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Sirs, you say: “And perhaps some scientists are coming out against the idea that humankind has warmed the planet and continues to spew increasing pollutants into our atmosphere. If so, they are awful quiet about their challenge. Perhaps they should post their arguments here and let NRDC’s real climate experts take them on.” Well, I am an Expert Peer Reviewer for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); i.e. I am one of the often touted “thousands of UN Climate Scientists”. I and thousands of others speak, publish and sign petitions in attempt to get the media to tell...

WASHINGTON – California's Mary Nichols has an idea for how Washington can respond to global warming: Start with the Environmental Protection Agency. Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board, has a big interest in whether that happens. She's believed to be one of two finalists – along with Lisa Jackson of New Jersey – to head the agency for President-elect Barack Obama. An announcement is expected this week in Chicago, when Obama names his environmental team. If Nichols gets the post, she would add to California's growing clout in crafting a national response to global warming. As powerful...

Greens Thwart Gasoline Production By Steven Milloy Four-plus-dollar gasoline is forcing Americans to realize that we need increased domestic oil production to meet our ever-growing demand for affordable fuel. But even if the greens lose the political battle over drilling offshore and in places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they nevertheless are way ahead of the game as they implement a back-up plan to make sure that not a drop of that oil ever eases our gasoline crunch. The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, successfully pressured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to block ConocoPhillips’...

In case you haven't noticed, gas prices are soaring, hiking the cost of food and just about everything else. If you believe Hillary Clinton, the blame for all this lies on the shoulders of those greedy oil companies and their bloated profit margins, a notion that like just about every other snake-oil remedy she tries to peddle is simply not the case. We're in the mess in which we find ourselves because of a small handful of people with the money and the power to inflict grievous harm on their fellow humans, whom they just happen to despise. It's about...

LOS ANGELES - President Bush cannot exempt the Navy from environmental laws banning sonar training that opponents argue harms whales, a federal judge ruled Monday. Navy officials did not immediately respond to the ruling by U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper. Mark Matsunaga, spokesman for the Navy's Pacific Fleet, headquartered in Hawaii, said officials needed time to review it before commenting. The president signed a waiver Jan. 15 exempting the Navy and its anti-submarine warfare exercises from a preliminary injunction creating a 12 nautical-mile no-sonar zone off Southern California. The Navy's attorneys argued in court last week that he was within...

MSM DoesnÂ’t Care About GoogleÂ’s Pro-Jihadi Censorship By Matthew Vadum | November 6, 2007 - 16:41 ET As Islamic scholar Robert Spencer can tell you, the mainstream media has barely noticed that Google, the Internet search engine giant, is now deciding for its users which ideas are acceptable and which are not. ItÂ’s never been a secret that Google leans left and wonÂ’t tolerate ideas it doesnÂ’t agree with. The company hired global warming profiteer Al Gore as senior advisor and has a history of purging content based on ideology. More evidence of the companyÂ’s thinly-veiled, warm and fuzzy politically...

Several environmental groups have announced they are suing the federal government over a fleet of mothballed warships floating east of San Francisco Bay. The Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups are demanding the U.S. Maritime Administration curb pollution they say the vessels are causing in regional waterways. More than 70 ships comprise the Suisun (suh soon) Bay Reserve Fleet, some dating back to World War II. The old ships were once kept afloat in case of war, but many have fallen into disrepair. A congressional order set a 2006 deadline to scrap more than 50 ships, but a regulatory...

SACRAMENTO A state Fish and Game commissioner, who last month indicated he would support a ban on the use of lead ammunition in areas where condors roam, resigned Thursday, saying his resignation was requested by the Schwarzenegger administration. R. Judd Hanna's resignation came the day after 34 Republican legislators sent Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a letter asking for his dismissal. The events were the latest in a continuing struggle over attempts by lawmakers and regulators to require deer hunters to use copper bullets in condor zones. Lead poisoning caused by ingesting bullet fragments in the carcasses of fallen animals is the...

Gov. Schwarzenegger recently escalated a battle of words with federal officials over how to manage the remaining wilderness areas in Southern California's national forests. In an August letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Schwarzenegger accused the federal government of not doing enough to make sure wilderness in the San Bernardino, Cleveland, Angeles and Los Padres national forests is protected from road construction. The state and environmental groups want more restrictions on forest roads than are outlined in new forest management plans, 10- to 15-year master plans for land use in the forests. Schwarzenegger charged the federal government with not...

Once again, catastrophic fire has left its devastating footprint on our California landscape. It seems that this time every year, we find ourselves in the same precarious situation of watching our hillsides get drier and drier while the summer gets hotter and hotter, until a fire erupts and we scramble to contain it and minimize its effect. Once the fire's been put out and things return to normal (for the most part), we do little to prevent future fires. Then summer hits once again and we're back to square one. It's time we put an end to this cycle. --snip--...

EL MONTE Maria Valdez didn't consider herself an environmentalist when she pressed this city east of Los Angeles to buy land ringed with factories and railroad tracks for a new neighborhood park. The trash lot is now on its way to becoming a green oasis with a butterfly sanctuary and community garden and Valdez is undergoing a transformation of her own. Next month she will be sworn in as president of the El Monte chapter of Mujeres de la Tierra, a two-year-old environmental group that caters to Hispanic immigrants and translates as "Women of the Earth." "When you get involved...

Joel Schwartz (joel@joelschwartz.com) is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. America's entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are passing up a chance to earn billions of dollars by investing in technologies to reduce California's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The only way to overcome business people's stubborn refusal to get rich is for California policymakers to adopt mandatory GHG controls. That's the conclusion of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Climate Action Team, according to an April report to the governor, and of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley Climate Change Center in an August report, "Economic Growth and Greenhouse Gas...

Green CEOs and good business just don’t mix. Witness this past week’s embarrassing examples of Ford Motor Co.’s Bill Ford and BP’s Lord John Browne – with General Electric’s Jeff Immelt warming up in the bull pen. ... Ford always appeared more concerned about being green than being profitable. In May 2000, he declared that SUVs – his company’s most profitable product – harmed the environment. He lectured a Greenpeace audience that something needed to be done about global warming. Ford focused on turning the company’s massive Rouge plant into an “icon of lean, green manufacturing” and issued reports about...

Environmental groups, lured by the prospect of more than $4 billion for public-transit projects, are backing away from opposing the massive transportation bond on the November ballot. The environmentalists also are daunted by the nearly $7 million in campaign funds amassed by the bond's supporters. Over the weekend, the 75-delegate board of the Sierra Club of California decided against opposing the $19.95 billion bond package, which includes the money for public transit and $14 billion for road construction, plus other projects. Bill Allayaud, the group's legislative director, said Northern California members pushed to fight the bond, while many Southern California...

Officials who OK'd Delta homes illegally failed to consider sea level rise, groups say. Environmental groups plan to file a lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court today claiming that flood-control officials violated state law by allowing major levee modifications in San Joaquin County without considering the effect of global warming. The groups, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, assert that the sea level rise associated with climate change could eventually overtop those levees, putting thousands of people at risk. The suit targets a permit approved June 26 by the state Reclamation Board that cleared the way for the River Islands...

Though much has been done to clean up our waters, much work remains. Sewer overflows and runoff from farms and city streets threaten the life-sustaining properties of our waters, endanger human health and wildlife, and result in thousands of beach closings each year. NRDC works to continue reductions in industrial water pollution while pressing for effective pollution controls on agriculture, logging and other sources previously exempt from them. We help develop and promote strong federal laws and regulations to address polluted runoff, raw sewage discharges, and factory farm wastes and we sue polluters when they violate the Clean Water Act.

He's put the hummers in storage. He's told friends he was deeply impressed by Al Gore's new global-warming movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." And as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hit the campaign trail last week, he had a new look: a bright green bus emblazoned with a mural of Yosemite National Park. At Schwarzenegger's first stop, near Redding, Calif., along the banks of the picturesque Sacramento River, a woman asked him what he'd do about high gas prices. Schwarzenegger promised to go after price-gouging oil companies, then launched passionately into his plan to build a "Hydrogen Highway" and to impose strict limits...

California's Republican governor and top Democratic lawmakers are talking tough, prompt action to battle climate change, yet unlike its pioneering restrictions on air pollutants, the state is taking more measured steps in regulating greenhouse gases. In fact, Sacramento could end up pushing Washington into action but lagging behind the federal government when it comes to curbing greenhouse emissions. Last week, Democrats led by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, D-Woodland Hills,filed legislation calling for mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions by major emitters in January 2008 and a gradual capping of those emissions starting in 2012. Gov. Arnold...

As electric utilities look at new power plants for the next 30 years, overwhelmingly they are plowing money into burning pulverized coal — cheap, abundant domestically and full of carbon dioxide. Some of the 132 new coal-fired plants proposed for the United States will not be built, but federal energy analysts are predicting the new plants will boost greenhouse-gas emissions for the electric industry 43 percent by 2030. Ceres, a coalition of environmentally minded investors and environmental groups, reported Wednesday at its meeting in Oakland that those releases account for nearly all growth in U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions for the next...

SACRAMENTO--Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez introduced legislation Monday to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, oil refineries and other industrial sources, a step he said would lead the nation in combating global warming while spurring the state's economy. "(The bill) sends a loud and clear message to ... innovators and entrepreneurs here and abroad to develop and bring clean technologies into the California marketplace," the Los Angeles Democrat said. Nunez announced the legislation on the same day Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration released a report calling for development of economic incentives that could include emission caps to cut greenhouse gases, chiefly...