National (U.S.)

After a months-long political stand-off, the Senate confirmed Daniel Ashe as director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"As record-shattering heat cripples Oklahoma, Sen. Jim ('global warming is a hoax') Inhofe (R-OK) failed to show for an fossil-industry-funded climate denial conference. A shrinking band of far-right economists, lawyers, and a few scientists have gathered in Washington, DC, for the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, funded, like Inhofe himself, by Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil. Inhofe was scheduled to be the denier conference’s keynote speaker, but he bailed out, explaining appropriately that he is 'under the weather'"

"A federal judge in Wyoming yesterday said the government must not delay decisions over whether to issue oil and gas leases in the West but that the Interior Department may refuse to issue leases even after a company has submitted a winning bid."

"A federal judge [Thursday] upheld the George W. Bush administration's decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act."

"It's been a busy week for anyone following the national debates over hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking,' the controversial method used to cut into shale rock to extract natural gas. In New Jersey, a strong bipartisan majority in both chambers of the legislature approved a bill banning fracking in the state as its neighbor to the north, New York, appeared ready to end its moratorium on the practice."

"A study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimates that the bottom-line cost of all the meteorological craziness is a staggering $485 billion per year in the U.S. alone, as much as 3.4% of the country's GDP."

"The owner of the West Virginia coal mine where an explosion killed 29 men last year kept two sets of books on safety conditions -- an accurate one for itself and a sanitized one for the government, federal regulators said Wednesday."

"After months of delays, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board plans next week to release its report on safety problems -- including a January 2010 phosgene leak that killed a worker -- at the DuPont Co. plant in Belle [WV]."

"There’s a ripple of unease among many scientists who study the warming of the planet these days. Some have faced harassment, legal challenges and even death threats related to their research, the American Association for the Advancement of Science reports."

"U.S. EPA [Tuesday] issued a final rule on how gasoline stations must label fuel with up to 15 percent ethanol content (E15), marking a step toward legal sale of the fuel and drawing criticism from several groups that said the labels will not do enough to prevent consumers from misusing it."