Greenwire

Ammon Bundy, the leader of the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, yesterday defended the takeover as "a needed action" and told state and federal law enforcement officials to leave Oregon.

Environmental groups are planning to protest at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans next month to urge President Obama to end oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Jason Briefel, legislative director for the Senior Executives Association, has been picked to serve as the group's interim president.

Financing for biomass plants all but dried up in 2013 and 2014 -- and the industry will pay the price with little new capacity for the next few years.

The state of Utah has joined the legal battle challenging the Obama administration's sweeping plans to save the greater sage grouse across the West, claiming they are unnecessary and undermine the state's own grouse conservation efforts.

The Supreme Court's recent move to uphold a federal energy conservation rule bodes well for the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, environmental lawyers say.

The Obama administration today finalized a series of controversial updates to the Endangered Species Act, which will change the way that federal wildlife managers determine how much habitat to protect for imperiled animals and plants.

Before he renounced his grazing fees and helped lead an illegal occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the late LaVoy Finicum was an upstanding rancher in the eyes of the Bureau of Land Management. The turning point came when Finicum decided that he -- not the American taxpayer -- owned the northern Arizona grass that fed his cows.

As Duke Energy Corp. prepares to ship 1.5 million tons of coal ash to a new landfill in central Virginia, it's becoming clear that the cost will total billions of dollars.

A new move by U.S. EPA could make it simpler for companies to burn certain waste material at incinerators and power plants.

Dye will be placed into the Potomac River today to find the source of an ongoing oil spill.

Two persistent and possibly harmful chemicals once used in manufacturing nonstick cookware coatings and other materials are present in drinking water in a Colorado city, U.S. EPA said.

Managers for New York's Indian Point nuclear plant said water contaminated with radioactive materials leaked into groundwater near the facility last month, drawing sharp responses from state and federal officials.

More than 880,000 pounds of metals flowed into the Animas River when U.S. EPA officials triggered a wastewater spill at an abandoned Colorado gold mine last year, but contamination returned to normal levels within hours, the agency reported Friday.

European officials were aware that Volkswagen's vehicles didn't meet pollution standards for years prior to the emissions cheating scandal, records show.

Volkswagen said it will offer "generous" compensation packages for about 600,000 U.S. customers who own diesel vehicles that release an illegal amount of emissions.

Eight years ago, Californians voted to build the country's first high-speed rail that would shorten the six-hour car commute from San Francisco to Los Angeles to just under three hours. But in the years since, legal, financial and logistical delays have slowed progression for the now $68 billion project.

A new strategy document released with little fanfare by the U.S. Forest Service's Missoula-based regional office last year is a reflection of the agency's internal disarray, some advocates say.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is facing an audit into how it handles the maintenance of its aging ship fleet.

North Dakota's "man camps" full of oil workers, which grew rapidly starting in the last recession, are now largely empty and quiet as cheap oil has slowed new drilling in the area.

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