I love my job and I love Environmental Action. And, so far, 2008 is shaping up to be a great year. In just 30 days we've sent close to 10,000 messages calling for EPA Administrator Johnson to step down. From Sen. Boxer to Jon Stewart, we've made our voices heard!

And I think we can do more this year than ever before, and I'm counting on you to help us realize our goals. A key goal is our '50 from 50' fundraising drive. Each month, we need 50 people to give $50 to support our work.

Will January be your month? Can you pitch in $50 today to make sure our online program stays strong for 2008?

What are we going to do in 2008?

We're going to continue taking on the Presidential candidates, calling on them to support doubling our gas mileage standard

We're going to keep after Administrator Johnson, and the rest of the Bush cronies in their last year in power

We're going to continue shining the light on scientific censorship
We're going to fight to get the polar bear listed under the Endangered Species Act

We're going to call out corporate polluters, and the legislators they support
We're going to keep educating and activating the public

But it's not free. For the year, we need to raise $30,000 to fund our online work - just $2,500 a month. So if you can give $50 today and be one of the 'January 50' please do so. Do it because your son or daughter was born in January. Do it because it's a good way to start the year. Do it because my mom likes it when I'm gainfully employed, but please do it today.

And between you and me, if you can't give $50, that's ok too. Please just help with what you can, and help us raise the $2,500 we need this month.

Late last week, CA Senators Boxer and Feinstein introduced a bill to overturn the EPA's decision to deny California the right to fight global warming pollution. As astute readers know, we've been calling for EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to step down as a result of this terrible decision.

The bill so far has 17 co-sponsors :
Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.)
Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.)
Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)
Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.)
Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.)
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.)
John Kerry (D-Mass.)
Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.)
Barack Obama (D, Ill.)

Additionally, Sen. Feinstein has sent a letter to the GAO asking them to investigate this move by the EPA.

We're pretty excited to see so much movement on the issue, and we'll keep yah posted.

Be honest - which do you watch more, C-SPAN or The Daily Show? Yeah, me too. It's ok. The reality is that millions of people get their political news from Jon Stewart and the fine folks over at The Daily Show. So, if we want to succeed at getting EPA Administrator Johnson to step down we need to raise public awareness about the issue, and what better place to start than The Daily Show?.

So please, send The Daily Show an email, and ask them to start covering this issue.

Yesterday, I spent three hours watching Mr. Johnson testify before the Senate Environmental & Public Works committee, and he was completely unrepentant in his decision to deny California's request to fight global warming. Instead, he repeatedly contradicted himself, and said that global warming did not represent an extreme danger to the state of California.

So far 16 states have adopted the California greenhouse gas emission standard - more than half the population of the United States. Yet, Mr. Johnson chose to ignore the advice of his scientific and legal teams and denied states the right to limit greenhouse gas emissions and fight global warming.

Watching Mr. Johnson flip-flop before Congress yesterday, I realized just how political the decision was. He was not acting for the environment. He was acting for the Bush Administration and their head-in-the-sand policies towards global warming. This violation of the public trust cannot stand, and he needs to step down before he can do more damage.

To make that happen, we need to make this an issue in the public consciousness and what better way than to get the issue onto The Daily Show?

For the last seven years, every time the Bush Administration has wanted to avoid coming clean with the American public they have invoked executive privilege. As a reminder, here are what many consider to be their greatest hits:

Domestic wire-tapping
Firing U.S. Attorneys
Soldiers killed by 'friendly fire' overseas
Vice President Cheney's secret meetings with the energy industry to craft energy policy

And now another hit is climbing the charts: the EPA's refusal to let states fight global warming . Last Friday, the EPA announced they would not turn over documents as requested by Congress. First EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson completely ignored his staff's recommendations to let California fight global warming, and now he has the audacity to claim that the public release of EPA documents relating to the case is unsuitable for public consumption.

This is ridiculous, and needs to stop now. Please join me in calling on Congress for Administrator Johnson's resignation.

What is executive privilege? It's the power of the Executive branch to resist interventions by the legislative and judicial branches of the government. But members of the Bush Administration from Vice President Cheney to EPA Administrator Johnson view it more as a get-out-of-jail free card. When Administrator Johnson denied California's request to fight global warming, he was acting as Bush's lackey, and not as a legitimate protector of our environment.

The scary aspect is what else could happen in the final year of the Bush Administration if their hubris is left unchecked. We need him removed from the post of Administrator, and we need it now.

In the interest of full disclosure, I lived in Texas for a while. This is the conversation I usually have about it with friends.

Me: Oh yeah, I lived in Texas.
Friend: Oh, I'm sorry.
Me: No I liked it!
Friend: Were you in Austin?
Me: Well, yeah.
Friend: Oh well that's fine - that's not really TEXAS.

The thing is, the AP recently reported on how Texas is the nation's largest CO2 emitter, and that if Texas were a country it would be the 7th largest CO2 polluter in the world.

Maybe it's time we took Texas a little more seriously.

When it comes to global warming, it's way past time that we transcended silly stereotypes and political labels. I'll be honest, when I first read this article, my instinct was to write some snarky thing about how Texas is a dumb state, etc. etc, but after giving it a little thought, I realized that really what we need to do is figure how to actually educate people like Debbie Howden, who was written about in the story as follows:

Debbie Howden, an Austin real estate agent, said her family of six has two pickup trucks, three SUVs, and no apologies. "I would definitely put size and safety over the emissions thing," said Howden, 55. She calls their high fuel bills a "necessary evil."

If you're like me, your head is exploding at the thought of a family of six owning five gas-guzzling, global warming causing vehicles. But, and forgive the cheesiness here, I think part of being an activist is being a pro-activist. We need to figure out WHY this person feels it is a) important to own all these vehicles, b) why she views CO2 emissions as just some 'thing', and c) why it's even an option to have these gas guzzlers, given current technologies.

I think for way too long it's been simple for environmentalists to point fingers at people's lifestyles, and for people to feel like environmentalists are attacking their lifestyles. And, sadly, everyone is on board - you know that the writer of this article lead with the personal story of Debbie, rather than the political story of what's actually happening in Texas in regards to CO2 regulation.

In case you're interested in what IS happening in regards to environmental policy in Texas, Environment Texas is a good place to start.

There was an excellent op-ed in yesterday's New York Times digging into the shocking coincidence of the Fish and Wildlife Service's delay on their ruling for listing the polar bear and the Interior Department's plan to sell oil and gas leases on almost 30 million acres of polar bear habitat. I blogged about this exact issue a little while ago, and am pretty happy to see the NYT picking it up.

From the Times:

The listing delay was announced on a Sunday night, when few people were paying attention. H. Dale Hall, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the oil companies would have to comply with any eventual listing of the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act. But once the companies stake their claims, it would be hard to stop disruptive exploratory drilling. The delay also gives the political appointees at the Interior Department - notorious for meddling with science - time to craft a listing decision that magically excludes the oil companies from having to do much of anything to protect the bear.

With the possible exception of Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, everyone agrees that the polar bear is in deep trouble. The United States Geological Survey predicts that two-thirds of the world's polar bears, and all of Alaska's, will be gone by mid-century. While the overwhelming threat is the loss of sea ice, caused in large part by global warming, invading that habitat with oil rigs would surely increase the stress on the animals.

All of this, of course, underscores the much larger point that in their final year, we can expect the Bush Administration to literally ravage our environment for the betterment of their buddies in the oil and gas industry. We've already seen this underway with the EPA, and Administrator Johnson's refusal to allow California to fight global warming on their own terms.

Last week, thousands of Environmental Action activists called on EPA Administrator Johnson to step down because he refuses to let states fight global warming. So far, the EPA has been mum on the issue - but thankfully members are Congress are starting to step up. Late last week, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California suggested that Mr. Johnson's refusal to turn over documents related to the CA case, "is looking suspiciously like a cover-up."

In 10 days Mr. Johnson will appear before Sen. Boxer's Environmental and Public Works Committee. We're asking the Senator to publicly call for Johnson's resignation as well.

Take a minute right now, and email Sen. Boxer.

As I wrote about last week, Mr. Johnson has made many mistakes in just two years as head of the EPA. From supporting pesticide testing on children to promoting actually cutting the EPA's budget by $500 million, Mr. Johnson has abused his position as the man charged with protecting our environment.

His recent move to block California's right to fight global warming above and beyond what the federal government is willing to do is really the last straw, and we couldn't be more pleased that Sen. Boxer seems to be gearing up for the fight. Now we need to make sure she uses her leadership to call for Johnson's removal.

There's a great post from Treehugger recently that talks about how the Bay Area oil spill clean up is going well, and in fact is almost done, and kicks off with a good analysis of coverage of environmental issues:

Many environmental writers - this one included - have a tendency to focus on the latest scandal/natural disaster-related news, which make for more visible, high wattage stories; as a consequence, the eventual, often more meaningful resolutions to these stories tend to fall by the wayside. We're happy to report some good news in the case of at least one - the 58,000 gallon San Francisco Bay spill - which Bay Area authorities have managed to almost entirely clean up.

But of course while the clean up progress is good news, the effects of the spill themselves are still horrific. For instance, out of 1084 live birds recovered with oil damage, 649 have died and some estimate the total number of killed birds to be around 20,000.

Today we launched an effort that we are all terribly proud of. We are calling for the resignation of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.

We don't take this on lightly, but the reality is that he has gone too far. While nobody expects a ton out of officials appointed by the Bush Administration, Mr. Johnson has gone too far.

When he was nominated and approved in 2005, much was made that he is a career EPA man, and a trained scientist - making it the first time either was nominated to run the Agency.

Over the next couple of week, we'll be telling everyone more about Mr. Johnson, but for now, let's focus on the important piece, which is his refusal to allow California to move forward with their ground-breaking global warming legislation.

Tired of the complete and total inaction from the federal government, California recently passed the strongest global warming legislation in the country, and much of it was focused on reducing tailpipe emissions.

In order for the legislation to be binding, CA needed a clean air waiver from the EPA, which Mr. Johnson refused to grant. You can read Johnson's letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger here (PDF). It has come to light that EPA scientists and legal advisers told Johnson the waiver was fine, doesn't present a problem, etc., and Johnson completely ignored their input, instead denying the waiver with the extremely flimsy argument that we need national laws to fight global warming, not a 'patchwork' of state laws.

Call me crazy, but I've always liked that 10th Amendment to the Constitution, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The reality though is that while so many are looking forward to 2008 as the last year of the most anti-environmental administration our country has every known, we need to be acutely aware that our country's polluting industries are seeing the end of the gravy train, and are going to snatch up everything they can, and we need to make sure this doesn't happen.

Working to get Johnson to step down is an important step in environmental conservation, and over the next week or two, we'll continue to make the case for it. In the meantime, we ask you send him an email directly, asking him to resign his post.

It was announced that the Fish and Wildlife Service will be delaying their decision on listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act by at least another month.

As you may remember, the proposed listing is historic, as the primary cause for the decline in polar bear populations is global warming. During the public comment period, FWS received more comments than ever before on a proposed listing, which speaks pretty well to how much attention there is on the decision. Despite having a year to analyze the data and the comments, they're insisting they need another month.

Now, bear in mind a few facts here. A number of environmental groups submitted a proposal to list the polar bear about two years ago. FWS is required to respond to those submissions within a year, and when they failed, the groups sued to ensure they would follow through on it. Needless to say, FWS has not exactly embraced polar bear protection.

Also consider, another agency under the Department of the Interior (The Minerals Management Service) recently approved a plan to offer oil and gas exploration rights in 29.7 million acres off the northwest Alaskan coast, an are which is home to 16,000 bears - a little over 50% of the world's remaining polar bears.

But wait, don't forget that EPA Administrator Stephan Johnson has recently shot down California's landmark global warming legislation because it supersedes federal law, despite his lawyers and scientific teams saying the CA law is fine.

Basically, it would seem that in the last year of the Bush Administration, they are going to, at best, drag their feet on any meaningful reform and at worst, take part in one last set of massive giveaways to their corporate polluting buddies.

Strap in, 2008 is going to be a bumpy ride.

The Sierra Club and the Kentucky Waterway Alliance have filed suit to block a permit that would expand mountaintop removal mining at a site in Kentucky.

The expansion of the current mining site would dump waste into streams that feed into the Kentucky River, which is the water source for more than a million people.

From the story in Forbes:

It alleges the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the Clean Water and the National Environmental Protection acts by issuing a permit that allows ICG to expand its 960-acre mine in Leslie County by roughly 1,000 acres and construct valley fills.

We say kudos to the Club, and to the local activists in KY waging this fight.

Here's the full article.

In an amazing feat of stupidity, EPA Administrator Stephan Johnson struck down California's attempt to slash greenhouse gas emissions right before Christmas.

From the LA Times:

EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson announced Wednesday that because President Bush had signed an energy bill raising average fuel economy that there was no need or justification for separate state regulation. He also said that California's request did not meet the legal standard set out in the Clean Air Act.

Wait there's more. EPA scientists have come forward publicly to state that their research showed the exact opposite, and Administrator Johnson ignored them in issuing the decision.

Thankfully, Congress has already sprung into action calling for hearings, and California has filed suit in federal court against the decision.