Free Republic

The Sierra Club filed a lawsuit Thursday to stop oil and natural gas drilling on the Padre Island National Seashore. The complaint against the U.S. Department of the Interior, filed in federal district court, seeks to halt heavy truck traffic that the environmental group alleges will threaten the endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle, which nests on the seashore. In addition to naming Interior Secretary Gale Norton as a defendant, the Sierra Club also named the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The suit involves a natural gas well projected managed by BNP Petroleum, a Corpus Christi...

The Senate's rejection Thursday of oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will make it harder for Senate and House negotiators to reconcile the energy policy bills. In a key procedural vote, ANWR drilling supporters mustered only 46 Senate votes, falling short of a symbolically significant simple majority and well below the 60-vote supermajority needed to add the measure to the Senate energy bill. Last August the Republican-controlled House voted 240-to-189 in favor of an energy bill that includes allowing limited drilling in the 1.5-million-acre ANWR coastal plain, a region believed to hold some of the largest undiscovered U.S....