Report: The GOP Economic Outlook for Arctic Wilderness Drilling Is a “Pipe Dream”
The report, published Wednesday by conservation nonprofit The Wilderness Society, comes as the Trump administration weighs a proposal to allow seismic surveys in the refuge. The surveys would be a key first step in the administration’s push to approve drilling leases as early as 2019. Late last year, GOP lawmakers passed a wildly unpopular tax…
Scientists Are Using Penguin Poop to Understand How Climate Change Is Affecting the Arctic
assimo Rumi/Barcroft Images/Barcroft Media via Getty Images Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. This story was originally published by Wired. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Satellites watch many things as they orbit the Earth: hurricanes brewing in the Caribbean, tropical forests burning in the Amazon, even North Korean soldiers building missile launchers. But some researchers have…
Ryan Zinke Is Resigning, and the Internet’s Reaction Is Priceless
Tom Williams/AP Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that his Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, will be leaving his position in the coming weeks. Zinke’s tenure overseeing the nation’s public lands has been controversial and has resulted in a number of federal investigations. (He…
Ryan Zinke Out as Interior Secretary
George Frey/Getty Images Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. President Donald Trump announced Saturday morning that Ryan Zinke—who, as Interior Secretary, oversees nearly one-fifth of all land in the United States—will leave his post at the end of the year. Trump said he will nominate a new secretary in the next week,…
Leaked Memo: Government Scientists Warned Trump’s Oil Plan Would Threaten Alaska’s Polar Bears
Polar bears in the Arctic National Wildlife RefugeSylvain Cordier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. In an internal memo circulated within the Interior Department earlier this year, government scientists issued a stark warning: The Trump administration’s plans to allow oil exploration in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) could further jeopardize…
Getting Interior to Respond to Your FOIA Requests Just Got a Lot Harder
Shawn Thew—Pool/Getty Images Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. In his latest attempt to make the Interior Department’s activities less transparent, Ryan Zinke shifted responsibility for handling public records requests from a career employee to a political appointee with a long history working for conservative megadonors Charles and David Koch. The order, signed…