to agree to goals for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Bush administration, though, says it will only set targets if big emerging economies such as China are on board.

“The G8 countries could certainly take a leadership stand and agree to that (a long-term goal), but I think that really depends on whether Bush is ready to take that leap or not,” said Jennifer Morgan, director for climate and energy security at Berlin-based think tank E3G. “Up to this point in time, the U.S. has shown no flexibility on this point.”

Which basically means everyone’s looking to what might happen when Bush is gone.

Still, with Washington’s climate stance expected to shift under a new president, environmentalists are already looking beyond Hokkaido. Democratic candidate Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain both want to introduce cap and trade systems for greenhouse gases as part of a goal of big cuts by 2050.

The statement in the Reuters article about McCain and Obama’s positions on greenhouse gases leaves the impression that they are basically equivalent. While they share some similarities, there are also differences in the candidates’ positions that are worth paying attention to. Luckily, Triple Pundit has just posted a comprehensive analysis of Obama and Mccain’s plans for dealing with global warming and climate change.

Regardless of who is elected next November, both candidates agree that climate change is a fact and not a theory.

“I know that climate change is real,” said John McCain. “We can have a debate about how serious it is, but the debate about climate change is over.”

John McCain and Barack Obama however vary widely in their response to this issue, leaving the American people with a choice of approaches when choosing the next president.

Congress is getting ready for a holiday break, and over the weekend politicians will be headed home to appear at celebrations, community events, and fireworks displays all over the country. If you get a chance to talk to or ask a question of one of them, here’s a good outdoors related topic to bring up.

Senator Jeff Bingaman introduced a major lands bill, S. 3213, yesterday, before Congress began its July 4th recess. The Chairman’s package contains more than 90 titles, including more than a half dozen wilderness measures to protect over 900,000 acres of wild land in Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, Virginia and West Virginia.

The bill includes the following provisions specifically relating to wilderness.

The Copper-Salmon Wilderness Act, to protect 13,700 acres of pristine old-growth forest in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest;

The Lewis and Clark Mount Hood Wilderness Act, to permanently protect more than 128,000 acres of national forest on Mount Hood in Oregon;

The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument Voluntary and Equitable Grazing Conflict Resolution Act, to protect 23,000 acres in southeastern Oregon’s Soda Mountain region;

The Owyhee Public Lands Management Act, which will protect as wilderness 517,000 acres in Idaho’s Owyhee-Bruneau Canyonlands;

The Rocky Mountain National Park Wilderness and Indian Peaks Wilderness Expansion Act, to protect nearly 250,000 acres (94 percent) of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park;

The Wild Monongahela Act, to protect 37,000 acres of wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia;

The Virginia Ridge and Valley Wilderness and National Scenic Area Act, protecting 43,000 acres of the Jefferson National Forest as wilderness, and another 12,000 as a national scenic area.

So again, if you get the chance, let your senator or congressperson know that you support the wilderness provisions of the public lands bill. It will not only show them that people care about these issues, but should also impress them with just how up to date you are.

Haven’t had a cute animal story here for a while, so here’s one about a couple of otters who found themselves trying to make it in the big city.

Two baby river otters are safely in the care of a wildlife rescue group after a weekend excursion that took them through several Petaluma neighborhoods, including a stop at a local pub.

Residents began calling the Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue hotline Friday night, reporting sightings of the pair slinking across porches and diving under fences.

The sad part is they probably lost their mother. The good news is they’re in a wildlife care center where they’ll be taken care of, then released back into the wild.

it’s another in a long series of warning signs that something is out of whack out there. But people know and like penguins, so perhaps their plight will help mak e molre people aware.

Penguin populations have plummeted at a key breeding colony in Argentina, mirroring declines in many species of the marine flightless birds due to climate change, pollution and other factors, a study shows.

Dee Boersma, a University of Washington professor who led the research, said the plight of the penguins is an indicator of big changes in the world’s oceans due to human activities.

“Penguins are in trouble,” Boersma, whose study appears in the journal BioScience, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “They certainly are canaries in the coal mine.”

It’s going to be appealed, it may not stand up, but it’s surely an interesting move in the on-going story of how to deal with pollution from coal.

In a ruling believed to be unprecedented, a Georgia judge halted the construction of Dynegy’s Longleaf coal-fired power plant because it had not made provisions for reducing its emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most widely implicated in man-made global warming.

The way this ties into the Environmental Protection Agency is that the judge, Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore, based her ruling on last year’s Supreme Court decision ordering the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

In the ruling released late Monday afternoon, a state judge relied on a decision by the Supreme Court last year that carbon dioxide could be regulated as a pollutant. Carbon dioxide, which is colorless, odorless and not directly harmful to animals or plants, is not now regulated, and the Bush administration has signaled that it would not issue such regulations before the president leaves office.

But the judge, Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore in Superior Court in Fulton County, Ga., said that federal air pollution control laws required pollution permits to cover all pollutants that could be regulated under the Clean Air Act, not just those for which there is “a separate, general numerical limitation.” The case had been brought by the Sierra Club and a local environmental group, Friends of the Chattahoochee.

If the ruling that stands from this is that a business has to abide by the requirements of the clean Air Act regardless of whether or not the EPA has actually issued regulations on a specific pollutant, then this could go down as a major, precedent setting decision. It might even take some of the politics out of the EPA

Some of the most memorable camping and backpacking trips I’ve taken have been in Montana, so it’s always good to hear that more of the mountains, forewsts, and streams are being saved for conservation and outdoor recreation.

Some of the most prized land in the northern Rocky Mountains is being protected from development in a conservation land deal hailed as the largest of its kind in U.S. history.

More than 300,000 acres of critical habitat for threatened and endangered animals, including grizzly bears and lynx, will be transferred to public ownership in a $500 million deal with Plum Creek Timber. A ceremony was held Monday in Montana to sign the agreement.

The land is in the Swan Valley between Missoula and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, an area wher development has expanded rapidly in the last twenty years. I’ve been through there several times, and it’s good to know it will still be there the next time I get out to Montana.

We need a little background on this one. You’ll recall that last year the EPA denied California’s request for a waiver under the Clean Air Act in order to enforce the state’s more stringent standards for emissions from trucks and cars. Sensing an opportunity, automakers then sued, arguing that because the EPA was not likely to grant the waiver any time soon, they shouldn’t have to comply with California’s law, which sets standards for emissions starting in 2009.

A federal judge didn’t buy it.

A federal judge has denied the latest attempt by automobile manufacturers to invalidate the California law that regulates greenhouse gas emissions from cars.

On June 23, Judge Anthony Ishii ruled that the automakers and dealers were not entitled to overturn this law.

In his decision Judge Ishii wrote, “..so far as this court can discern, the choice to proceed as though California would never be granted waiver of federal preemption is fundamentally just a business decision that, like any other, may have negative consequences if wrongly made. It is not up to the courts to deflect the burden of such business decisions.”

In other words, you can’t be exempted from a law just because you made business decisions based on the gamble that law would not be enforced. That may sound like an obvious decision, but it’s a form of reasoning that doesn’t always get applied to big business in the US. You can bet this decision will be appealed.

But court decisions take time, and other events could get in the way. Like, for example, a new president appointing an EPA Administrator who will immediately grant California’s waiver.

The Pentagon has come up with a novel approach towards dealing with clean-up orders from the Environmental Protection Agency: Just Say No.

The Defense Department, the nation’s biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose “imminent and substantial” dangers to public health and the environment.

The Pentagon has also declined to sign agreements required by law that cover 12 other military sites on the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country. The contracts would spell out a remediation plan, set schedules, and allow the EPA to oversee the work and assess penalties if milestones are missed.

Guess the Pentagon decided that if their Commander-in-Chief can place himself above the law, they can too. Either that, or they just don’t like bureaucrats telling them what to do.

They make one of the most amazing journeys in nature, yet are fragile by their very nature and depend on increasingly disappearing forests to survive. They’re also so well-known that protecting them is spurring a nice bit of international co-operation.

Canada, Mexico and the United States are cooperating to protect and conserve the monarch butterfly, which environment ministers of the three countries say has become a symbol of North America’s shared environment.
Each year millions of monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles back and forth from wintering grounds in Mexico to their breeding locations in the eastern United States and Canada.

Theings are especially perilous in Mexico where the butterflies cluster on only twelve mountaintops, all of which are endangered by illegal mining. The pressure is going to be on the Mexican government to live up to this agreement and halt the logging, something they have failed to do in the past. Here’s hoping their future efforts bring success.