Los Angeles -- Today, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is hosting a bi-partisan, international Governor's Climate Summit in Los Angeles, and I have just obtained a copy of the taped remarks that President-Elect Obama will deliver. In these remarks, Obama repeats his commitment to an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases by...

DETROIT -- As of this morning, it appears that the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress are perfectly prepared to let General Motors go into bankruptcy, and that President-elect Obama and the Democrats in Congress are trying to simultaneously reform and rescue GM. Since the auto industry has been, after...

San Francisco -- The Supreme Court ruled this week that the Navy may proceed with its sonar training programs without complying with several important environmental safeguards for whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals.

The bad news for wildlife is that the Supreme Court -- unwisely in my view...

President Bush may have been willing to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that carbon dioxide is an air pollutant and that EPA must regulate it, but as the clock runs out on Bush's presidency, the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) signaled the end of the Bush era...

I still smile whenever I read or hear the phrase, "President-Elect Obama." And as we learn more about the election results, it becomes even clearer that Americans voted overwhelmingly for "new energy for America." Since the election, environmentalists have picked up another key Senate seat, in Oregon, where Jeff Merkley...

Gerald Ford, on replacing Richard Nixon, declared "our long national nightmare is over." George Bush's administration has been a much longer national nightmare -- but we finally know that it will end on January 20. Barack Obama's transformational victory ended the notion that America is evenly and deeply divided between...

If you know someone who hasn't voted or is still worrying about whom to vote for, here are half a dozen new reasons to get to the polls and elect Barack Obama:

1. Green Republicans have switched. Two former Republican EPA Administrators just endorsed Obama. William Ruckelshaus and...

State College, PA and Seattle -- I was at Penn State during Barack Obama's 30 minute campaign video (it's sleazy and dishonest to call it an "infomercial;" we ought to be encouraging this kind of use of TV in place of 30- and 15-second spots). We were there to honor...

Pittsburgh, PA -- "Jobs, baby, jobs" was United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard's riposte to the McCain-Palin ticket on a raucous, almost revival-style, three-hour radio celebration of the opportunity to revive the economy, rebuild the American middle class, and repower America with clean, green, energy investments.

The program, hosted at...

Columbus, OH -- Four years ago I sent everyone in my email directory a photo I took on Sixth Street here -- an abandoned brick factory with broken windows and a huge "Bush-Cheney for a New America" banner hanging from it. Little did I guess that the factory would become...

The struggle between public servants in environmental agencies and the political servants of polluters in the White House continues. In writing about EPA Administrator Johnson's courageous decision to set a tough new lead standard, I pointed out that there had to have been ferocious pressures from Gang Cheney --...

Missouri is the geographic center of the U.S. -- and Missourians like to think of theirs as the "bellwether state," having voted for the winning presidential candidate (with one exception) in every election since 1904. So the significance of Prop C (the initiative being voted on next week that would...

Oregon's U.S. Senate race is one of the most hotly contested, and quirky, in the country. The Democratic nominee, Jeff Merkley, is ahead in the last five polls by about 5 percent but is being outspent 2-1 by the Republican incumbent, Gordon Smith. Now Karl Rove's independent smear operation, Freedom...

The McCain-Palin ticket keeps getting more entangled while trying to explain its energy policy. "Energy independence" was the big deal -- hence "drill, baby, drill" and John McCain's abandonment of his long-standing opposition to offshore oil drilling. Sarah Palin in her VP debate lamented that "it's a nonsensical position that...

Sarah Palin's candidacy is now widely viewed as a political liability. As a result, the substantive threat posed by her candidacy is in danger of being overlooked. But the more we find out about her, the worse she looks.

A new article in The New Yorker makes clear...

Last week's superb EPA decision to set science-based air quality standards for lead was clearly a fluke -- not a wholesale declaration of independence by environmental agency leaders against Vice President Cheney and the White House. But there are indications that some tides are shifting as the administration runs...

Wonderful things do happen. Stephen Johnson, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has proposed a public health protecting air quality standard for lead -- one that is actually more stringent and health-oriented than was expected, and  that is even better than the recommendation of EPA's Science Advisory Board....

Why did it take the complete meltdown of the financial markets and the partial nationalization of the banks by the most conservative administration of the past 75 years to put issues at the center of media coverage of the presidential race?

Last Sunday's New York Times featured its ombudsman, Clark...

San Francisco -- The McCain-Palin ticket gets basic facts about energy and the environment (and their own records) wrong so consistently that I'm issuing a challenge to illustrate the point. If anyone can find an important, consequential energy or environmental statement that McCain and Palin have gotten right -- besides...