Wilderness plan closes trails to bikes Many of the area's skilled mountain bikers are concerned about a proposal that would ban them from some of their most-prized local trails, including a segment of the Colorado Trail. The proposal is part of a draft plan by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service to guide management of 2.4 million acres of public lands in Southwest Colorado. The plan recommends classifying 55,000 acres as new wilderness, including 51,000 acres west of Hermosa Creek. The designation would overlay the Colorado Trail along the Indian Trail Ridge segment, which lies between Kennebec Pass and the intersection with the Highline Loop Trail. Several other popular trails would be affected, including Corral Draw and Clear Creek. Some mountain bikers are calling the proposal extreme. "There's 500,000 ways to preserve it other than by banning bicyclists," mountain biker Gardner Catsman said. The Colorado Trail, a 500-mile route from outside Denver to Durango, is "a premier, world-class, long-distance" trail for mountain bikers, according to the trail's Web site, with the strenuous 75-mile segment from Molas Pass to Durango being especially revered among the sport's elite....
Blowin' in the Wind If you thought the 2008 presidential race was shattering all records for windy rhetoric, it's nothing compared to the political eco-rhetoric being spun to US taxpayers -- to get them to cough up billions of dollars to fuel a renewable wind power industry boom sensible investors won't touch with a turbine's rotor blade. At present, the growth of the wind power industry in the US lags behind that in Europe. While Denmark and Germany pioneered wind power growth in Europe, Britain is about to steal the world lead. The UK wants to develop an unprecedented 33 gigawatts of wind power, mostly offshore, that will, literally, change the face of Britain. 7,000 wind turbines -- one every half-mile around the entire coastline -- are to be built in a bid to install power capacity that theoretically would be enough for all 25 million homes by 2020. Wind power sounds a great European success story -- one to be echoed in the US, it seems, as 2008 is set to see wind power developments shatter records for the fourth consecutive year. However, a closer look at the European "success" story reveals that all is not quite as it seems. Wind seems to be blowing in the mind of the politically correct and those on the recent environmentalist bandwagon but the cost is going to be huge, no companies will plunge into it without massive government subsidies and, if actually built, power reliability will take a nosedive....
Interior under pressure to delay Alaska drilling rights sale The Interior Department says it has no plans to delay the Feb. 6 lease sale for oil drilling rights in Alaska's Chukchi Sea, despite growing concerns from department scientists, environmentalists and lawmakers that energy development could be devastating to polar bears and other wildlife there. Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service announced earlier that it would not meet its deadline this month for making a decision on whether to designate polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. That means the lease sale next month likely would occur before any decision on the bear's' status is made, jeopardizing the government's ability to protect it. It is widely expected that the polar bear will be listed. The U.S. Geological Survey reported in September 2007 that new research suggests that at the current rate of sea ice melting, more than two-thirds of the world's polar bear population would be lost by the middle of the century, and cautioned that this was a conservative estimate. At a recent hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., told Randall Luthi, director of the Minerals Management Service, the Interior agency responsible for offshore leasing, that the agency's decision to go ahead with the lease sale was "negligent in the extreme." Also at the hearing, committee chairman Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced legislation that would compel the administration to delay the sale until the polar bear status was resolved. Contributing to skepticism about Interior's ability to balance wildlife interests with those of energy developers, the environmental watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility last week released a series of e-mail exchanges among employees at Interior's Minerals Management Service in December 2005, when the agency was in the process of developing the environmental impact statement upon which the lease sale is based....
Measure would ban horse slaughter Buried deep within the government spending bill Congress passed last month is a provision that effectively bans horse slaughter in the United States. The measure bars the U.S. Department of Agriculture from collecting fees to pay for horse meat inspections, without which slaughter can't legally continue. But if Rep. Ed Whitfield of Kentucky has his way, it won't be the last legislative effort to end a practice he and others consider inhumane. Whitfield, R-1st District, and others are sponsoring legislation that would ban the transport, sale, purchase or donation of horses to be slaughtered for human consumption. The idea would be to permanently prohibit the practice nationwide and also prevent horses from being taken to other countries for slaughter. Whitfield said the legislation represents a final step that needs to be taken because horses are being transported eventually to be slaughtered beyond the U.S. border. "The problem now is that people are moving more of the horses to Mexico, where the slaughter process is even worse than it was in the U.S," he said. With the closing of U.S. slaughterhouses, some equine groups are expressing concerns about a glut of unwanted horses as the cost of caring for them increases. According to the USDA, more than 100,000 horses were slaughtered in the United States in 2006 -- primarily for dinner tables in Asia and Europe....
USDA amends regulations on imports from BSE minimal-risk countries USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has amended its regulations for the importation of animals and animal products, removing several restrictions regarding animal identification and ruminant-materials processing from regions that present a minimal risk of introducing bovine spongiform encephalopathy into the United States. This amended rule makes final several minor changes from a proposed rule published in the Aug. 9, 2006, Federal Register. Under this amended rule, APHIS is allowing: ---The unique individual identification of animals by means other than ear tags, provided the APHIS administrator has approved the manner of identification for the type of animal intended for importation and the identification is traceable to the premises of origin of the animal ---The importation of hide-derived — in addition to bone-derived — gelatin for any use, provided certain conditions are met; and non-ruminant material that is processed in BSE minimal-risk regions to be processed in facilities that also process material derived from ruminants from the minimal-risk region. APHIS said it is updating this rule to remove these restrictions because they provide no additional safeguards against the introduction of BSE into the United States....