"Before becoming a top official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Aaron Szabo was a lobbyist for the oil and gas industry. Metadata shows he helped draft a trade group’s 2022 letter to the EPA objecting to controls on methane emissions."
"President Donald Trump’s administration will move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters out of the nation’s capital to Salt Lake City as part of an organizational overhaul that involves shuttering research facilities in 31 states and concentrating resources in the West, the agency announced Tuesday."
"A federal judge has knocked down the core of President Trump's executive order barring federal funding for NPR and PBS, saying it violated the broadcasters' First Amendment rights on its face."
"The Justice Department and the state of Vermont faced off in a federal courtroom on Monday over the state’s landmark 2024 “climate superfund” law, which will require fossil fuel companies to pay for the mounting costs of climate change." "The law would make fuel companies help pay for damages caused by climate change. The administration argues it’s unconstitutional."
"Several high-ranking Trump officials that make up the so-called “God Squad” voted on Tuesday to quash longstanding Endangered Species Act regulations in the Gulf of Mexico, exempting all oil and gas drilling. It’s an outcome environmentalists fear could spell doom for the critically endangered Rice’s whale, a species that only exists in the Gulf and has just 50 whales left in existence."
"Plans for a wall in Big Bend National Park prompted public protests and behind-the-scenes lobbying to sway the Trump administration to stop."
"If you've opened your natural gas or electric bill lately and bit back a scream, or watched the numbers tick up and up at the gas pump, you're not alone. For many Americans, energy prices feel uncomfortably high right now."
"The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is failing to put warnings on pesticides linked to cancer — even when the agency itself determined a product’s ingredients are carcinogenic, according to two new analyses of federal data."
"The president was non-committal when asked Sunday night about Casey Means’s nomination, which has stalled in the Senate."
"A federal judge on Monday partially ruled that the first Trump administration erred when it weakened aspects of the Endangered Species Act.
The ruling (attached below) was heralded by environmental groups, saying it underscored that “federal agencies must use the best available science when assessing harm to species, they cannot ignore incremental harm to critical habitat, and the agencies must firmly commit to any measures relied upon to reduce harm to imperiled plants and animals.” (Emphasis added—ed.)
