Coal plants jeopardized over climate The fate of scores of new coal-burning power plants is now in limbo over whether to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The uncertainty resulted when an Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel on Thursday rejected a federal permit for a Utah plant, leaving the issue for the Obama administration to resolve. The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming. The matter was sent back to that office, which must better explain why it failed to order limits on carbon dioxide. This is "an issue of national scope that has implications far beyond this individual permitting process," the panel said. EPA spokesman Jonathan Shrader said the agency was reviewing the ruling by the appeals panel, which traditionally gives great deference to agency decisions. Environmentalists and lawyers representing industry groups said the ruling puts in question permits - some being considered, others approved but under appeal - of perhaps as many as 100 coal plants. "It's going to stop everything while EPA mulls over what to do next" about how the federal Clean Air Act is to be used to control carbon dioxide, said David Bookbinder, a Sierra Club lawyer. "And that will be decided by the next administration."....

Congress has fast-track power to kill Bush rules President-elect Barack Obama will have limited authority to overturn federal regulations approved in the waning months of the Bush administration. But a little-used power offers the new Democratic Congress an early test of how aggressively lawmakers might unravel such rules pushed through by Republicans. Under a special fast-track authority, Congress could repeal current rules from as far back as May. Many are related to the environment and health. Aside from congressional action, such changes involve a laborious rule-making process that can take years. The Congressional Review Act of 1996, used just once in the past 12 years, could become a sweeping tool for Democrats against late regulations from the Bush presidency. Environmental activists are compiling lists of regulations they believe Congress should target, including ones covering water pollution at huge farms, pollution control equipment at older power plants and hazardous waste restrictions. The 1996 law gives Congress expedited authority to shortcut the legislative process. Once a regulation is repealed, Congress would have to approve any substantially similar new rule. The law allows 60 congressional working days to repeal a finalized regulation once it comes to Congress for review. If the House or Senate session ends before a full 60-day review period, a new 60-day clock starts 15 working days after the new Congress begins. The review period is elongated because Congress takes off August and members adjourn for long holidays or other breaks. That means that depending on when the lawmakers wrap up this year, regulations going back to May could be subject to expedited repeal by the new Congress that will convene in January, said Curtis Copeland, an expert at the Congressional Research Service who has studied the issue....The thing to remember from this is that there is not a single regulation on the books that Congress is not responsible for. They delegated this authority to the executive branch and the 1996 law was an attempt to take some of the authority back, but the gutless wonders never use it. The R's could have used this on the Clinton roadless rule, but didn't. They were too busy protecting their power and positions, which they have now deservedly lost.

U.S. military worries about climate change As a new administration committed to addressing climate change takes office, intelligence and defense officials are laying plans to address the national security implications of a warmer planet. In recent months, U.S. military planners have discussed the impact on personnel, equipment and installations of extreme weather events, rising ocean temperatures, shifts in rainfall patterns and stresses on natural resources. Among the concerns: 63 U.S. coastal military facilities and several nuclear reactors are in danger of flooding from storm surges, said Tom Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis. President-elect Barack Obama next month will receive a key intelligence report, Global Trends 2025. Sources who reviewed the document for the government but asked not to be named said the report gives top priority to climate change. The Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a Pentagon-funded think tank, issued a report last year that called climate change a "serious national security threat." The U.S. intelligence apparatus has worked up the first national intelligence assessment to focus on the implications of climate change for U.S. national security by 2030....With their finger to the wind, they want some of the $$$.

The world has never seen such freezing heat A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record. This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year. A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others....

Can’t See the Forest for the Trees Many experts believe it’s time to take a closer look, and not just in El Salvador. Despite assumptions that globalization is destroying forests, these researchers argue that in many parts of the world globalization and the policies that go along with it are in fact helping to create them. Migration from rural areas to cities or other countries, new markets for forest commodities, and even war are helping in some places to bring trees back. In other places the demand for diverse and far-flung products like rubber, tea, and açaí fruit, for example, is transforming existing forests and the lives that depend on them, often in unexpected ways. Perhaps most surprisingly, archaeologists and ecologists have discovered growing evidence that many forests once considered pristine, including much of the Amazon, have long been marked by human activity. Resurgent forests, changing forests, forests bearing the marks of ancient inhabitants: findings like these have made researchers reexamine how human activity has shaped forests in the past and is shaping them today. They have also forced researchers to revisit ideas that have long colored Western thinking, casting fresh doubt on what researchers call the “myth of the pristine” and suggesting that untouched forests may be more an invention of the Western mind than something found in the real world. Research also has challenged the assumption that human activity destroys biodiversity; in some circumstances, researchers say, it can increase biodiversity. Thus, rethinking forests carries powerful implications for conservation policy—it may require, for example, a greater appreciation for working forests. And rethinking forests leads to fundamental questions about the vexed relationship between nature and culture....

Alaska holds big natural-gas source Federal scientists have concluded that Alaska's North Slope holds one of the nation's largest deposits of recoverable natural gas in the form of gas hydrates, a finding that could open a major new front in domestic energy exploration. Researchers have speculated for years that gas hydrates - a combination of gas and water locked in an icelike solid that forms under high pressure and low temperatures - could provide an important source of natural gas in the United States and worldwide. Today, the U.S. Geological Survey will release a study estimating that 85.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas can be extracted from Alaska's gas hydrates, an amount that could heat more than 100 million average homes for more than a decade. Part of the reserve's significance, federal officials said, is that gas companies will be able to tap into it with existing technology. A coalition of American and international experts conducted three tests on gas hydrates over the past five years in the United States and Canada and demonstrated that the gas can be extracted by reducing the pressure that binds them together. Gas hydrates have also been found in the Wyoming basin, Texas's western Gulf basin, and the San Juan basin in New Mexico and Colorado, as well as in several offshore areas....

GOP senators freeze marine sanctuaries plan President Bush's proposal to create a string of marine sanctuaries in the Gulf of Mexico, known as the "Islands in the Stream," has died at least for now after Republican senators opposed it, a sanctuary official said. The sanctuaries would have restricted fishing and oil drilling in nine coral banks and hard-bottom areas in a large loop around the gulf from Texas to Florida. Ecological research shows that the gulf marine ecosystem relies on a ring of deep-water reefs and banks connected by the clockwise motion of ocean currents in a loop from Belize to the Florida Keys. Billy Causey, southeast regional director for the National Marine Sanctuary Program under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the proposal has been put on hold. He said this week that opposition from the senators and fishermen was too intense and that he received what he called "pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Interior" to put the proposal on ice. He declined to provide specifics....Hey Billy, was NOAA tring to time this with the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity going on in Valencia, Spain?

Stenholm eyed for D.C. post West Texan Charlie Stenholm may be the next secretary of agriculture in the administration of president-elect Barack Obama. The former San Angelo congressman said it's news to him. Stenholm said no one from Obama's team has contacted him regarding the position. "I'm honored that my name is out there, but what else can I say? There's nothing but what I read in the paper," he said. His name was floated as part of a short list in a recent Associated Press article and popped up on at least two blogs....This would be a pleasant surprise, but I'm still betting on someone from California or the grain belt. Stenholm might be an Under or Assistant Secretary at USDA.

Natural gas rush stirs environmental concerns Advanced drilling techniques that blast millions of gallons of water into 400-million-year-old shale formations a mile underground are opening up "unconventional" gas fields touted as a key to the nation's energy future. These deposits, where natural gas is so tightly locked in deep rocks that it's costly and complicated to extract, include the Barnett shale in Texas, the Fayetteville of Arkansas, and the Haynesville of Louisiana. But the mother lode is the Marcellus shale underlying the Appalachians. Geologists call the Marcellus a "super giant" gas field. Penn State geoscientist Terry Engelder believes it could supply the natural gas needs of the United States for 14 years. But as word spread over the past year that a 54,000-square-mile shale field from southern New York to West Virginia promised to yield a trillion dollars worth of gas, making millionaires of local landowners, environmental alarms were sounded. Would gas wells damage water wells? Would chemicals poison groundwater? Would fabled trout streams be sucked dry? Would the pristine upstate reservoirs that supply drinking water to New York City be befouled?...Dear Mr. & Mrs Easterner: You've been running roughshod over the West for your energy supplies for quite awhile. It's time we returned the favor.

Agreement would let railroad cut through hatchery Montana fisheries officials say they've tentatively agreed to give the proposed Tongue River Railroad a 25 acre-easement through a major fish hatchery near the Yellowstone River. State Hatcheries Bureau Chief Bob Snyder said he'd rather not have the railroad cut through the Miles City Hatchery. But Snyder said the state has little choice because federal law gives railroads broad powers of condemnation. The proposed agreement includes a $25 million insurance policy maintained by the Tongue River Railroad Company to cover any damage to the hatchery. That would be enough money to replace the hatchery. The U.S. Surface Transportation Board approved the final section of the 130-mile railroad on Oct. 9. The $341 million project, proposed in 1983, is designed to tap into the region's vast but largely undeveloped coal reserves. Ranchers, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and conservation and environmental groups have fought against the rail line for decades. They claim it would cause excessive environmental damage, undermine existing railroad jobs and harm livestock producers....

Horse Advocates Decry Government Euthanasia Option A stampede of opposition is growing over a proposal by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to kill or allow unrestricted sale of wild horses captured from western public land because of budget constraints. Tens of thousands of horse advocates have voiced outrage at the idea of slaughtering what many revere as romantic symbols of the American West. The BLM's nine-member National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board is scheduled to consider the proposal at a meeting Monday in Reno. Critics also argue that, when it comes to public land, wild horses get short shrift to the benefit of livestock and wildlife. They claim that since 1971 about 20 million acres originally designated as herd areas have been withdrawn from that use. They say reopening those areas to horses would alleviate the need for boarding....

No ready solutions for unwanted horses What to do with unwanted horses is an increasingly difficult problem and one without easy solutions. The bottom has dropped out of the sale market for horses, something to which Kent Kerchal, manager of the Missoula Livestock Exchange, can attest. Many of the horses sold there, even trained riding horses, end up being sold for meat and shipped to slaughterhouses in Mexico or Canada. Horse slaughter ended in the United States in 2007. But slaughter isn’t the only option, he said. “Call the vet,” he said. “That’s what you do. Have the animal put down.” Easier said than done, especially when money is tight, said Linda Kauffman, a Stevensville veterinarian. t costs about $100 for a vet to euthanize a horse. Then it’s another $100 to rent a bulldozer operator to dig a hole and bury a horse. Owners who don’t have the land for burial can call the knacker, who hauls the body to a rendering plant. That’s another $100. Which brings the situation back around to slaughterhouses, Kauffman said. She said she’s in favor of slaughtering horses in the United States if the business returns with governing boards that ensure ethical slaughter as defined by national veterinary associations....

Horses with no home Young, middle-aged and old, the healthy, the starved and the crippled - all the horses are here for the same reason. “Hay is too expensive,” explains Carl Penner of Hamilton, who has brought a horse to the auction. “It costs a lot to keep them.” And so, people sell them - or try to. Horses are suffering as the economy falters, and not just in Montana. It's a nationwide problem, said Gene Greimann, a longtime Hardin veterinarian. “It's pretty clear we've got a situation,” he said. “And it's pretty critical.” Montana has seen a rash of horse neglect and abuse cases in recent months, most recently in the Bitterroot Valley, where two Georgia outfitters are accused of abandoning their pack horses, one of which nearly starved. In the Billings area, Greimann said, “people are turning horses loose on the Crow Reservation, and we have had several ranchers who have found stray horses starved, laying down and banging their head on the ground in misery.”....Picture that horse layin' on the ground and bangin' it's head in misery, and keep that picture in mind as you thank the "do gooders" in the animal rights industry and the gutless wonders in Congress for creating this situation.

Dam doomed tiny town of Marquette Wyoming has always been unforgiving country, with some early settlements failing to catch on, while others faded away after reversals of work, wealth or weather. The small ranching community of Marquette was settled years before Cody was founded. But it was the decision to build a massive dam between the two spots that meant an end to Marquette, submerging the settlement under what is now the Buffalo Bill Reservoir, about 10 miles west of Cody. At the confluence of the North Fork and South Fork of the Shoshone River, near the site of what was once a large Crow Indian village, rancher George Marquette became one of the first white settlers in the area, said Jeannie Cook, a Cody historian, archivist and author. "He was a fiddler, and he would go around and play for all the parties in the Bighorn Basin. He was also a carpenter and did a lot of work for Otto Franc," a German aristocrat who founded the Pitchfork Ranch in Meeteetse, Cook said. Named after Marquette, the community got a post office in 1891, with Marquette serving as postmaster. Just a few buildings served many purposes, with the post office including a dance hall. Another building had a barbershop and saloon, and the community also had a general store....Those of us in the West who are concerned about the Kelo decision should not forget our own history: farms, ranches and entire communities were condemned for "development."

Just right for the garden: a mini-cow It's the little cow with a big future. Rising supermarket prices are persuading hundreds of families to turn their back gardens into mini-ranches stocked with miniature cattle. Registrations of the most popular breed, the Dexter, have doubled since the millennium and websites are sprouting up offering “the world’s most efficient, cutest and tastiest cows”. For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer. The Dexter, a mountain breed from Ireland, is perfect for cattle-keeping on a small scale, but other breeds are being artificially created to compete with it, including the Mini-Hereford and the Lowline Angus, which has been developed by the Australian government to stand no more than 39in high but produce 70% of the steak of a cow twice its size....And we'll need some mini-cowboys to do some mini-wrangling.

The Klamath Bucket Brigade

November 14, 2008 - The planned removal of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River is a bitter pill to swallow for the basin's agricultural industry. Some farmers regard the plan as an unpleasant but ultimately necessary remedy that will help heal divisions over the competing water needs of farmers and fish. Other growers say dam removal will only enflame the Klamath Basin's ills over the long term. "Common sense says, what are they thinking?" said Tom Mallams, a hay farmer and president of the Klamath Off-Project Water Users, who opposes dam removal. "It's an absolute disaster, the way they're trying to do this." Read more from yesterday's Capital Press article Klamath dam removal plan unpopular with farmers. Oregon Sen. Doug Whitsett, R-Klamath Falls said he had severe reservations about the dam removal agreement in principle signed by state, federal and PacifiCorp officials Thursday. “I think that we really have no empirical science that removal is going to improve anything,” Whitsett said....

Gun Owners Not Welcome on Obama's White House Team?
President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team is showing its hostility toward lawful firearm owners by “weeding out” job applicants who own firearms themselves, a Second Amendment group says. The Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) notes that question 59 – part of a 63-item questionnaire given to Obama administration job applicants – asks for information about firearms owned by the applicant and his or her family. Found in the questionnaire’s “Miscellaneous” section, question 59 reads, “Do you or any members of your immediate family own a gun? If so, provide complete ownership and registration information. Has the registration ever lapsed? Please also describe how and by whom it is used and whether it has been the cause of any personal injuries or property damage.” Although it’s not clear that gun ownership would disqualify a job applicant, ISRA says question 59 shows the Obama team’s “distaste” for firearm owners. "Question 59 provides clear insight into how Obama and his people perceive firearm owners," said ISRA Executive Director Richard Pearson. “The questionnaire poses a number of questions asking the applicant to reveal any unethical activities, or embarrassing Internet chats, then wraps up by asking if anyone in the applicant's family owns a firearm. Obviously, Obama feels that owning a firearm is akin to talking dirty in Internet chat rooms.”....

Obama election triggers national gun rush Gun sales have skyrocketed since Barack Obama was elected, and many gun owners say they are concerned the nation's next president and a Democratic-controlled Congress will impose a ban on assault rifles and firearm ownership. From Nov. 3 to Nov. 9, the FBI reported 374,000 background checks on people purchasing guns – a 49 percent jump from last year. Dealers are reporting larger-than-usual sales since Election Day, according to the Chicago Tribune. The rush to buy weapons is more intense than in the days following Y2K and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks....

S.C. plans a tax-free period on guns Some confusion still surrounds state legislation passed earlier this year, waiving the sales tax on handgun, rifles and shotguns during the 48 hours following the Thanksgiving holiday. The bill passed in the General Assembly on June 4, was vetoed by the Governor on June 11 and was then overridden by the legislature later that month. On Thursday, the Department of Revenue issued a press release announcing what they are calling the "Second Amendment" Sales Tax Holiday. A spokesperson for the Department of Revenue who issued the Thursday press release said she was familiar with the legislative quagmire, but was assured the 48-hour tax break on firearm purchases would begin at 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 28 and continue through midnight Nov. 29. The tax exemption also applies to any local sales and use tax....

Two More U.S. Military Units Assigned For Homeland Security Northcom has announced that two more U.S. military units will be assigned for domestic homeland security missions, bringing the total number of combat ready service members operating inside the U.S. to around 4,700, as fears grow about the increasing militarization of law enforcement. The announcement follows the controversy surrounding a September 8 Army Times report (revised on September 30), which revealed that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, fresh from combat duties in Iraq, would be operating inside America for tasks including “civil unrest and crowd control,” a detail that was later denied by Northcom despite the concession that forces would be armed with both non-lethal and lethal weapons as well as having access to tanks. “In the next three years the military plans to activate and train an estimated 4,700 service members for specialized domestic operations, according to Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command, which was created in 2002 for homeland defense missions,” reports the Colorado Independent. But as Mike German, national security counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative office in Washington., D.C., points out, “This isn’t a military police brigade or a civil affairs brigade. This is actually a combat brigade being assigned a domestic mission.”....