National (U.S.)

"In a surprise statement undercutting Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s announcement last week that he would exempt Florida from President Trump’s offshore drilling plan, a senior Interior Department official said Friday that Florida’s coastal waters had not been excluded after all."

"WASHINGTON — A top manager who supervises the Environmental Protection Agency program responsible for cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated properties and waterways told Congress on Thursday that the government needs to plan for the ongoing threat posed to Superfund sites from climate change."

"Governors of states along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts desperately want the Trump administration to whisper the same magic words to them that it whispered to Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), who learned from Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke that the Sunshine State was being dropped from the president’s proposal to open 90 percent of the outer continental shelf to oil drilling."

"A House subcommittee hearing [Thursday] revealed bipartisan confusion about the leadership, priorities and funding of U.S. EPA's program for cleaning up the nation's most polluted tracts."

"Council on Environmental Quality nominee Kathleen Hartnett White, one of the White House's most controversial staffing choices, may be stuck in the Senate."

"The Environmental Protection Agency’s operations will continue through next week even if government funding expires at midnight, Administrator Scott Pruitt informed agency employees in a message Friday."

"TransCanada announced Thursday it has strong commercial support for the Keystone XL pipeline and will move forward with the long-contested tar sands oil project. But the pipeline's opponents say significant hurdles remain that continue to cast doubt on its prospects."

"A top manager who supervises the Environmental Protection Agency program responsible for cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated properties and waterways told Congress on Thursday that the government needs to plan for the ongoing threat posed to Superfund sites from climate change."

"A tablespoon of soil contains billions of microscopic organisms. Life on Earth, especially the growing of food, depends on these microbes, but scientists don't even have names for most of them, much less a description."

"As a Friday deadline for a government shutdown approached, the Trump administration began setting plans in motion to halt scores of federal functions — even as it scrambled to keep hundreds of national parks and monuments open to the public to minimize anger over the disruption of services."