Environment/Energy

Straddling the Colorado-New Mexico border, where the broken peaks of the San Juan Mountains give way to the high desert’s windswept buttes and mesas, a 1.4 million acre expanse harbors some of the wildest land in the Southwest. The last grizzly in the Southern Rockies lurked unnoticed here for decades. Extirpated wolves and wolverines are still rumored to roam the backcountry. Re-introduced Canadian lynx prowl the deep snow beneath conifers. But this this unnamed region, stretching between Colorado’s Wolf Creek Pass and Abiquiú, New Mexico, isn’t pure wilderness. Right in the middle are 500,000 acres of privately owned land, surrounded by three national forests and the Jicarilla Apache reservation.

As expected, today, the Obama administration announced the release of final rules creating the Clean Power Plan. In announcing the CPP, President Barack Obama said this generation is the first “to feel climate change – and the last that can do something about it.”

The Colowyo mine outside Meeker may be closed after a successful lawsuit from the environmental group WildEarth Guardians forced the federal government to reissue permits for the mine because the Office of Surface Mining initially failed to take into account the environmental impact of the operations and public comment on the project.

The South Platte River is running big this year, and the mud in the fields around Sterling is boot-deep. Water is everywhere, overflowing levees near the pastures, corn and hayfields north of town. The swales along roadsides and railroad tracks are swamped, and backyards are squishy, so the ranchers are in the coffee shops, waiting it out.

Colorado's Cory Gardner, a US Senate hopeful, has a long and storied history of championing an anti-women, pro-business, and far right causes. This record makes his laughable claim to have kickstarted the state's green energy economy a complete farce.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper announced his staunch opposition to mandatory fracking setbacks of 2,000 feet, and to grant communities the power to limit development. The governor's announcement followed the disintegration earlier this week of lawmakers' negotiations over a legislative compromise on the local control of oil and gas development. Hickenlooper says such bills could be "disastrous."

Rocky Mountain lynx, or bobcat, populations have dwindled while the US Fish and Wildlife Service has twiddled its thumbs on a recovery plan. Well, twelve years is plenty of time, a judge ruled recently, giving the department 30 days to present a final plan.

Environmentalists and solar power energy supporters gathered at Colorado's Public Utilities Commission to voice their support for net metering, a way for independent, home-based solar power to be siphoned onto the grid. Xcel, the state's main energy supplier, claims that net metering doesn't make it enough money.

Colorado Representative Jared Polis fired off a letter to the Colorado Oil and Gas Industry, a powerful oil and gas lobby, decrying their lawsuits against the cities of Fort Collins and Lafayette. Both cities, after ballot initiatives, forbade the industry from fracking near their communities.

They aren’t happy, and they don’t make for good eating because they’re more susceptible to illness. Yet a lot of cows are stressed in America. They’re shuttled around and crowded onto the massive feedlots where so many of them live out their short lives, breathing, eating and drinking in the same crowded space where they leave their waste.