By Ephrat Livni 1 August 2017 (Quartz) – The American Civil Liberties Union isn’t exactly known for its sense of humor. But on 1 August 2017, the defenders of free speech filed a jocular amicus brief in perhaps the most comical case of 2017, a year that’s proving pretty amusing for US courts.Still, the organization […]
By Jacqueline Thomsen 1 August 2017 (The Hill) – A top Environmental Protection Agency official resigned Tuesday in protest of the direction the EPA has taken under President Trump.Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland ended her 30-year run at the agency with a scathing exit letter in which she claimed that “the environmental field is suffering from the […]
By Julia Belluz 28 July 2017(Vox) – If there was ever a moment to fear the anti-vaxxers could win, this is it.Consider the following: The president courts known anti-vaccine crackpots like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and makes the same kinds of pseudoscience claims about lifesaving immunizations that they do. RFK Jr. has seized on the […]
By Igor Bobic 31 May 2017 (Huffington Post) – Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told a constituent last week that God can solve the problem of climate change if the global phenomenon truly exists. The 66-year-old Republican, who is a climate change skeptic, made the remark at a town hall in Coldwater, Michigan, on Friday.“I believe […]
By Chris D’Angelo 24 July 2017 WASHINGTON (Huffington Post) – Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) — who has spent his career cozying up to fossil fuel interests, dismissing the threat of climate change and harassing federal climate scientists — is now arguing that pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide is “beneficial” to global trade, crop […]
By Steve Horn and Curtis Waltman 20 July 2017 (MuckRock) – Behind the scenes, as law enforcement officials tried to stem protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, alumni from the George W. Bush White House were leading a crisis communications effort to discredit pipeline protesters.Emails show that the firms Delve and Off the Record Strategies, […]
By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis 21 July 2017 (The Washington Post) – President Trump will nominate a prominent coal lobbyist and former Senate aide, Andrew Wheeler, to serve as the Environmental Protection Agency’s deputy administrator, according to two senior administration officials. Wheeler, a principal at Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting, is a lobbyist for coal […]
By Natasha GeilingFollow 20 July 2017 (ThinkProgress) — Sam Clovis, a former Trump campaign adviser and one-time conservative talk radio host, has no background in the hard sciences, nor any policy experience with food or agriculture. Still, that did not stop President Donald Trump from officially nominating Clovis to the position of the United States […]
By Josh Voorhees 30 June 2017 (Slate) – Scott Pruitt is hatching a new plan to turn his personal and unreasonable denial of the accepted science on climate change into official federal policy: He’ll employ military tactics to review climate science to assess the “truth.” Or, as a new report in E&E News’ ClimateWire put […]
By James Gallagher 11 July 2017(BBC News) – Thirty-five people have died in the past year from measles outbreaks across Europe, the World Health Organization has warned.It described the deaths – which can be prevented with vaccination – as an “unacceptable tragedy”.A six-year-old boy in Italy was the latest to die from the infection. More […]
