A remarkable news item surfaced this past week that Gale Norton, President George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Interior from 2001-2006, is under a federal criminal probe due to her potentially inappropriate, unethical, and illegal relationship with Royal Dutch Shell over the federal lands that a Shell subsidiary was awarded for oil shale development when Norton was Secretary. more

As I sat down at my computer yesterday morning and looked at my overflowing email inbox, a new unread email subject line caught my eye: “Secretary Salazar to Announce Decision on Pacific Northwest Forest Management.” The day had come! The Obama Administration would finally decide the fate of Oregon’s ancient forests, which have been under serious threat from a Bush-era plan that proposed to more than double the amount of logging on some 2.6 million acres of Bureau of Land Management forests. more

Unlike conventional energy production, we don't have to raze mountaintops or drill into our national wildlife refuges to access energy provided by the sun. Huge swaths of the Southwest receive enough sun to power utility-scale solar energy projects. Not only does solar energy not run out: it also runs wide. In fact, in the Southwestern United States alone, the sun provides enough energy to power our country 6 times over! more