Climate Change
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Anti-coal port candidates now appear in charge in Whatcom County- In recent years there has been a big effort to clear the way to build a huge coal terminal (seaport) near Bellingham, Washington to ship Wyoming and Montana coal to China. This has caused a big controversy in Whatcom County where Bellingham is, next to…
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More effective and less expensive than logging, beaver also provide fish, wildlife and flood control benefits- After almost every large wildfire or fires that do significant damage to structures, people ask for proactive measures. The desire for this is rational. It needs no explanation. Officeholders usually respond, verbally at least. Politicians’ solutions, however, are often…
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One of the often repeated remarks used to explain the large fires we are experiencing around the West is that a hundred years of fire suppression has led to unnatural accumulations of fuels. Yet such assertions assume that fire suppression was always efficient and effective—a questionable assumption especially in the early days of the Forest…
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EPA Continues its Critique of State Department analysis of controversial pipeline from the Alberta tar sands- A million objections were sent to the State Department’s Draft Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement analysis (SEIS) of the environmental effects of the Keystone XL pipeline. Perhaps it was portentous that the due date for comments about the SEIS was…
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I attended the Fish and Wildlife Service’s wolverine listing hearings in Helena. Opponents, including a number of Montana state legislators as well as MDFWP, argued that wolverine populations were “stable” or even “increasing” and therefore did not warrant listing under the Endangered Species Act. While the ill-informed state legislators who testified could be forgiven for…
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Holistic grazing guru pieces together false assumptions to produce ineffective but popular recommendations on climate change- Allan Savory is a name not well known to most people concerned about climate change. However, he has been preaching his gospel of holistic grazing for a generation now and is somewhat loved by the Western livestock grazing industry,…
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I’ve been reading about the world’s economic woes quite a bit recently and the arguments between between those who support austerity to fight some looming “deficit crisis” and those who support deficit spending to stimulate the economy. In these arguments I am starting to believe that those who argue for austerity cuts to reduced the…
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Hurricane Sandy’s belated recognition of the issue is way too late- After hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the fossil fuel industry and its allies like the Koch Brothers, one wrong way hurricane affecting millions of people has put climate change back on the political map. The melt of the Arctic Ocean and the…