National (U.S.)

"Not many years ago, there wasn't enough wind power coming from the Great Plains to worry about. Now there is, and lots of people are worrying."

"U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said Monday her agency is not seeking to halt mountaintop removal, but will 'try to minimize, if not end, any environmental degradation to the water' caused by the practice."

"The Supreme Court declined today to review a lower court's ruling prohibiting U.S. EPA from suspending normal emissions standards for major pollution sources during "startup, shutdown and malfunction" (SSM) periods."

"More than a year after a Tennessee coal ash spill created one of the worst environmental disasters of its kind in United States history, the problem is seeping into several other states."

"The Obama administration has delayed action on a set of broad-ranging and specific measures to reduce the environmental impacts of mountaintop removal, after details of the plan were leaked to coal-state mining regulators."

"The Interior Department said Friday that the greater sage grouse, a dweller of the high plains of the American West, was facing extinction but would not be designated an endangered species for now."

"Alongside a multitude of pending applications for new nuclear reactors, there is a move to restart construction at sites where the work began decades ago only to be abandoned before completion." The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering reinstatement of construction permits for the Tennessee Valley Authority's two Bellefonte nuclear reactors, started near Hollywood, Ala., in 1974 but never finished.

"The chairwoman of the House panel that oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration yesterday called for the agency's director of law enforcement to step down in the wake of a scandal over heavy-handed fisheries enforcement."

"No one can accuse Naomi Davis of lacking ambition. She wants simultaneously to rebuild black America and save the planet -- one neighborhood at a time. She knows she cannot do either alone. Her plan is to recruit and train an army. A green army."

As Congress has gridlocked on climate change, the Obama EPA has pushed forward to regulate greenhouse emissions under its Clean Air Act authority. Now some Congress members are proposing legislation to prevent EPA from doing that as well. The key question is how much support they can win from coal- and oil-state Democrats.