unEARTHED | the Earthjustice forum on environmental issues

Do they love that dirty water?

You'd think Colorado's two Democratic U.S. senators, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, would be in the forefront to protect one of Colorado's most valuable natural resources: our water.  Unfortunately, the jury is still out on whether they will be.

As has been amply detailed by Earthjustice and in a recent op-ed in the Denver Post by Trout Unlimited's Melinda Kassen, the federal Clean Water Act turned America's water from a polluted (and sometimes burning) mess into much cleaner lakes, rivers and streams.

Gentle Persuasion

As a candidate, Barack Obama promised to "uphold and defend" the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which set out to protect nearly 60 million acres of pristine national forest lands across the country. Not long ago, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has responsibility for the Forest Service among many things, announced that he will personally review any projects proposed in roadless areas. This move was labelled a year-long "time out" for road building and logging by some in the media, but in fact, there’s no guarantee.

With an eye toward nudging the president to a more bold and forthright act, five conservation organizations are launching a major ad campaign aimed directly at the president.

Long Live Savage Rapids

The pictures are not what you'd generally call beautiful, but they're stirring nonetheless: the early stages of the demolition of the Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River in Oregon, which has been killing salmon for decades.

The demolition is the result of yeoman (yeowoman too) efforts by a cast of hundreds, including Earthjustice's Mike Sherwood, who jumped through dozens of hoops, went to court, raised hell, and finally prevailed. Demolition will take some months yet--a celebration at the site is planned for October 10, though that could change a little. Go to Waterwatch  for updates. Savage Rapids Dam Is Dead. Long Live Savage Rapids.

EPA Puts Kansas Power Plant On Hold

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has thrown a wrench into the expansion of Sunflower coal-fired power plant in Kansas. It's the first hopeful sign out of that state since its new governor cooked up a deal allowing the expansion in May.

In a letter this week, the EPA told the state and Sunflower Electric that it must apply for a new air permit before building a massive, dirty 895MW coal-fired power plant. Agreeing with a position taken by Earthjustice, the EPA said Sunflower must submit new environmental analyses addressing hazardous pollutants, dirty particulates and the possibility of cleaner technology than may exist today.

This means that the state has to use a more public and thoughtful process instead of the backroom private deal-making employed by Gov. Mark Parkinson. The deal poisoned two years of successful efforts by his predecessor, Kathleen Sebelius, to prevent the expansion. She opposed the plant because of its massive greenhouse gas emissions, and pushed hard for wind energy as an alternative.

Of particular interest is how EPA has now asserted its oversight authority in Kansas. Until now, the EPA allowed the state to operate as a kind of surrogate in approving power plant permits. With EPA finally on the case, local politics should play a much smaller role.

Lightbulb: A Change You Can Believe In

How many presidents of the United States does it take to change a light bulb?

Just one.

It's no joke. Millions of Americans have already changed their lightbulbs to save energy and fight global warming. New lighting standards announced Monday by President Barack Obama will help all our homes and businesses make the switch, and as a result save billions of dollars in utility bills and create thousands of new jobs.

Brown Republicans

A good case could be made that the most important U.S. federal environmental laws are the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. And what do they have in common? They were enacted (amended since in some cases) in the early 1970s and signed into law by Richard Nixon, a conservative republican.

Which makes the reaction of the Republican right wing to the recent House passage of a compromise climate bill so interesting 

A Communist Plot

Remember the John Birch Society? The virulent right-wing McCarthyist outfit born in Indianapolis in 1958? I hadn't heard of it for years, would have guessed it had passed quietly back into the fourteenth century, but low and behold it's still alive, kicking, screaming, and denying the fact of global warming and climate change.

Bedfellows

The Alabama-based environmental law firm Wildlaw has just announced the hiring of Mark Rey as a part-time lobbyist to work on national forest restoration projects in the Southeast and to help with land acquisition efforts.

Here's a little backstory. Wildlaw is headed by an attorney named Ray Vaughan, and it has done much good work in the Southeast defending national forests and scarce species and waterways and other resources. Mark Rey was the Under Secretary of Agriculture overseeing the national forests under George W. Bush, and a more reviled figure among environmental activists would be hard to find. 

It's Not Trash, It's Compost

On Tuesday, the board of Supervisors in San Francisco approved the first and only mandatory composting and recycling law in the country. While recycling is mandatory in some other states, composting is not.

The aggressive policy is aimed to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions—particularly methane, which is more than 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide—and to eliminate transport of these recyclables and compostables to landfills and incinerators by 2020. San Francisco already diverts 72 percent of its 2.1 million tons of annual waste away from landfills. City officials claim that if the recyclables and compostables that do go to landfills are diverted, as much as 90 percent of San Francisco's waste will stay out of landfills and incinerators.

Supreme Indifference

Two long and thoughtful pieces today, one from the Daily Journal, the other from Greenwire, discuss in painful detail the thumping environmental cases suffered at the hands of the Supreme Court this term. In each case, the court overturned a pro-environment ruling from a court of appeals.

The first case involved whether the Navy must protect whales and dolphins from the effects of loud noises. The most recent case, an Earthjustice case as it happens, revolved around a permit the Corps of Engineers awarded to a mining company that allows the company to dispose of toxic mining wastes in an Alaskan lake. In between, the court found that environmental groups didn't have the right to challenge certain Forest Service regulations, that Shell Oil was not responsible for cleaning up a Superfund site in California, and that cost-benefit calculation at a New England powerplant was legal. The decision the court overturned in the last case, incidentally, was written by Sonia Sotomayor, who looks likely to become the next associate justice. In all five cases, the court upheld rules put forward by the Bush administration.