Environment

“Panel tells DNR moose hunting should be allowed.” Other news media also cover a new report from Minnesota’s Moose Advisory Committee to the state Department of Natural Resources, but only the Star Tribune’s headline hinted at the potential gallows humor in a Palinesque death panel for Minnesota’s biggest mammals. The committee proposes a moose harvest (sorry, [...]

Most people who fish like a good tussle. But those who prefer less aggressive quarry might try wetting a line downstream from an ethanol plant. A new study of 19 sites in Minnesota and Iowa shows that the production of biofuels can put plant-based estrogens into the water of the sort that have been linked [...]

Last summer Tom Elko posted here about barrels containing who-knows-what that U.S. Army contractors sank in Lake Superior 50 years ago. Last night, the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa told a Duluth audience about its plans to begin bringing those barrels to the surface next summer.

The House last Friday provided a generous lifeline to the wildly popular clunkers program — which grants drivers up to $4,500 to scrap their gas guzzlers for more fuel efficient vehicles — and the Senate is poised to pass that bill Thursday. But there’s a glitch. The proposal steals its funding from a Department of Energy program encouraging the development of renewable energy technologies.

Minnesota’s congressional delegation spent a lot of time discussing health care this week, but there were other issues to deal with. Railroads, grasslands, student loans and peace in the Middle East all garnered attention from Minnesota’s members of Congress.

Former state representative and two-time Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen Quist claims that a map from the 1500s “disproves the theory of man-made global warming.” In a recent piece for Ed Watch, the conservative organization his wife is vice president of, Quist relies on a map laid out by Oronteus Finaeus which shows a partially ice-free [...]

Despite a metro-area city backing out of the project, representatives for the proposed Big Stone II power facility say they remain optimistic about the plant’s future, while opponents are still saying that it means dirty power for the Dakotas and Minnesota.

Federal strategies for tackling climate change are doomed to fail without concerted efforts to keep Americans out of their cars — efforts that will necessarily include a greater emphasis on public transit, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told Senate lawmakers Tuesday.

As the U.S. Senate takes up debate on climate legislation, environmental groups are slamming a biofuels provision.

WASHINGTON — As Senate lawmakers launch new efforts to curb the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, some key members have joined local transportation officials and environmentalists to ask a seemingly relevant question: Where’s the commitment to public transit?