Full Coverage: Energy and Environment in the West

The Obama administration’s plan to save the greater sage grouse was widely heralded as a landmark moment in collaborative conservation when, nearly two years ago, former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced the effort to protect the rare Western bird.

Amid a widening partisan divide over climate change, Hawaii lawmakers have a message for President Trump: The Paris agreement is needed.

Gov.

U.S.

The debate over the best use of these vast canyonlands is not just about states’ rights or who should control public land.

Less than a week after President Trump moved to open protected coastal waters to offshore oil drilling, environmental groups are pushing back with a federal lawsuit.

President Trump on Friday is expected to sign an executive order that could open large parts of the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans to new oil and gas drilling, a prospect that elicited a fierce backlash in California and elsewhere even before details of the order were clear.

The fierce debate over public land in the West is almost certain to intensify following President Trump’s signing of an executive order Wednesday that could lead to the reduction or elimination of some national monuments.

When the U.S.

This sprawling metropolis morphed in a matter of decades from a scorching desert outpost into one of the largest cities in the nation.

Tuesday marked an obscure anniversary in American history: It was 114 years to the day after President Theodore Roosevelt established the first national wildlife refuge, in Pelican Island, Fla.

Not long after Bill Gaines began working to rebuild the population of grizzly bears in the North Cascade mountains, he and others decided to investigate how many there once were and why so few remained.

The Dakota Access pipeline could begin transporting oil as soon as next week after a judge on Tuesday rejected the latest effort to prevent its completion and operation.

Ryan Zinke, a Republican congressman from Montana who has questioned climate science and expressed support for expanding mining and oil and gas development on public land, was confirmed Wednesday as the new Interior secretary.

Law enforcement took control of the largest Dakota Access pipeline protest camp Thursday, arresting or moving the few dozen people who had remained in the mud and snow in one of the largest environmental protests in American history.

California is not the only place in the West confronting startling amounts of rain and snow.

The scale and duration of the protests that have unfolded here over the fall and winter by those determined to block the Dakota Access oil pipeline have created endless logistical challenges.

A journalist arrested in a broad sweep of a “rogue” protest camp near the Standing Rock reservation is facing criminal charges from North Dakota authorities.

Five people who did not know one another a few months ago stood around a campfire talking with passion, wit and pain about how they came to live together here in the cold.

With supporters carrying signs saying “Make big business pay” and Native American activists performing an “honor song” in gratitude, the Seattle City Council on Tuesday voted to make this the first city in the nation to ends its relationship with a bank in protest of the Dakota Access pipeline.

It took President Obama most of two terms to decide to reject the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Shortly after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president last summer, a cougar swam across a salt-water channel to this island oasis amid Seattle and its suburbs.

Rep.

Much of the news out of the Arctic of late has been about efforts to protect the fragile region from new oil and gas development — but that may be about to change.

Next month, the World Meteorological Organization is expected to declare 2016 the hottest year in recorded history — just as the United States prepares to inaugurate a president who questions whether climate change is real.

Further burnishing his environmental legacy, President Obama on Wednesday designated two new national monuments in rugged areas of Utah and Nevada — places that have deep cultural importance for Native Americans but that have become flashpoints in the debate over control of public land in the West.

The election of Donald Trump has thrilled many people across the West’s oil and gas industry who say his promises to roll back regulations will free it from unfair and unnecessary obstacles imposed by President Obama.

On the night Vanessa Dundon was shot in the eye, she was on the front lines looking up at a phalanx of police.

Invoking a rarely used provision in federal law, the Obama administration on Tuesday announced a permanent ban on offshore drilling in broad parts of the Arctic and Atlantic coasts — a sweeping and controversial move that will help secure the president’s environmental legacy even as critics vowed to reverse it.

Long before Ryan Zinke trained elite Navy Seals, served in Congress or became Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of Interior, he was a boy who swam and caught crayfish in the Whitefish River in his native Montana.

Before coal became king and the Rust Belt rusted, the Pacific Northwest began building an economy based on timber.

Several thousand snow geese may have died after landing in a former open-pit copper mine in Montana that is now filled with highly acidic water.

The West’s most powerful water managers held an emergency conference call on the morning before Thanksgiving to consider the same question people across the country are asking: What will the election of Donald Trump mean for the issues they care about?

Canadian indigenous groups claimed victory Tuesday with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s rejection of the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline project, which would have carried crude oil across the wild salmon rivers and the Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia.

North Dakota Gov.

The Obama administration said Friday it was banning offshore oil drilling in the Arctic through 2022, a move that prompted widespread praise from conservation groups but raised questions over how long the decision will stand just two months before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Plant hundreds of millions of trees.

Invoking the historic mistreatment of Native Americans, the Obama administration said Monday it will continue to withhold a final permit for completion of the controversial Dakota Access pipeline while it conducts further analysis of concerns that the project will damage sacred tribal sites and water supplies.

A day after the Obama administration said it would continue to withhold a final permit for the Dakota Access pipeline, thousands of protesters across the country urged the administration to shut down construction for good.

When Donald Trump takes the oath of office in January, he appears poised to become the only world leader who questions whether climate change is real.

The bitter fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline seemed to erupt out of nowhere this summer, and there is a good explanation for that: Relatively few people knew the pipeline was being built.

Jody Atkin felt as if he’d been constantly losing.

On election day, less than a week after the historic Paris climate accord is set to take effect, voters here will have the chance to establish what some experts say would be one of the planet’s most ambitious policies for fighting climate change: the first statewide tax on carbon emissions.

First they were a solution. Then they were a problem. Now they are being phased out.

Scientists have long said that climate change has made wildfires worse in the West — but how much worse?

The answer is apparently not blowing in the wind. At least not in Wyoming.

Native American protests of an oil pipeline under construction in North Dakota began this spring with a handful of people praying in a makeshift camp on a nearby Indian reservation.

A reckoning arrives every August for the Colorado River and the 40 million people across the West who depend on it.

Long before Lewis and Clark paddled by, Native Americans built homes here at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers, using the thick earth to guard against brutal winters and hard summer heat.

When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations.

Not long after it became clear that the robust winds that blow down from the Rocky Mountains and across the sea of sagebrush here could produce plenty of profit in a world that wants more renewable energy, some of the more expansive minds in the Wyoming Legislature began entertaining a lofty question: Who owns all of that wind?

This may be what the start of a water war looks like.

This Southwest capital presents a distinctive postcard: brutal heat, desert peaks, sprawling subdivisions and endless asphalt.

Concluding a long legal climb to cleaner air, the federal government Monday announced a record $425-million settlement with two oil refiners that is expected to reduce pollution emissions in the West by almost 43,000 tons annually.

The Obama administration has made it harder to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean – not that many companies are trying to do so these days.

Oakland city leaders have voted overwhelmingly to ban the storage and handling of coal within city limits, dealing a likely fatal blow to an effort to build what would be the largest coal export facility in California.

Deep in an industrial neighborhood of South Anchorage, a bald eagle known only as No. 1526 eats donated salmon and pet store rats as he is trained for use as a classroom exhibit.

You can count coots again. Sandhill cranes, too.

The federal government dealt a fatal blow on Monday to a proposed coal export facility in Washington state that pitted two Indian tribes against each other — one that wanted to export coal to Asia, another that argued the facility would damage its historic fishing grounds.

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday ruled that state law overrides local efforts to limit hydraulic fracturing, dealing a setback to opponents of oil and gas development but potentially adding momentum to a broader fight that could play out at the ballot box this fall.

A wildfire was growing just outside Fort McMurray, but Matt Hepditch went to work in the oil sands the way he always does.

Global climate rehab begins with a three-step process: Adopt. Sign. Join.

It could be an Earth Day like no other.

The United States is expanding. That was not among the goals when the Elwha River was set free.

It is just a modest extension — two stations added to 13 others already in existence on a line that serves a tiny fraction of the population in one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities.

The predictions only get worse.

Environmentalists and energy experts have been saying it for a while now.

The winters keep getting warmer. The racers keep getting faster.

Two months after Arch Coal filed for bankruptcy protection amid a steep decline in the coal industry, the company has announced that it will stop pursuing a project in the grasslands of southeastern Montana that would have been one of the larger surface coal mines in the country.

President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday announced a wide range of environmental initiatives to combat climate change, expand renewable energy and protect a fragile and remote region important to both nations -- the Arctic.

A years-long effort to turn a tiny town near the south rim of Grand Canyon National Park into the site of 2,200 new homes and a sprawling commercial area was rejected Friday by federal officials.

A decade after federal wildlife officials tried and failed to remove protections for grizzly bears that live in and near Yellowstone National Park, they are trying again, this time declaring that bear recovery efforts have been a “historic success.”

They feel them in the little city of Cushing, where a web of pipelines and giant oil storage tanks makes the area a crucial international hub — and vulnerable.

The vast black canyons have not always been here and they are not supposed to stay.

The same day four final holdouts ended the armed occupation of a remote wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon, a new occupation was just getting underway.

Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher whose refusal to pay federal grazing fees led to an armed standoff with law enforcement two years ago, was arrested late Wednesday in Portland, Ore., according to the F.B.I.

It came down to one young man. “Let me take my stand,” he said.

A federal grand jury indictment unsealed Thursday charges Ammon Bundy and 15 other people involved in the standoff at an Oregon wildlife refuge with a single count of “conspiracy to impede officers of the United States” — even as four of those charged remain at the refuge, refusing to surrender to FBI agents who surround them.

They call him El Jefe and he roams alone.

The Internet is not the only place where a passionate and often anonymous debate took place Friday over what a video released by the FBI revealed about the shooting death of Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, a spokesman of the armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge near this town.

The rancher arrived with the evening snowfall.

Gerald “Jerry” Smith grew up in Nevada and went to work for the Bureau of Land Management right after college.

To hear members of the Bundy family and other armed occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon tell it, they are the brave leading edge, a handful of people willing to act on a widely held belief that the federal government has gone too far in its control and regulation of public lands.

People loved to leave this town. Kids grew up and got out. Take me to Minot, they would say.

For more than two decades, conservation groups have argued that a wolf and the rainforest in southeast Alaska where it lives are at risk.

The standoff at a federal wildlife reserve in Oregon has put a spotlight on an often overlooked conflict over grazing rights on federally owned land that has played out for decades across the West.

Late last summer, with wildfires burning throughout the West and the U.S.

A Utah official who quietly helped arrange a $53-million loan using public money so that coal-producing counties in his state could export coal to Asia through a terminal planned for San Francisco Bay has resigned his position as head of the Utah Transportation Commission.

The troubled U.S. coal industry has said for years that its future is in Asia.

Chinook. Sockeye. Coho. AquAdvantage.

When a Canadian company first proposed building the Keystone XL oil pipeline in 2008, Barack Obama was a presidential candidate running to end wars, climate change was a fringe issue to many people and the nation was entering a devastating recession that would send the unemployment rate soaring to 10%.

The company that hopes to build the Keystone XL pipeline to carry crude oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast asked the Obama administration Monday to delay its review of the proposal — a striking turn that adds further uncertainty to a project that has generated bitter debate since it was proposed seven years ago.

If Ken Ivory could ask the Republican presidential hopefuls a question at their debate Wednesday night in Colorado, the state lawmaker from Utah would raise a subject that might seem arcane to much of the nation but no doubt would stir strong responses from the event’s Western audience.

The blowout at an abandoned Colorado gold mine in August that sent 3 million gallons of toxic mine waste into rivers below could have been prevented by the government agency that caused it -- the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a review released Thursday by another federal agency.

The story of the wolves, the island and the ancient forest began long before there were struggling sawmills and endangered species.

Remember the Keystone XL pipeline?

Measure twice, cut once, they say. Unless you are trying to save the planet.

In yet another blow to the belief that the Arctic Ocean would be the next frontier in domestic oil production, the Obama administration said Friday it was canceling planned lease sales for offshore drilling in the Arctic and had denied requests by Shell and another company to extend leases they hold.

It was only in recent weeks, after Royal Dutch Shell had spent eight years and more than $7 billion in its controversial effort to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean, that the company finally began to drill deeply into what it believed was a promising expanse of seafloor off the coast of Alaska known as the Burger Prospect.

This is a story that Billy, Dolly and the rest of the elephants at the Denver Zoo will probably never forget: how they almost, but not quite, became not just animals on exhibit, but also sources of renewable energy.

They worried the feds were going to shut down the West.

The greater sage grouse works hard for love.

The record wildfire season scorching the West is prompting renewed calls for Congress to change how it funds firefighting, a push that comes as the head of the Forest Service said the agency would soon exceed its firefighting budget for the year — again.

The lemonade lady lives in subsidized housing on the reservation. She has lupus. Her joints ache.

The Obama administration removed the final bureaucratic obstacle preventing Royal Dutch Shell from drilling for oil beneath the Arctic Ocean, clearing the way for the company to complete exploratory wells as soon as this summer.

The worst wildfire season in Washington state history could be particularly devastating to the people who have lived here between the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains since long before the region became part of the United States.

Here at the confluence of the Okanogan and Columbia rivers, tens of thousands of sockeye and chinook salmon stage themselves every summer in an underwater base camp, waiting to make a final push to higher elevations in Canada and their cold-stream destiny: spawning.

Royal Dutch Shell’s narrow summer window to drill for oil in the Arctic became slightly narrower Thursday after protesters in Portland, Ore., suspended themselves from one of the city’s many famous bridges to briefly block an essential support vessel from traveling north.

Not everyone arriving in this Rocky Mountain resort steps from a private jet.

Royal Dutch Shell received final approval from the Obama administration on Wednesday to begin exploratory drilling for oil in the Arctic this summer, but with new restrictions that will alter the company’s plans.

Neither tribe created the modern energy economy.

The Colorado River begins as snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains and ends 1,450 miles south in Mexico after making a final sacrifice to the United States: water for the farm fields in this powerhouse of American produce.

Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change could prevent tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions in economic losses in the United States, according to a new study by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Hydraulic fracturing, which has transformed the U.S. into an international leader in oil and gas production but stirred deep concerns about its risks to the environment, has not caused “systemic” damage to drinking water but does pose risks, the federal government concluded Thursday after a detailed, four-year review of the controversial drilling method.

The big rains that have soaked parts of Nevada, Utah and Colorado in the last month have provided a brief and perhaps misleading sense of relief from the drought that is parching the West.

In April 1989, a Michigan developer named John Rapanos dumped fill on 54 acres of wetlands he owned to make way for a shopping center.

The mayor made a late play to stop it, citing permit violations.

It was just in January when environmentalists were praising President Obama for setting aside nearly 10 million acres in the Arctic Ocean for protection from oil and gas development.

The Obama administration on Monday announced conditional approval for Shell Gulf of Mexico Inc. to resume its long and troubled efforts to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean, prompting a backlash from environmental groups that warned of the risks of operating in the extreme conditions off Alaska.