The New York Times' John Broder reports that environmentalists have grown upset with Barack Obama: Mr. Obama moved quickly in his first months in office, producing a landmark deal on automobile emissions, an Environmental Protection Agency finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, a virtual moratorium on oil drilling on public lands and House passage of a cap-and-trade bill. Since then, in part because of the intense focus on the health care debate last year, action on environmental issues has slowed. The Senate has not yet begun debate on a comprehensive global warming bill, the Interior Department is writing new rules to open some public lands and waters to oil drilling and the E.P.A. is moving cautiously to apply the endangerment finding. I'm not sure if this is imprecise writing from Broder or imprecise thinking from environmentalists, but it's not Obama's fault that the Senate hasn't started debate on a global warming bill. It's the Senate's fault.

Government Executives' Katherine McIntire Peters picks up on the fact that the same day Barack Obama pledged to cap carbon emissions, Interior Sec. Ken Salazar announced 38 sites where the federal government will lease land for oil and natural gas ...

Good news item #1 for good-government advocates: The Interior Dept. is ending the oil and gas royalty program, reports the New York Times' John Broder and Clifford Krauss. Now oil companies will pay the government in cash for public land they lease, instead of oil. Besides the odd logic ...

It may be that Florida is shrinking (the state is experiencing out-migration for the first time in decades) but it's likely to come back. And like California and other large states, Florida has the opportunity to be a leader and trendsetter in many areas of government. Given ...

Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times reports:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Thursday scrapped a plan, authorized in the last days of the Bush administration, to nearly quadruple the allowable logging on federal lands in western Oregon -- including many prized old-growth stands -- and open up protected northern ...

So says Valerie Fellows, spokeswoman for the Interior Dept's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in her explanation of why Interior can't use the Endangered Species Act to save the polar bear through a crack down on global warming. David Farenthold of ...

The Bush administration Interior Dept. decided at the last minute that they would undo a 1983 law that bars mountaintop miners who mine for coal from dumping debris into nearby bodies of water. Now Interior Dept. Sec. Ken Salazar wants the Justice Dept. to get a court order to undo ...

Central New Mexico is a great place for large solar and wind arrays -- the one being proposed could take the place of several coal-fired power plants -- but power lines coming out of the region would cross territories where sandhill cranes and other wildlife live. Juliet Eilperin and ...

Alec McGillis of the Washington Post writes that while states and federal agencies have used a little of the $787 billion from the stimulus bill, most of the cash is waiting to be spent: "In most cases . . . the money is working its way ...

Cornelia Dean of the New York Times reports that they are 800 species of bird in the U.S. -- and 1/3 are endangered. And the problem will get worse with global warming, according to a report mainly culled from data at the Interior ...