I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced today that greenhouse gases endanger human health and the environment, and must be regulated.
“These long-overdue findings cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States Government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a press release.
These are final findings that follow the EPA’s announcement in April that it would move in this direction, in response to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that greenhouse gases are covered by the Clean Air Act as air pollutants. The endangerment finding covers six greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. The EPA’s Web site includes a page with climate change facts that lay out what it calls the key scientific facts supporting the endangerment finding.
An endangerment finding means that the EPA can set stronger emissions requirements in the future, guided by these findings in conjunction with the Supreme Court interpretation of the Clean Air Act.
The announcement comes just as an international conference on climate change gets underway in Copenhagen.
Here in New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson today issued an executive order that maintains a state government climate change advisory group and directs state agencies to work in collaboration with the group to identify new strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the state.
The advisory group was formed in 2005 through an executive order that also set greenhouse gas emission reduction goals for New Mexico. Those goals called for the state to meet year 2000 levels by 2012, 10 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, and 75 percent below 2000 levels by 2050.
