by Mark Silva

Tough news for Dick Cheney - and word of interest to Todd Palin as well -- from the federal court in Washington, courtesy of our court-watching Countdown to Crawford friends.

The Bush administration has attempted to expand access for snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, after first President Nixon and then President Carter imposed limits on off-road vehicles in the national parks.

But now, as President Bush prepares to leave office, Countdown's Jim Gerstenzang reports on a Washington Post report, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan has tossed a National Park Service plan crafted in 2007. It would have allowed 540 recreational snowmobiles and 83 snow coaches a day to enter Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway.

The Grand Tetons tower above Jackson Hole, where the soon-retiring Cheney maintains a secluded home deep in a heavily forested spread, Countdown notes.

The plan developed by the Bush administration "is arbitrary and capricious, unsupported by the record, and contrary to law," opined Sullivan, nominated to the federal court by President Clinton, after serving in District of Columbia superior and appeals courts to which he was named by Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The plan "clearly elevates use over conservation of park resources and values and fails to articulate why the Plan's 'major adverse impacts' are 'necessary and appropriate to fulfill the purposes of the park.''

Appeal, vows Ed Klim, president of the International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association, telling the New York Times: "This is not the end of the issue.''

Gerstenzang notes that a certain "First Dude'' - Alaska's - also may be watching this court case. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's husband Todd, husband of the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee, is a champion snowmobile racer.

(Todd and Sarah Palin at the start of the Iron Dog snowmobile race in 2007. Al Grillo / Associated Press.)

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

by Frank James

There's been no let up in the criticism by environmentalists of the Bush Administration's changes, announced yesterday, to the Endangered Species Act that would essentially leave it to various federal agencies to determine the impact of their projects on endangered species without involving the federal officials most responsible for protecting such animals.

It's one thing to have environmentalists upset. It's another to have Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) the act's founding father as it were and definitely not the kind of person big-business types would call a tree-hugger, issuing the following sort of statement today:

Dingell Outraged Over Proposed ESA Changes

"I wrote the Endangered Species Act and seeing it signed into law was among my proudest moments as a Member of Congress. The changes sought by the Bush Administration would seriously weaken the law, eliminating the requirement that scientists be the ones making decisions regarding science, instead giving political hacks and unsympathetic bureaucrats another opportunity to attack the scientific community. It is remarkable that this bill, signed into law by Richard M. Nixon and accepted for decades as a pillar of American conservation would be destroyed by George W. Bush in the final months of his Administration. It is most peculiar that a statute which has done so much good should be now jeopardized by the stroke of a hostile Presidential pen."

by William Neikirk

Former Vice President Al Gore returned to the nation's capital today to issue a stunning challenge: The United States must abandon fossil fuels in generating electricity over the next decade to conquer the danger of global warming.

He said it should be done, could be done, but didn't express confidence that it would be done. His speech raised the question of whether Gore, as a political figure, has enough clout and stature to inspire the kind of solution he outlined.

The former vice president knows he is stepping on many toes and special interests in trying to summon support for such a national crusade. The fact that his rhetoric has yet to break a Washington deadlock over climate change would be reason to doubt the power of his own persona and his scary scenarios.

And will ordinary Americans sign on to this plan? That is a key issue, especially since the country is grappling with gasoline prices topping $4 a gallon and an economy teetering on the edge of a recession. Although viewed as an alarmist by conservatives, Gore hopes that the current climate will make Americans more willing to go along with his drastic plan.

The survival of the country is at risk, Gore warned, and "the future of civilization is at stake" as the planet warms as a result of heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" accumulating in the atmosphere.

And, he said, U.S. national security would be severely threatened without the kind of plan he outlined today. He raised the specter of "hundreds of millions of climate refugees" being able to cause political instability around the world.

The Nobel Prize-winning Gore called for a national effort akin to the country's effort to put a man on the moon, inspired in a famous speech by President John F. Kennedy.

by Katie Fretland and updated

How does California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger feel about global warming in 12 words or less?

At a 2007 luncheon in honor of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist's efforts to combat climate change, Schwarzenegger pulled out a line from his action star days.

"We have to say 'hasta la vista baby' to the greenhouse gases," he said.

A year later, the Governator is still fighting that fight, now calling President Bush's administration "bogus" on climate change.

The Environmental Protection Agency decided last week not to take further action against global warming while Bush remains in office. The EPA declined to declare greenhouse gases unhealthy to the public.

At the Group of Eight Summit this month, world leaders said they made significant progress by agreeing to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, but environmental groups say that decision was a failure to address more immediate goals.

Today in an interview with ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Schwarzenegger was asked about rumors that Obama would ask him to take a position within his potential administration relating to energy or the environment.

"I'm always ready to help in any way I can the United States, because as you know, I've committed myself to be a public servant, because this country has given me everything.... I'd take his call now and I'd take his call when he's president, anytime," Schwarzenegger said.

by Mark Silva

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pumped up President Bush in a re-election campaign rally at a Columbus, Ohio, hockey arena four years ago. But Bush has let Schwarzenegger, and the world, down on global warming, the governor maintains.

""This administration did not believe in global warming," Schwarzenegger told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos in an interview that will air Sunday on ABC's This Week.

"They just didn't believe in it or they didn't believe that they should do anything about it, since China is not doing anything about it and since India is not willing to do the same thing, so why should we do the same thing?" Schwarzenegger maintains - and that's not the American way, says this son of Austria who found his fortune in his adopted homeland.

"We don't wait for other countries to do the same thing,'' Schwarzenegger tells Stephanopoulos (there's a couple of mouthsful for you). "That's what makes America number one... And I think we have a good opportunity to do the same thing, also, with fighting global warming.''

Schwarzenegger's comments follow the Environmental Protection Agency's decision not to take further action against global warming during the remainder of Bush's presidency.

"To be honest with you, if they would have done something this year, I would have thought it was bogus anyway," the governor says. "You don't change global warming and you don't really have an effect by doing something six months before you leave office....

"This administration did not believe that [carbon dioxide] and greenhouse gases is a pollutant,'' he says. "They fought this in court and then finally the Supreme Court had to tell them, 'Yes, it is a pollutant.''

The Republican governor also seizes the opportunity of this appearance on the Sunday morning talk show to tout his own state's initiatives on climate change: "I'm very happy that California is in the forefront. We are very aggressive. We have made a commitment to roll back our greenhouse gas emissions to the 1990 level ... We didn't wait for Washington.

"The administration and the federal government have been terrific partners in a lot of things for us and we have worked together very well,'' Schwarzenegger says, "but environmental issues was not one of them."

by Frank James

In a move that shouldn't surprise anyone, the Bush Administration decided it wanted no part of regulating the greenhouse gases most scientific experts believe contribute to global warming.

The EPA decision took the form of a 588-page document issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in which the EPA declined to take the vital step of declaring greenhouse gases unhealthy to the public.

If the EPA had done so, the agency would have been required by law to regulate greenhouse gases. Last year, the Supreme Court said the EPA had the authority to make such regulations if it determined that such gases were harmful to Americans' health.

Even though Bush has publicly accepted the premise that humans are contributing to global warming, his administration has opposed such regulations on the grounds that the U.S. economy could potentially be bogged down if the EPA were required to sign off on thousands or more projects and activities across the nation that influenced greenhouse gases.

The Bush administration's view on new EPA rules also mirrors its objections to the Kyoto Protocol; that the global warming problem is by definition a world-wide problem and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the U.S. to burden its economy with rules and costs to fight global warming if developing nations like China and India weren't similarly constrained.

So Bush's EPA essentially punted, leaving it to a future president and Congresses to determine how the EPA should proceed. In lieu of making regulations, the EPA issued a document that, among other things, merely sums up the objections it heard from across the administration to possible regulations.

by Katie Fretland

The Group of Eight industrialized nations today decided on a plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 in an effort to combat global warming, but environmentalists say the proposal falls short of setting more immediate goals.

Leaders from the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Canada and Italy issued a joint communique asking for a global response from all major economies on climate change.

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said long negotiations in the year since the last G8 summit in Germany led to today's agreement.

However, environmentalists criticized the plan.

Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the South African minister of environmental affairs and tourism, called the statement an "empty slogan."

"To be meaningful and credible, a long term goal must have a base year, it must be underpinned by ambitious midterm targets and actions," van Schalkwyk said.

Kim Carstensen, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Global Climate Initiative, said the G8's agreement reflects little change since the last summit.

"So little progress after a whole year of minister meetings and negotiations is not only a wasted opportunity, it falls dangerously short of what is needed to protect people and nature from climate change," Carstensen said.

Greenhouse gas emissions must fall within the next 15 years, scientists have said, in order to keep global temperatures down and avoid serious damage to the environment and extreme weather.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

(Photo by AP shows British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper--left to right.)

by Matthew Hay Brown

Congress left Washington last week for the Fourth of July break, but gasoline prices take no holiday - and neither does the campaign by congressional Republican leaders to push for more domestic drilling.

House Republican Leader John A. Boehner is highlighting today's CNN/Opinion Research poll finding that 73 percent of Americans in favor of expanded offshore drilling for oil and natural gas in protected U.S. waters. The survey of 1,000 Americans from June 26 to 29 is the latest to show rising support among beleaguered consumers for increasing access to America's oil reserves.

"For decades, Democrats have locked up our nation's natural energy sources, and with $4.10 per gallon gasoline and $145 per barrel oil, American families and small businesses are literally paying the price. While the Democratic Majority refuses to schedule meaningful legislation to help reduce gasoline prices, the American people are saying 'enough is enough.' "

Democrats say such drilling would harm the environment while doing little to reduce prices at the pump. Forty-nine percent of poll respondents believe environmental protection should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth, while 44 percent said the government should focus on economic growth, even at the expense of the environment.

Carroll Muffett, deputy campaigns director at Greenpeace, called the choice "a false dichotomy."

"In truth, what is truly good for the environment is what is truly good for the economy, because a shift to better energy solutions would create jobs," Muffett told CNN.

By Josh Mitchell and wire reports

The Pentagon and the Environmental Protection Agency are mired in a dispute over the pace of environmental cleanups at Maryland's Fort Meade and Fort Detrick, where contamination from fuels and munitions for years seeped into soil and groundwater.

The Pentagon says that it has spent more than $120 million cleaning up Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County and Fort Detrick in Frederick County and that it plans to spend tens of millions more on the efforts.

But defense officials have refused to sign an EPA order setting a more aggressive timetable and establishing fines for missed deadlines.

Another 10 locations are in dispute at facilities in New Jersey, Florida, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, Alabama, Florida and Hawaii.

The dispute has intensified in recent days, with the EPA moving to add Fort Detrick to its Superfund list of the nation's most contaminated sites, a list that includes Fort Meade and Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County.

And late yesterday, Maryland Sens. Benjamin L. Cardin and Barbara A. Mikulski called for congressional hearings on the Defense Department's refusal to sign the order.

"DoD is not above the law and is not exempt from EPA regulations," Cardin said in a statement. "This issue affects not only Fort Meade - but the thousands of people living, working, praying and playing on base and in nearby communities."

Pentagon officials said that they are aggressively cleaning up the Maryland military posts and that the EPA's latest order exaggerates the extent of the problem.

"Our cleanup effort has not waned," said Tad Davis, a deputy assistant secretary of the Army, adding that there is no health risk to people on the posts.

"That order is based on the premise that there is an imminent and substantial endangerment to health and human safety, which we believe is completely false. That's the whole purpose of what we've been doing to date, is to make sure that the actions we've taken provide a safe environment to the soldiers, family members and civilians that work on Fort Meade."

Read the full story in the Baltimore Sun.

by Mark Silva

As leaders of the world's major economic powers prepare for a meeting in Japan next month, an adviser to President Bush says they have not reached agreement yet on a long-term plan for emissions of greenhouse gases.

Bush and the leaders of the rest of the Group of Eight nations will meet at Toyaka for their annual G-8 summit after the Fourth of July, and they also will meet with leaders of China, India, Brazil and other economic powers taking part in climate change talks which Bush had held promise of delivering an agreement on national goals by the end of his presidency.

Jim Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, offered a briefing for reporters last night about the status of ministerial-level talks leading up to the G-8 and major economies meetings. He was finishing the fourth round of such talks in South Korea.

"Our goal is to pull together the agenda for a meeting of the leaders of the world's major economies on -- to discuss energy security and climate change,'' he said. "This will be the first time the leaders have come together in that number and in that configuration, to have a candid exchange about some of the most difficult issues related to advancing the agenda on climate change.

"We've been talking about the general direction of the major economies in providing leadership in addressing greenhouse gas emissions, consistent with promotion and sustaining economic growth, and poverty eradication especially in the developing countries,'' he said, unable to divulge details. "These meetings are private, high-level, and we really are able to sort of press on some of the tougher issues that have been eluding the climate negotiators.''

What about any progress on the goal which many have of a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050?

"The long-term goal is a new issue,'' he said. "It was not a subject of discussions among any of the countries until it was put on the table by several countries in conjunction with the G8 meetings last year in Heiligendamm... and it was a pretty big deal for all the countries to agree that they be considering a global vision that they would share and they would try to translate that into a specific shared goal. ...

"There's no agreement on a long-term goal until the end of next year when all the parties come together in agreement,'' Connaughton said. "All I can say at this time is that we have advanced the discussion... The long-term goal is a very complex subject, as you look at the various scenarios for how you get from here to there.''

(Transocean drill ship, Discoverer Enterprise, the world's largest. Photo: Company handout/AFP/Getty Images)

by Frank James

One of most relevant news stories in the last 24 hours was in the New York Times. With all the talk about whether to drill for oil offshore or not, there's just this one not so little sticking point that many people probably didn't realize: There's aren't enough ocean-drilling ships to meet today's demand, let alone any signicant new demand.

As President Bush calls for repealing a ban on drilling off most of the coast of the United States, a shortage of ships used for deep-water offshore drilling promises to impede any rapid turnaround in oil exploration and supply.

In recent years, this global shortage of drill-ships has created a critical bottleneck, frustrating energy company executives and constraining their ability to exploit known reserves or find new ones. Slow growth in oil supplies, at a time of soaring demand, has been a major factor in the spike of oil and gasoline prices.

Houston-based Transocean is the largest provider of such ships to the oil industry and sees the logjam in orders lasting for years.

Transocean believes the deepwater market will continue to be constrained until at least 2012. Over three-quarters of the drill-ships currently under construction have already been contracted to oil companies eager to benefit from triple-digit oil prices, Mr. Long said.

by Frank James

House Democrats responded to President Bush's proposal to end the moratorium on drilling for oil offshore as well as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by telling the president to drop dead, although they used a lot more words to make the same point.

The Democrats' main argument was that the oil industry is already in possession of 68 million acres of oil leases and that Big Oil should drill away on those before they come around asking the federal government for any more land or ocean floor.

At a Capitol Hill press conference following Bush's White House Rose Garden appearance, Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts ridiculed the president as essentially a mouthpiece for the oil and gas industry.

Then he urged Bush to support legislation that would charge oil companies fees that would increase the longer the companies hold onto the leases without producing oil on them:

And you know, today is an historic day. The president has decided to take out some of the oldest ideas which the oil and gas industry have had for destroying the most pristine wilderness and shoreline that we have in the United States. After eight years, President Bush and Dick Cheney have turned the GOP into the "Gas and Oil Party." That's the legacy that they are going to leave.

And what we're going to do, Mr. (Rahm) Emanuel, Mr. (Nick) Rahall, Mr. (Maurice) Hinchey and the Democratic Party is going to do, is we're going to give them a chance in the White House to put their money where their mouth is. We're going to give them a chance to impose fees on the oil industry on the public lands where they do not drill, where the American people have already given them an opportunity to drill. And we will increase the fees as the years go by, because otherwise, they will have wound up warehousing where the oil is in the United States that the American people, the Democratic Party, everyone wants them to drill, but they're refusing to drill, and at the same time, they're insisting that we should go to places that should be preserved forever.

by Mark Silva

President Bush, attempting to put political pressure on the Democratic-run Congress in an election year plagued by soaring gasoline prices, today called for a lifting of federal bans against off-shore oil drilling and other measures to boost oil production.

"For many Americans, there is no more pressing concern than the price of gasoline,'' the president said in a Rose Garden appearance this morning. "Families across the country are looking to Washington for a response.''

The president, who faces opposition in Congress for his proposals to drill off-shore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as well as to the leasing of Western federal lands for extraction of oil from shale, is attempting to leverage the rising price of gas - which has now surpassed $4 a gallon - in a bid to get Congress to budge before Election Day, if not sooner.

"There is no excuse for delay,'' Bush said, acknowledging that it will take years for any of his proposals to pump new oil into the American economy. "It's time to move swiftly.''

If Congress leaves for its July Fourth recess without action, the Republican president suggested, "they will have to explain why $4 a gallon gas is not enough of a reason to act.''