The Federal Emergency Management Agency has wasted more than $3 billion and misused thousands of its employees by responding to hundreds of undersized floods, storms and other events that states could have handled on their own, an investigation by E&E News shows. CONTINUE READING >>>
ABOVE THE RIO GRANDE — The river cut a red rock vein through New Mexico's high desert grassland, a vast dotted sea colored dusky green after a summer of rain.
Jeremy Vesbach, game commissioner with the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, pointed from a single-engine plane to a recently restored population of bighorn sheep in the river gorge.
Farther north, the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, which runs this span of the river, spread out along the Colorado line, home to wildlife that migrate from the southeast slopes of San Antonio Mountain to the northwest in summer.
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The Navy has quietly stood down its Task Force Climate Change, created in 2009 to plan and develop "future public, strategic, and policy discussions" on the issue.
The task force ended in March, a spokesperson said, and the group's tab on the Navy's energy, environment and climate change website was removed sometime between March and July, according to public archives.
There is still a climate change link in the lower right corner of the site that led, at last check, to an empty page titled "Climate Change Fact Sheets."
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BUTTE COUNTY, Idaho — The Big Lost River earns its name. Beginning in Idaho's tallest peaks, moving through irrigation dams and diversions, the river flows into the desert here and simply ends.
An ancient tributary to the iconic Snake River, the Big Lost was cut off by volcanic eruptions millions of years ago. Lava cooled into porous basalt, now covered by volcanic ash. When the river reaches the aptly named Sinks, it disappears underground.
Water "lost" today will reemerge in 200 years at the other side of the aquifer, 100 miles away, pouring into the Snake River from black canyon walls sprouting bright green vegetation. CONTINUE READING >>>
After spending $66 to buy a new 3-by-5-foot nylon rainbow flag, the National Park Service flew it high at one of the agency's newest monuments: the historic Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village, where a riot on June 28, 1969, launched the modern gay rights movement 50 years ago this week.
But a trove of emails released under the Freedom of Information Act shows how that flag decision set off alarms for Trump administration officials in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2017.
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LARAMIE, Wyo. — Ever since Interior Secretary David Bernhardt's decision last month to name self-proclaimed sagebrush rebel William Perry Pendley as the temporary leader of the Bureau of Land Management, the Trump administration has been fighting allegations that it is open to selling off the nation's public lands.
Internal emails and personnel records obtained by E&E News shed light on the ouster of Ruth Etzel from EPA's Office of Children's Health Protection. They detail the investigation of the health office chief as well as the campaign by the agency's press office to push back as her departure gained national attention.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — "Welcome aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 109 to smoky Anchorage," a voice said over the loudspeaker as travelers boarded a plane in Fairbanks.
Fully self-driving cars are the darling of Republicans and Democrats alike, but sustainability experts are warning against the notion that autonomous vehicles would slash greenhouse gas emissions.
Greta Thunberg, at age 16, has quickly become one of the most visible climate activists in the world. Her detractors increasingly rely on ad hominem attacks to blunt her influence.
Presidential candidates are rallying behind the idea of stopping new leases to extract fossil fuels on public lands. But experts warn the issue could be a political loser and spawn court fights.
The 21-year-old suspect in the mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart mingled environmentalism with white supremacy, saying in a manifesto that dwindling resources made racist violence "logical."
House Democrats gathered on the steps of the Capitol last week to celebrate their achievements in the first 200 days of the 116th Congress, but they didn't say a word about climate change.
Democrats running for president want to electrify American transportation. That might hurt the party's chances of winning a key state that makes gasoline-powered cars.
INDIANAPOLIS — As a new commissioner of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, Bob Gordon assumed his world would revolve around clean energy policies, rate regulation and infrastructure decisions.
Some of the world's most infamous hackers have zeroed in on the U.S. power sector in recent months, according to a nonpublic alert issued by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. and new research.
A major environmental group helped drive a federal court decision last week blocking emergency funds for President Trump's planned border wall build-out.
On Aug. 4, 2017, at 7:43 p.m., two emergency shutdown systems sprang into action as darkness settled over the sprawling refinery along Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast.
The systems brought part of the Petro Rabigh complex offline in a last-gasp effort to prevent a gas release and deadly explosion. But as safety devices took extraordinary steps, control room engineers working the weekend shift spotted nothing out of the ordinary, either on their computer screens or out on the plant floor.
STANTON, Texas — People can die when small rural pipelines called "gathering lines" explode. But after decades of talk among industry and regulators, the death of a little girl in Texas serves as a reminder that there are still no rules.