There’s little cause to celebrate upcoming Sunshine Week for those who cover Trump administration environmental agencies. The latest WatchDog catalogues how the EPA has adopted a secretive approach and displays frequent hostility to the news media, including with a troubling series of attacks on individual journalists.
"Oil executives urged the Trump administration to slash the rates their companies pay to harvest natural gas and crude from beneath U.S. waters."
"American solar company SunPower will lay off about 3 percent of its workforce in March, a decision that comes after President Trump began imposing new tariffs on imported solar materials earlier this month."
"U.S. President Donald Trump has asked for more talks between representatives of the oil and corn industries after a meeting on Tuesday failed to yield an agreement on how to help refiners cope with the country’s biofuels policy."
A hard-nosed account of Monsanto and its controversial and popular herbicide Roundup comes in a new book by a former wire service reporter, who pieced together documentation and fact-finding from over 20 years to make a case there was a dangerous cover-up. BookShelf reviews Carey Gillam’s “Whitewash.”
A new book on the Gulf of Mexico earns kudos for the balance and passion of its tone, as well as for its historical storytelling about this important ecosystem and the overfishing, oil spills, hurricanes, explosive growth and poor land-use decisions it faces. BookShelf reviews Jack Davis’ “The Gulf.”
"A proposal to cut the federal government's take from deepwater oil and gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico is making its way towards Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's desk."
"In Charleston, S.C., where the ports have been expanding to accommodate larger ships sailing through the newly widened Panama Canal, a real-estate developer named Xebec Realty recently went looking for land to build new warehouses and logistics centers."
Infrastructure is much in the news these days, with battles over politics and funding yielding stories for environment reporters. In play are a Trump plan, who gets to pick projects, who pays and much more. But in an election year, how likely are infrastructure plans to move forward? The backstory, with angles for environment and energy, plus what to watch for in 2018, in our Backgrounder on infrastructure.
Covering local infrastructure projects often means covering energy and the environment. This week’s TipSheet offers a companion to our special backgrounder on the national infrastructure story emerging out of Washington. We’ve got dozens of resources and links for finding infrastructure news and information from Congress, executive agencies, infrastructure organizations and environmental groups.
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