Arctic

Public Lands Watch: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Senate budget resolution being considered this week could open refuge to oil drilling

One of the longest lasting fights over the federal public lands has been whether to open up portions of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas development. The Refuge is one of the most important and largest protected areas in North America – it is unusual in that it protects the …

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Newsflash: Not All Climate Stories are Dismal, Scientists Actually Try to Discover the Truth

Islands and Huge Icebergs at the Mouth of Otto Fiord, 1994 (Arctic)

Methane Leaks Not Caused by Human-induced Climate Change,

NPR aired a story this week about what scientists thought, in 2008,  were ominous signs of a warming ocean.  Churning bubbles of methane — a very potent greenhouse gas — were pouring out of the ocean floor in Arctic Norway.  Scientists theorized that as the globe and the oceans warmed, the methane trapped in the …

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Add these to your reading list

Here’s some summer reading for environmental law and policy nerds. Okay, it’s not exactly beach material, but it will keep you up to date on some important issues. Elizabeth L. Bennett, Another Inconvenient Truth: The Failure of Enforcement Systems to Save Charismatic Species, Oryx  (subscription required). Dr. Bennett, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, argues that …

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Saving the Polar Bear: The Saga Continues

Follow-up:  Greenwire now (Oct. 22) has more details: The Obama administration today proposed protecting more than 200,000 square miles in Alaska as critical habitat for the polar bear — an area the administration said would be the largest the government has ever put forward in a bid to protect an imperiled species. The Interior Department’s …

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