Government

"The US interior secretary, David Bernhardt, is promoting a fossil fuel project for which his former employer, a lobbying firm, is a paid advocate, e-mails obtained by the Guardian suggest."

"Joe Balash, the Alaskan leading the Interior Department's plans to auction the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's coastal plain for oil development, has resigned, effective at the end of the month."

EPA's internal watchdog released a report this morning that found President Trump's first EPA chief made the most appointments to "administratively determined" positions under the Safe Drinking Water Act compared with his recent predecessors."

"When the Trump administration first pushed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration, it predicted that drilling would generate a windfall for the federal Treasury: $1.8 billion, by a White House estimate. But two years later, with the expected sale of the first oil and gas leases just months away, a New York Times analysis of prior lease sales suggests that the new activity may yield as little as $45 million over the next decade."

"America Rising has been filing records requests for the emails of agency officials who have supported Rep. Ilhan Omar, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and others."

"The last four members of a wolf pack that preyed on cattle in a rural Washington state area bordering Canada have been killed by state hunters, prompting protests from environmental groups."

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency has wasted more than $3 billion and misused thousands of its employees by responding to hundreds of undersized floods, storms and other events that states could have handled on their own, an investigation by E&E News shows."

"The former head of the Climate and Health Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to file a whistleblower complaint, E&E News has learned."

"The Trump administration has reauthorized government officials to use controversial poison devices – dubbed “cyanide bombs” by critics – to kill coyotes, foxes and other animals across the US."

"The Trump administration named a former oil executive who has voiced doubts about man-made global warming as the top Environmental Protection Agency official in the South-Central United States, a hub of the fossil fuel industry as well as the site of recent climate-driven disasters such as Hurricane Harvey."