Feds make minor changes to Idaho's roadless plan The U.S. Forest Service made minor changes in an Idaho plan to protect 8.7 million acres of roadless national forest. The agency released its draft environmental impact statement on the plan written by former Gov. and now Lt. Gov. Jim Risch and has the endorsement of current Gov. Butch Otter. It plans to schedule more than a dozen public meetings around the state in January and February. The proposed roadless plan would release 609,500 acres of lands currently protected as roadless under the 2001 roadless rule pushed by the Clinton administration. That would allow logging, road building, mining and other activities. But the rest of the land would be managed under four other designations that offer progressively more restricted limits on development. The most controversial, called backcountry restoration areas, would allow temporary roads and logging "to protect public health and safety in cases of significant risk or imminent threat of flood, fire, or other catastrophic event." These areas account for more than 5 million of the total 9.3 million acres currently protected under the Clinton rule....
EPA blocks California bid to limit greenhouse gases from cars The Bush administration blocked efforts by California and 16 other states Wednesday to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, setting up a political and legal fight over whether states can take a lead role in combatting global warming. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson rejected California's request for a waiver from the federal government to impose its tough tailpipe emissions standards. The other states were poised to adopt similar rules if California's request was granted. The states represent nearly half the U.S. population, and their laws would effectively require automakers to cut greenhouse gas emissions nationwide, despite President Bush's rejection of mandatory national standards. Johnson said Congress' passage of an energy bill this week that raises fuel economy standards for all cars and trucks to 35 miles per gallon by 2020 made the state laws unnecessary. Bush signed the law Wednesday morning....
Whales may have evolved from raccoon-sized creature In the search for a missing evolutionary link to modern whales, scientists have come up with an unlikely land cousin -- a raccoon-sized creature with the body of a small deer. Prior molecular studies have proposed the hippo as the closest land relative of today's whales, but researchers reporting in the journal Nature on Wednesday suggest a four-footed creature from India known as Indohyus, which probably hid in water in times of danger. Scientists have long known that whales had ancestors that walked on land. Now a team lead by Hans Thewissen of Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy have pieced together a series of intermediate fossils that trace the whale's evolutionary journey from land to sea....