NEWS ROUNDUP

Udall, DeGette sign on to push solar, wind Several Western lawmakers are leading an effort in the House to set a national requirement that utilities produce 20 percent of their electricity from wind, solar and other renewable energy sources by 2020. Democratic Reps. Diana DeGette and Mark Udall of Colorado and Tom Udall of New Mexico are among a group of lawmakers pushing to add the renewable electricity standard to a House bill promoting clean energy. The renewable electricity proposal is a key - but controversial - measure that environmentalists say must pass if the nation is going to take meaningful steps to combat global warming and reduce dependence on foreign fossil fuel. A similar effort failed in the Senate earlier this summer. The Western House members hope their effort will make it through Congress. By pushing the bill, the lawmakers are likely setting up a fight that will pit the West and Midwest against the Southeast. It's unclear whether the proposal has enough support to pass. Western states were among the first to start requiring the use of renewable energy, in part because of the ample supply of wind and sunshine. More than 20 states mandate that a percentage of their electricity be produced from renewable energy sources....
Environmentalism's Legal Legacy Environmental activists, policy scholars, and others claim that the environmental movement is in decline, suffering from attacks on the right on Capitol Hill and from the White House in recent years. Yet given some distinctive attributes associated with this issue, the progressive environmental cause is uniquely situated to ensure that it receives considerable attention in Washington. The result has been an uncommon expansion of government activity in a single issue area. And despite claims to contrary, progressive environmental policy making has continued to gain ground even in recent times—even under Republican leadership. This paper highlights legislative expansion of environmental law. It uses several datasets to document the growth of the environmental legal legacy. First, an analysis of congressional vote scoring by the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) reveals that environmental pressure groups do relatively well even in a subset of close votes scored—winning a majority of the time in eight out of 17 congresses and winning 43 percent of these votes overall. It does indicate that environmental groups faced some real challenges in recent years, but it does not reveal how that affected public policy. The LCV scoring also shows that environmental groups are involved in policy making at a very detailed level. Two additional analyses reveal the importance of environmental issues vis-à-vis other issues on Capitol Hill. The fi rst focuses on congressional committee actions that produced public laws during 12 congresses. This analysis showed that environmental committees remained a center of legislative activity throughout the timeline studied, and that activity reached high points during the 1990s after the Republicans gained a majority in Congress....
Utility blasts its Oregon dam to make way for fish The largest dam removal in the Pacific Northwest in 40 years began on Tuesday with blasts of 4,000 pounds of explosives, the dam's owner, Portland General Electric, said. Eight feet of the 47-foot-tall Marmot Dam was removed by Tuesday afternoon and over the next two months there will be five more blasts, along with jackhammers working daily, company spokesman Mark Fryburg said. "Today, this partnership took a great step toward restoring a breathtaking river for fish, wildlife and people," Portland General Electric CEO and President Peggy Fowler said in a statement. The Marmot Dam on the Sandy River about 40 miles east of Portland was built almost 100 years ago along with the nearby 16-foot-high Little Sandy Dam, which will be destroyed next summer, the utility said. Portland General Electric, the biggest utility in Oregon, is spending $17 million to remove the two dams in coordination with 23 environmental, governmental and civic organizations....
ID lawmaker blames grazing restrictions for wildfire's size An Idaho state lawmaker-rancher is blaming federal grazing restrictions for the size and ferocity of a giant wildfire on the Idaho-Nevada border, a contention dismissed as baseless by the leader of a conservation group. The Murphy Complex fire has burned across nearly 975 square miles, burning up grassland and killing at least one cow that couldn't escape the flames. Two small communities were briefly under evacuation orders. The Murphy Complex fire killed at least one cow owned by Rep. Bert Brackett, R-Rogerson, although officials say more dead cattle will likely be found. "This didn't have to happen," he told The Times-News as he stood over the charred body of a cow. Had more cattle been allowed to graze, there would have been less available fuel, he said. "I think we need to take a hard look at basic (grazing) policy issues because what we're doing just isn't working," Brackett said....
Feds Propose Habitat for Bighorn Sheep More than 400,000 acres of wildlands in the Eastern Sierra Nevada should serve as a protected habitat for an endangered mountain sheep rebounding from the threat of extinction, the federal government said Wednesday. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's proposed critical habitat designation is a response to a 2005 lawsuit by environmentalists, who claimed the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep couldn't recover because their habitat wasn't protected as required under the Endangered Species Act. In their lawsuit, environmentalists singled out as a particular problem: the U.S. Forest Service's decision to allow ranchers to graze domesticated sheep on public lands thought to be crucial to the wild sheep's survival. Domestic sheep not only compete for the sedges and grasses that grow in the rugged, mountain landscape, but can spread diseases like pneumonia and scabies when bighorn rams try to mate with their domesticated cousins, government scientists said. Sheepherders dismissed assertions that their herd's proximity to the wild sheep played a role in their decline, and said the new designation could cause millions of dollars in losses to the $1 billion wool textiles and lamb industry. "The bighorn have been a very good surrogate tool to clear out areas of livestock grazing," said Tom McDonnell, a consultant for the American Sheep Industry Association, whose members graze their lambs and ewes in the Mono Lake area. "We will probably lose substantial amounts of grazing on private, state and federal ground."....
Governors sign agreement to form Blue Ribbon commission As a sign of unity in the wake of the Angora fire, the Lake Tahoe Basin's two state governors signed an agreement Wednesday to form a fire commission intended to review forest management practices in the Basin. California and Nevada Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Gibbons used the Lake Valley Fire station in Meyers as a backdrop to define the mission of the Blue Ribbon Fire Commission. The fact-finding panel will consist of 17 voting members, each governor appointing eight and the U.S. Forest Service appointing one. Up to six additional non-voting members can be appointed by the governors. The commission will disband two months after delivering its report. Gibbons called the fire a learning experience on several fronts. Questions and tempers have been raised regarding forest fuel reduction practices and whether agencies tasked with sustaining the environment have created gridlock at removing the dead and dying trees and the undercover of flammable material....
Prosecutors mull charges in Zaca blaze Investigators have completed a report on the cause of a three-week-old Santa Barbara County wildfire and will forward it to local prosecutors for a decision on whether to file criminal charges, officials said Wednesday. The 31,000-acre blaze was started July 4 by workers grinding metal to repair a water pipeline on a private ranch in Bell Canyon, just west of the Los Padres National Forest boundary and Zaca Lake. Prosecutors were expected to decide by next week if any charges are warranted against the landowner. California Department of Forestry investigator Andy Andersen wouldn't disclose the recommendation in the investigators' report that was scheduled to be sent to the district attorney's office on Friday. The cost of suppression efforts has already exceed $33 million....
USFS venture aims to offset carbon emissions The U.S. Forest Service is teaming with a nonprofit foundation to allow consumers to participate in a voluntary program to "offset" their carbon dioxide emissions. Under the agreement announced Wednesday, the Forest Service and the National Forest Foundation will allow individuals or groups to make charitable contributions that will be used to plant trees and do other work to improve national forests. The Forest Service has identified several reforestation projects to kick off the new program, including one in the Custer National Forest in Montana and South Dakota and another in the Payette National Forest in Idaho. The Forest Service estimates that the nation's 155 national forests offset about 10 percent of carbon emissions in the United States. Forest Service scientists believe that figure can be raised to as much as 25 percent by doing such things as planting more trees in urban areas or reforesting old crop land....
Hood wilderness bill clears Senate panel, moves to floor A long-awaited and oft-troubled attempt to expand wilderness protection to nearly 125,000 acres in the Mount Hood National Forest gained new life Wednesday when a bill moved to the floor of the U.S. Senate. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed the "Lewis and Clark Mount Hood Wilderness Act of 2007" unanimously on a voice vote. A troubled land exchange between a ski area and the federal government had held the bill up for a year, among other difficulties. Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith co-sponsored the bill. "It's a new day for wilderness, and we are now poised to pass the protection that Mount Hood deserves," said Wyden. The bill would add to existing wilderness protections on the forest and grant Wild and Scenic River status to an additional 80 miles of rivers. Further, the bill would create more than 34,000 acres of a Mount Hood National Recreation Area with access for mountain biking and other recreation. Wilderness areas do not allow mountain biking and severely restrict most activities to retain the wild features of the land....
GE Launches 'Green' Credit Card General Electric Co., a longtime target of environmentalists that is working to bolster its "green" image, launched a credit card Wednesday that gives users a chance to offset their greenhouse-gas emissions. The new card, the GE Money Earth Rewards Platinum MasterCard, is being marketed as the nation's first to offer customers "rewards" that can go toward carbon emissions credits rather than more common perks such as cash-back payouts or airline miles. A joint venture between GE and electric power company AES Corp. will use the credits to pay for projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Both the card and the joint venture are part of GE's "Ecomagination" initiative, which the Fairfield, Conn.-based conglomerate launched two years ago to boost sales of environmentally friendly technology and cut carbon emissions. Card users will be able to automatically contribute up to 1 percent of their purchases toward emissions offsets. Customers will have the choice to donate all of their rewards or receive half in cash. Rewards will accrue over the course of the year and can be redeemed for emissions credits each Earth Day, April 22. There will be no limit on the amount of credits customers can earn....
Salazar blocks BLM nominee U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar has officially blocked the confirmation of President Bush's nominee to head the Bureau of Land Management. He vowed Wednesday to relent only when Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne pledges that the department's conflict with the state over energy development won't end in a "train wreck." Salazar, a Colorado Democrat, said he outlined his concerns in a meeting with Kempthorne and asked for assurance that the federal government "would not be running roughshod over the Roan Plateau and Colorado's public lands." Specifically, Salazar wants the state to have "meaningful input" about the development of oil shale and for Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter to have time to review a plan to drill for natural gas on the scenic Roan Plateau. Salazar said that until then, he will prevent the Senate from voting on James Caswell's nomination to head the BLM....
Groups sue to block drilling People who think energy development is moving too quickly in the Pinedale area got a boost this week from two little-known environmental groups and several people in Wyoming. The Environmental Preservation Foundation and Habitat for Wildlife, both based in Utah, along with two Cokeville and two Kemmerer residents, filed suit against Bureau of Land Management officials, saying the agency has not conducted adequate environmental reviews to allow a boom in energy activity. The lawsuit calls for a cessation of new oil and gas drilling pending further environmental review that takes into account the cumulative impacts of drilling. It also called for the BLM to stop issuing waivers to companies to drill. And, the complaint calls for the Pinedale Anticline supplemental environmental impact statement to be stopped pending the outcome of the case. The BLM is currently finishing a supplemental analysis allowing for 4,399 new wells on the Anticline in a concentrated area, and a resource management plan for the broader Pinedale area. The groups say there should be "a regionwide EIS that contemplates all of the current and proposed oil and gas activities in the Pinedale Resource Area and connected areas." That includes the Jonah and Anticline fields....
Lightning hits 1,700 times in 7 hours The National Weather Service recorded approximately 1,700 lightning strikes in southeastern Montana in just seven hours Tuesday evening. Joe Lester, meteorologist with the Billings National Weather Service station, said that between 5 p.m. Tuesday and midnight Wednesday, 1,700 strikes were counted in Rosebud, Powder River, Fallon, Custer and Carter counties. There were about 500 strikes between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. alone in that area Tuesday. The NWS receives lightning strike numbers for the previous 24 to 48 hours from a national lightning detection system, Lester said. The system uses ground sensors to detect and map ground strikes. Tuesday evening's storm brought a reprieve from 100-degree heat in the southeastern part of the state - Billings dropped from a high temperature of 102 degrees to 83 degrees around 6 p.m. - but may have ignited several fires. The Miles City Bureau of Land Management field office reported four lightning-caused fires Tuesday and another nine lightning-caused fires Wednesday....
Governor takes heat for stand on drilling When Gov. Bill Ritter asked the helicopter pilot to make an impromptu landing on a mountain in northwest Colorado, little did he know he would anger Moffat County commissioners and stir up his choppy relationship with the oil and gas industry. Last week, the county's three commissioners, all Republicans, fired off a scathing letter to the Democratic governor, criticizing his unannounced July 3 visit during a tour of oil and gas drilling sites in the region. He subsequently requested that the federal government exempt the scenic 77,000-acre Vermillion Basin from natural gas drilling. Ritter's request, the commissioners say, ignores years of hard work by local, federal and state agencies and activist groups to cobble together a drilling plan for the environmentally sensitive basin, which contains billions of dollars of natural gas reserves....
Erosion on Alaska coast eats into old oil wells Old Alaskan oil wells could be swallowed by the ocean as rising temperatures speed up erosion of the state's Arctic coastline. The disappearance of sea ice that shields against storm waves, and of permafrost that holds shorelines together, is eating away at the coast of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study. Erosion rates have risen steeply along the coastline of the reserve — where the Bush administration wants to increase oil drilling — possibly due to warmer weather, the study showed. "Coastal erosion has more than doubled along a segment of the Arctic Alaska coast during the past half century," it said, adding the land loss was being magnified by the conversion of freshwater "thermokarst" lakes into saltwater bays as they become inundated with waters from the Arctic Ocean. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the reserve, has identified about 30 old oil exploration wells that need to be cleaned and plugged before the sea claims them....
Wild horses found dead on Nevada range Wild horses managed by the Bureau of Land Management were found dead late last week and additional horses have died since the discovery. The cause of death for 40 wild horses is under investigation. The horses died near a water source in the extreme northwest portion of the herd management area, about 210 miles northwest of Las Vegas, which is within the U.S. Air Force Nevada Test and Training Range. The military alerted BLM late Friday that they had seen some dead horses. The area is restricted to public access and the Air Force is providing access to the BLM. On Saturday, BLM went to the site and found 25 dead wild horses and an antelope. A water pond on a dry lake bed is suspected to be the source of the problem....
Bills Calls for Meat to be Labeled by Origin An ordinary trip to the supermarket meat department could turn into an experience in international comparison-shopping under House legislation scheduled to be debated today that for the first time would require meat products to be labeled by their country of origin. The farm bill House members will consider includes a provision mandating that meat -- including beef, pork and lamb -- include a label stating where it came from. Only meat from animals born, raised and slaughtered in the United States would be eligible for a domestic label. The measure aims to enforce a five-year-old law that has already been implemented for seafood but was delayed after meat packers, pork producers and grocery chains claimed it would create a costly bureaucratic and record-keeping nightmare. The issue reemerged this year after reports of safety problems with food and products from China spurred American consumers to seek more information about what they eat....
Commercial feed named as cause of Canada's 10th case of mad cow The mature dairy cow that became Canada's 10th case of mad cow disease was probably infected by commercial feed that it received after weaning, says a report by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency released Wednesday. The Holstein, which was destroyed earlier this year, had spent its entire life on the same dairy farm in the Fraser Valley. The most likely cause was commercial feed, which the cow would have eaten only during its first year, that got cross-contaminated with prohibited materials -- rendered products from other ruminant animals. The most likely source was cross-contamination of the heifer feed either at the feed mill or during transportation. The CFIA investigated 155 of the 66-month-old cow's herdmates, and their feed. "Only cattle in the feed cohort were implicated in the investigation," said Dr. Connie Argue, an epidemiologist and scientific adviser to the CFIA. Of those cattle, five have since been slaughtered for unrelated reasons. Another 87 had already been slaughtered -- and of those, five had tested negative for BSE. There were 23 animals that could not be traced, and the remaining 41 live animals have been quarantined and will be killed in the next few months....
Mule's foal fools genetics When it reportedly happened in Morocco five years ago, locals feared it signaled the end of the world. In Albania in 1994, it was thought to have unleashed the spawn of the devil on a small village. But on a Grand Mesa ranch, the once-in-a-million, genetically "impossible" occurrence of a mule giving birth has only drawn keen interest from the scientific world. That, and a stream of the locally curious driving up from the small town of Colbran to check out and snap pictures of a frisky, huge-eared, gangly-legged foal. "No one has run away in fear yet," laughed Laura Amos, the owner of the foal, along with her husband, Larry. The foal is being called a miracle because mules aren't supposed to give birth. Mules are a hybrid of two species - a female horse and a male donkey - so they end up with an odd number of chromosomes. A horse has 64 chromosomes and a donkey has 62. A mule inherits 63. An even number of chromosomes is needed to divide into pairs and reproduce. But those numbers added up to implausibility in late April when the Amoses awoke to a braying and whinnying ruckus in the corral behind their house....
Cowgirl is not horsing around You could say the 28-year-old Mussell was born in the wrong time period. She would have been right at home with the great cowgirl bronc riders of the 1920s and '30s: Tad Lucas, Ruth Roach and Alice Greenough, a.k.a. the Women of the West. The women were talented bronc riders and trick riders who drew headlines all over the world not only for their style but also for their daring. They competed before ranchers and kings in places ranging from Cheyenne, Wyo., to Wembley Stadium in London. Eventually, women roughstock riders were phased out of rodeo. That is, until 2000, when Mussell discovered there were no rules preventing women from competing in roughstock events in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. Now, she is the only professional female saddle bronc rider in both the PRCA and the Canadian Professional Rodeo Association. She filled her permit in 2003, which meant she won over a $1,000 in a year. In 2005, she moved from her native Canada to Stephenville, Texas, and now is competing on near equal footing with many of the men in the Texas Circuit, primarily at the weekly Mesquite Championship Rodeo....