unEARTHED | the Earthjustice forum on environmental issues

Lightbulb: A Change You Can Believe In

How many presidents of the United States does it take to change a light bulb?

Just one.

It's no joke. Millions of Americans have already changed their lightbulbs to save energy and fight global warming. New lighting standards announced Monday by President Barack Obama will help all our homes and businesses make the switch, and as a result save billions of dollars in utility bills and create thousands of new jobs.

Historic Fight In Congress For Our Clean Energy Future

Both the Senate and the House of Representatives are considering legislation that could set in motion a prosperous economy powered by wind and sun with millions of new clean energy jobs ...the kind of future voters envisioned when they swept President Obama into office, and that Earthjustice has worked towards for years through major legal and legislative efforts.

The legislation could shift government spending into clean energy alternatives, creating many of those jobs, while significantly reducing pollutants that harm people and the planet.

Promising as the legislative goals sound, however, the fossil fuel industry is lobbying hard to gut this effort to shift our country’s energy priorities. The future they envision – and are working hard in Congress right now to ensure – is on a timetable that fits their business plans, ignores the urgency of global climate change and shunts aside the great economic potential at hand of investing in alternative, sustainable energy.

Let's Keep Wilderness Wild

Road construction in national forests can harm fish and wildlife habitats while polluting local lakes, rivers, and streams. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule -- which was made on the basis of extensive citizen input -- protects 58.5 million acres of national forest from such harmful building. I will be proud to support and defend it.
-- Senator Barack Obama, 2008

Both as a senator and as a candidate for the White House, President Obama was forthright in his support for the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protects nearly 60 million acres of pristine national forest lands.

The rule was established by President Bill Clinton in 2001, but severely undercut by the Bush administration -- freezing its implementation, not defending it against industry court challenges, finally effectively repealing it by making it a state-by-state option that left roadless areas vulnerable to local political pressure.

In Obama's Hands: The Future of The Arctic

The Beaufort Sea, off Alaska's northernmost shores, and the Chukchi Sea, which separates Alaska from Russia, are home to one in five of the world's remaining polar bears. These icy waters are crucial feeding and migration zones for bowhead, beluga and other whales, seals, walruses and migratory birds; for thousands of years they have also sustained a vibrant Native culture. But the Bush administration treated America's Arctic as just another place to be exploited, relentlessly pushing oil and gas drilling without regard for the consequences.

Now a new President and his Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, have pledged to restore science to the forefront of decisions about energy and the environment. They have no better opportunity to fulfill that pledge than in the coming weeks, as they face key decisions on oil and gas activity in the Beaufort, Chukchi and Bering Seas -- decisions that will determine the future of the region, its people and its creatures.

A Global Warming Story You Haven’t Heard

John Kerry and Barbara Boxer are two of the greenest members of the Senate. Jim Inhofe is the Senate's chief global warming denier. But last week -- on Earth Day, no less -- they came together to introduce a bill requiring the EPA to look at ways to control a dangerous pollutant that kills millions worldwide and accelerates global warming, particularly in the Arctic.

No, not carbon dioxide, which remains the main driver of worldwide climate change, but black carbon, airborne microscopic particles of soot. In the United States and Europe, black carbon comes from diesel engines and industrial smokestacks. In the developing world, the main source is primitive cooking and heating fires.

Breathing black carbon causes serious respiratory illness responsible for 1.6 million deaths a year, from the sprawling suburbs of California to the slums of Mumbai. And when it falls on ice or snow in the Arctic, it causes faster melting, accelerating tipping points like the thawing of the Greenland ice sheet. Just within the last 18 months, climate scientists have determined that black carbon could be responsible for up to half of all Arctic warming.

Born In Wartime, Earth Day Unified The Nation

The first Earth Day, 39 years ago today, was a godsend for a country mired in war and riven by racial, political and cultural issues. Arriving suddenly -- as a gift whose time had come -- it offered folks something to unite around: the idea of an entire planet, our home, in peril.

It was a time when industrial pollutants made rivers burn and were killing the Great Lakes; smog and soot choked our cities; DDT -- thanks to Rachel Carson -- had become the national poster child for the abundant horrors of unregulated pesticide usage; old growth forests were devoured unchecked.

Images of environmental catastrophes -- such as sea birds tarred by the 1969 Santa Barbara channel oil well blowout -- helped drive home the point, and 20 million people rose as one on April 22, 1970 to seek change.

Clean Water Restoration Act Provides Hope

On Feb. 17, Earthjustice called on Congress to introduce and pass legislation that would fix a glaring loophole punched in the Clean Water Act during the Bush years. The Supreme Court, with Bush administration backing, held that only "navigable" waterways could enjoy protections of this law.

Today, I am glad to report, the Clean Water Restoration Act has been introduced by Senators Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, Benjamin Cardin and 20 other pro-clean water senators in the 111^th Congress. The new bill would protect ALL waters of the United States, regardless of whether one could paddle a dinghy down the stream or not.

The federal Clean Water Act is the nation's primary protector of water quality. Its basic goal is to restore and maintain our lakes, rivers and wetlands, to ensure that we have clean water for fishing, swimming and drinking.

The Clean Water Restoration Act will close the loophole and restore the traditional scope of protection intended by Congress in the 1970s when the Clean Water Act was adopted. It will again guarantee Americans the safeguards we need to achieve the goal of restoring and maintaining our waters.

On the campaign trail, President Obama said he would support legislation to restore protections to our nation's waterways. Congress should swiftly pass this important legislation and get it on the president’s desk as soon as possible.

Time To Applaud the "New" EPA

One year ago in this column, I called on Environmental Protection Agency chief Stephen Johnson to resign for letting politics, not science, guide his agency’s decisions. Nor was I alone – 10,000 EPA employees were in open revolt for the same reason. Johnson was defying the Supreme Court’s ruling that his agency should move forward on climate change and was refusing to approve California’s forward-looking controls on climate-altering pollution.

Today, I am calling on all Earthjustice supporters to join with me in thanking his successor, Lisa Jackson, for steering the EPA back on course with a string of good decisions, especially her action last week aimed at regulating one of the most toxic side effects of burning coal for power: coal ash.

Fixing The Broken Clean Water Act

The Clean Water Act, despite being one of our nation's most potent environmental protection laws for three decades, has an Achilles' heel -- a one-word weakness that the U.S. Supreme Court has expanded into an enormous loophole.

In decisions handed down in 2001 and 2006, the Supreme Court seized on that word -- "navigable" -- to make rulings that neither friend nor foe of the Act could predict, and none of us can live with. Effectively, the Supreme Court broke the Clean Water Act by saying Congress meant that the Act's protections apply only to "navigable" waters when it passed the Act to eliminate water pollution back in 1972. Therefore, only an act of Congress can mend this potentially fatal injury.

Grumblers Can Cheer Longer Lives

This column by Earthjustice President Trip Van Noppen recently appeared in Alternet.

Americans who love to grumble about regulations now have some they can cheer about. The New England Journal of Medicine is reporting that we now live an extra five months, thanks to regulations that have cleaned up air pollution over the last few decades.

By breathing air cleansed of particulates, the federally-funded study said, Americans in 51 cities are enjoying those extra months -- and people in the most-polluted cities are getting 10 months of bonus life.