A flap over pool coverage of President-elect Trump may prove a prologue to new challenges for the news media. Will journalists have access to the sources and information needed to do their jobs, including covering coming policy battles over the environment? Our WatchDog editor reads the signals on press relations under a Trump Administration. Photo: By Marc Nozell (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0].
"U.S. officials plan to block new mining claims outside Yellowstone National Park as the Obama administration races in its last days to keep industry out of pristine and environmentally sensitive areas."
"Colorado officials say it will be 2021 before the state meets the current federal health standard for ozone air pollution — for which metro Denver and the northern Front Range have been out of compliance for more than four years."
"The GOP electoral sweep has Alaska Republicans feeling upbeat on the prospects for a priority that has eluded them for decades — opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration and drilling."
"Tensions over the Dakota Access oil pipeline flared again Sunday when North Dakota law enforcement used water cannons to disperse a group of about 400 protesters trying to move past a barricaded bridge toward construction sites for the controversial project."
"A well-known author and conservationist is appealing the Bureau of Land Management's decision last month to reject her purchase of two oil and natural gas leases in Utah on the grounds that she had no intention of developing them."
"NATURAL BRIDGE, Va.— In the Natural Bridge Hotel lobby before a pipeline summit in opposition to two planned fracked-gas pipelines, two words could be heard in almost every conversation: 'Trump' and 'election.'"
"Uranium mines around the Grand Canyon. Oil drilling rigs studding the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. New coal and timber leases in the national forests. States divvying up millions of acres of federal land to dispose of as they wish. To environmental groups, it would be a nightmare. To miners, loggers, ranchers and conservative politicians in resource-dependent areas, it would be about time. Either way, Donald J. Trump’s election presages huge potential change on America’s 640 million acres of federal public lands, from the deep seas east of Maine to the volcanic coasts of Hawaii."
"The state of Michigan on Thursday challenged a federal court order demanding that officials deliver bottled water to Flint residents who can’t easily pick up their own from distribution sites around the city, calling the requirement 'unnecessary' and saying it would require 'a tremendous expenditure of taxpayer funds.'"
"Donald Trump’s new hires should brace themselves for a full immersion in government ethics school. They’re going to need it given the president-elect’s sprawling business empire and his lack of interest in selling off his companies and properties outright."
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