The first of nine proposed major solar energy plants easily won the approval of California regulators Wednesday, reports David Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle -- as firms battle technical hurdles and race against the clock.

Set aside some time to read Juliet Eilperin and Scott Higham's insightful (and long) look in the Washington Post at the culture of permissiveness that developed over many years at the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency (now disbanded) that was responsible for overseeing mining and drilling of ...

[caption id="attachment_10286" align="alignleft" width="136" caption="Steelhead trout"][/caption] A coalition of six California water districts failed to convince a federal court that there's no real distinction between endangered anadromous steelhead trout and comparatively plentiful rainbow trout. The lawsuit, brought against the National Marine Fisheries Service, sought to strip steelhead of their distinction as a separate species

If you really want to know how laws are made, watch this narrative. According to Phil Willon of the Los Angeles Times, California’s two US senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, are demanding answers from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management in the wake of eight fatalities and ten other injuries during an off-road race held on publicly-owned land in the Southern California desert.

In the wake of a horrific crash at an off-road race in the Southern California desert, survivors and observers are blaming the promoter and federal Bureau of Land Management for setting up the tragedy, according to Phil Willon and David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times. Eight were killed Saturday night when a race vehicle soared into the air, hit a large rock on the way down and violently rolled over onto a knot of fans.

Another obstacle for removing several century-old dams on the Klamath River, a waterway once teeming with now endangered salmon, has been removed by a second federal study, the Associated Press reports. As a result, the U.S. Department of Interior announced it will conduct a third examination of the sediment that has built up behind the dams to determine the consequences of dam removal. The main concern is that mercury and other toxic compounds left over from historic gold mining, plywood manufacturing, and farming would contaminate areas downstream.

The final hurdle has been cleared in a controversial plan to round up thousands of wild horses from federal land straddling the California-Nevada border.  As the Associated Press reports, the Ninth Circuit court of appeals in San Francisco rejected a stay requested by critics of the Bureau of Land Management’s plan to round up about 2,000 wild horses by helicopter.

Researchers at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve are working to restore the west coast’s native oyster species, the Olympia Oyster, to the slough, an estuary teeming with wildlife along California’s Central Coast between Monterey and Santa Cruz. Harvested to near extinction following the Gold Rush, efforts are now underway to restore the bivalves to parts of their historic range, reports Genevieve Bookwalter of the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The Obama administration has deployed the 'BP Squad' of federal investigators to the Gulf to probe whether there was any wrongdoing on the part of government regulators or private companies related to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. As Peter Henning points out in The New York Times, the criminal probe focuses mostly on

[caption id="attachment_9448" align="alignleft" width="122" caption="Pat Quinn"][/caption] For almost a year, Illinois has fought with other Great Lakes states, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Fish & Wildlife Service over what to do with Asian carp that swim up the Mississippi River:  have the Army Corps close the lock between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi? Get the Fish & Wildlife Service and local Dept. of Natural Resources to try and kill the carp? According to the Chicago Tribune's Joel Hood, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn now says he has the answer: ship up to 30 million pounds of Asian carp to China, where the fish are considered a delicacy. "If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em," Quinn said yesterday.