Environmental Politics

"A former Syngenta scientist alleges lives could have been saved with tweaks to the formulation of weedkiller paraquat".

"Senate Democrats plan to deploy an obscure but powerful legislative weapon in the coming weeks to try to quickly reinstate a major Obama-era climate change rule that the Trump administration had effectively eliminated."

"The Biden administration is taking the unusual step of making a public accounting of the Trump administration’s political interference in science, drawing up a list of dozens of regulatory decisions that may have been warped by political interference in objective research."

"Gov. Greg Gianforte of Montana violated a state hunting requirement last month when he trapped and killed a wolf near Yellowstone National Park without first taking a mandated trapper education course, state officials said on Tuesday."

"Just before the Trump administration headed out the door, a federal agency this past December cleared the way for a private company to begin pumping groundwater from under the Mojave Trails National Monument in Southern California."

"The world stands on the cusp of a massive shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, but many are worried that the transition won't be fair. Already, electric cars and efficient heating technologies are showing up disproportionately in wealthy neighborhoods. The U.S. faced a very similar problem almost a century ago with electricity, the energy revolution of that time. Most cities had been electrified by the 1930s, but many rural areas had not, because private electric companies saw little profit in string wires down lonely country roads."

"President Biden’s next big thing would fuse the rebuilding of America’s creaky infrastructure with record spending to fight climate change, a combination that, in scale and scope, represents a huge political shift, even for Democrats who have been in the climate trenches for decades."

"The White House has withdrawn its nomination of Elizabeth Klein to become the Interior Department’s deputy secretary, as the Biden administration faced push back from Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, sources familiar with the situation said Monday."

"Federal regulators finished an environmental study of America's first major offshore wind farm in the summer of 2019, according to documents newly obtained by E&E News through a Freedom of Information Act request. But the review was never made public, and the timing of its completion raises fresh questions about whether the Trump administration interfered with Vineyard Wind's pursuit of federal approval."

"When a special team of EPA inspectors first showed up at an industrial plant belching carcinogens on the worn outskirts of Birmingham, Ala., in 2011, their findings of flagrant regulatory violations were later deemed serious enough to warrant a referral to the Justice Department."