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The Trump administration is moving forward with a proposal to revoke part of California’s authority to set its own automobile gas mileage standards, a government official said Thursday, confronting a state that has repeatedly challenged the administration’s environmental rollbacks. The Environmental Protection Agency was preparing paperwork for the White House for the move, meant to help the administration set a single, less rigorous mileage standard enforceable nationwide, according to the official, who is familiar with the regulatory process and spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public. President Donald Trump has pushed for months to...

BLM’s westward trek and enviros losing water battle Move’em out The Department of Interior is moving forward with their plan to relocate the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to Grand Junction, Colorado. The reorganization would have the top twenty-seven BLM positions make the move to Grand Junction while three hundred or so will be assigned to various positions in the West. Sixty-one positions will remain in D.C. The plan to move BLM headquarters is vehemently opposed by the environmental lobby groups, which means, guess what, it is opposed by the Democrats in Congress. Leading the pack...

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed revoking Obama-era regulations on climate-changing methane leaks from many oil facilities, a move that environmental groups said was meant to renounce the agency’s overall legal authority to regulate the gas in the fight against global warming. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the proposed rule followed President Donald Trump’s directions to remove “unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry.” The step would be the latest in a series easing the previous administration’s emissions controls on the oil, gas and coal industries, including a 2016 rule regulating oil-industry methane leaks as...

U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood has handed a victory to the state of Georgia and nine other states that sued the federal government (and to the rest of the nation) by declaring that the WOTUS Rule is unlawful. Wood stated that the rule, which was intended to provide better protection of the nation’s water, violated the Clean Water Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, and she remanded it back to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers for further work. She wrote that while the agencies have authority to interpret the phrase “waters of the United...

Energy recommendations from a government-backed program have gone viral after suggesting that people should keep their home thermostats at least at 78 degrees for cooling. Energy Star, which works with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department to set efficiency benchmarks for appliances, electronics, building materials, lighting and other products, recommends that Americans program their thermostats to at least 78 degrees from 6 a.m. The program then recommends temperatures be raised to at least 85 degrees from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., at which point it recommends again setting temperatures to at least 78 degrees. Thermostats should be then...

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Tom Harris. There has been a barrage of attacks against the Trump administration for replacing the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) with the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. Last week, for example, the American Public Health Association and the American Lung Association announced that attorneys representing them from the Clean Air Task Force are filing a lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for repealing the CPP and bringing in ACE in its place. The three organizations issued a press release in which they asserted, “EPA’s decision to repeal the Clean Power Plan and...

A U.S. appeals court panel sided with the Trump administration Friday in a mining pollution dispute, ruling that state and federal programs already in place ensure that companies take financial responsibility for future cleanups. The ruling came after the administration was sued by environmental groups for dropping an Obama-era proposal that would have forced companies to put up money to show they have resources to clean up pollution. The mining industry has a legacy of bankrupt companies abandoning polluted sites and leaving taxpayers to cover cleanup costs. But the three-judge panel with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District...

Full Header: Alaska Senator: We Can’t Build ‘a Simple Road’ Without ‘Radical Extreme Environmental Groups’ Suing Us Members of Congress who claim that building “a simple road” in his state will harm wildlife, like the porcupine caribou, “don’t know what they’re talking about,” Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan (R) told CNSNews.com in an exclusive interview last Wednesday. “No offense to my colleagues here, but they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Sen. Sullivan said. “There was this notion that the porcupine caribou herd was going to be hurt by a road - that’s literally absurd. That was the big thing that...

U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked .. PETER JAMES SPIELMANN ... June 30, 1989 UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before...

Earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's purported "top climate change expert" and the agency's highest paid employee, John C. Beale, was arrested and convicted of fraud. Turns out that while at EPA, Beale pretended to also work for the CIA and for years had wasted his official employment time while loafing around his house in his underwear. Taxpayers are mad about Beale's theft of their money, and "climate change" advocates are humiliated, because Beale's purported knowledge and expertise about this made-up subject was also similarly made up. Beale was an expert at lying; that is it. I am...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to drill a test well into an inactive mine tunnel in southwestern Colorado to get information for a Superfund cleanup, the agency said Friday. The EPA said it will drill into the American Tunnel next month to measure water levels and investigate how the passage is connected to other shafts. ... The agency designated the Superfund site after it inadvertently ( LOL ) triggered a spill while doing excavation work at the inactive Gold King Mine in August 2015. The spill released 3 million gallons of wastewater, polluting rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and...

The ethanol wars between King Corn and the oil and gas industry continue, with the corn faction finding a new champion this month in the person of Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois). It shouldn’t come as any surprise that she’s teaming up with Senators Ernst and Grassley since Illinois is the third largest ethanol producer in the country. The fight is still going on over the EPA granting waivers to smaller refineries from the ethanol blending requirements in the Renewable Fuel Standard, but Duckworth is raising the stakes. She’s asking the EPA’s Inspector General to investigate whether or not Trump’s EPA...

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Floodwaters overwhelmed a miles-long sandbag barrier over the weekend, drenching another community in the southern end of the Mississippi Delta. Volunteers, prisoners and others had stacked 100,000 sandbags and more than 600 wire flood-control baskets, trying to keep water out of hundreds of homes at Eagle Lake, north of Vicksburg. But water trapped inside a levee system keeps rising... ...The lake is among multiple oxbow lakes along the lower Mississippi River that are lined with houses, a mix of permanent residences and weekend getaways. It's another casualty in a backwater flood that's the highest since 1973,...

The name of a Navy veteran may be cleared after he was convicted, fined, and imprisoned for digging ponds in a wooded area near his Montana home, to supply water in case of fire. The Supreme Court has vacated a lower court ruling against Joe Robertson, who was sent to federal prison and ordered to pay $130,000 in restitution through deductions from his Social Security checks. Any definitive legal victory for Robertson would be posthumous, since he died March 18 at age 80. But his lawyers describe the Supreme Court’s action as a “big win” for Robertson’s widow, Carrie, who...

In December 2009, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency issued its Endangerment Finding (EF) – decreeing that carbon dioxide (CO2) and other “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) endanger the health and welfare of Americans. In the process, EPA ignored the incredible economic, health and welfare benefits of fossil fuels – and the fact that (even at just 0.04% of the atmosphere) carbon dioxide is the miracle molecule that enables plants to grow and makes nearly all live on Earth possible. EPA turned CO2 into a “dangerous pollutant” and ruled that fossil fuels must be eradicated. The agency subsequently used its EF to justify...

jury ruled against chemical giant Monsanto on Monday, awarding a California couple $2 billion in damages after determining their cancer was caused by the weedkiller RoundUp. The decision in Alameda County Superior Court comes on the heels of a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) statement that said there were no serious public health risks associated with glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp. But a growing number of juries disagree with the EPA's position. Monday's ruling marks the third case since August in which a jury found that glyphosate caused cancer. More than 13,000 similar lawsuits have been filed against Monsanto...

Vindication for President Trump What Was the FBI Telling and Paying Anti-Trump Dossier Author Steele? Judicial Watch Sues for Collusion Docs Between Obama FBI and Clinton-DNC Lawyers Good News for all Land Owners from the Supreme Court Digging Into John Kerry’s ‘Shadow Diplomacy’ Over Iran Nuclear Deal Happy Easter! Vindication for President Trump President Trump has been vindicated. The Mueller investigation failed to find any evidence to support the big lie that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government and failed miserably to prove any obstruction. We’re pleased that Attorney General Barr saw through the 448-page smear of...

Full title: Judicial Watch: Supreme Court Moves to Overturn Conviction of Veteran Fined and Jailed for Digging Ponds on his Rural Montana Property SCOTUS overturned decision upholding Robertson’s conviction and remanded the case so that the indictment could be dismissed and the lien cancelled(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned a lower court decision affirming the conviction of Joseph Robertson, a 78-year-old veteran now deceased who was sentenced to prison for digging ditches on his rural Montana property to protect the area surrounding his home from wildfires. Judicial Watch had...

A consortium of oil-producing countries has taken more than a million barrels a day off the market — and that’s the least of the problems plaguing American gasoline prices. Across the U.S., regular gas averaged $2.77 a gallon, up 7 cents on the week and 29 cents on the month, according to GasBuddy. Last year, gas prices topped out at $2.98 at the outset of Memorial Day weekend. Oil prices are climbing, but that only accounts for about one-quarter of the recently higher gas prices American drivers have been facing. A bigger issue is that this is around the time...

The prestige of America’s elite universities is rapidly deflating, as scandals reveal them to be far from disinterested seekers of the truth and shapers of the minds of the meritocratically-selected future leaders. The hard truth is that they are big businesses, as self-interested and narrow-minded as any corporation, but harder to take because of all the pretensions. The admissions scandals unfolding, with more indictments promised, is but one pillar of elite academic prestige that is getting very shaky. Equally if not more serious is the problem of research fraud, spurred by the availability of gigantic research grants, mostly from...