Government

The Obama administration is taking shape with many key environmental appointments to the cabinet and elsewhere. This is the first half of our guide to the new players, their backgrounds and agendas.

The Obama administration is taking shape with many key environmental appointments to the cabinet and elsewhere. This is the second half of our guide to the new players, their backgrounds and agendas.

When the journalist and author William F. Buckley Jr. died last February, much was written and said about his seminal role in the growth of the modern conservative movement after he founded National Review magazine in 1955. Read as The Beat checks in on a few of the most influential journalists and publications identified with the conservative and libertarian regions of the political spectrum to offer a sampling of their recent treatment of environmental matters.

Hundreds of EPA scientists are complaining that they are being pressured by political appointees who run EPA to alter their scientific findings to support the administration's deregulatory agenda, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

House and Senate conferees have dropped from the 2007 Farm Bill language that would keep secret the names and addresses of feedlot operators. Faced with recent defeats in both Congress and the courts, the USDA and meat industry, both of whom seem determined to keep such information secret, may be shifting their strategy to trying to accomplish the same result by using Privacy Act regulations.

Scientists advising the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on air pollution issues are criticizing EPA higher-ups for ignoring their scientific counsel. Specifically, they are accusing the Bush Administration of excising science from the process the agency uses to determine how clean the air we breathe should be. The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) challenges EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson.

Another resource for tracking the influence of money on US politics was announced May 16, 2007.

Often, the workings of the federal legislature appear to be "hiding in plain sight," obscured by arcane, cumbersome language and information systems.

Mexico released a report condemning the border fence along the U.S. border as environmentally destructive.

The public comment period for a long-delayed EIS draft designating energy corridors in 11 Western states is open.