by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel Supreme Court decisions occasionally have far-reaching impacts, but last week’s ruling in Utah’s Uintah Basin Railway case was a doozy, in which the justices unanimously hinted that Eagle County, Colorado, should mind its own business. County Commissioners there had challenged the Surface Transportation Board’s [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel A British biologist named John Gurdon won a Nobel Prize for discovering that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become “pluripotent.” That means mature cells can be converted into stem cells, so brain cells can be changed into heart, foot, or skin cells. That [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel A friend named Stephen Heins is an energy and environment consultant who for a long time called himself “The Practical Environmentalist.” We’ve been kindred spirits for years because we never bought the conventional wisdom that a healthy environment is incompatible with a prosperous economy. [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel An article in BBC Science Focus highlights the difficulties of “multi-tasking,” handling several things at a time, which apparently most of us don’t do very well. “In an ideal world, we’d focus on one task at a time, get it finished and only then [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel The New York Times this week shrieked about congressional Republicans using what it called “an obscure law” and “a little-known statute” to rescind regulations adopted at the end of the Biden administration. The article refers to the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which is neither [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel My grandpa once gave away a classic Model T. It would be valuable today, but he wasn’t using it and someone else was. In fact, it costs money to keep such things, so he just said, “I didn’t need it anymore.” If only the [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel Every year for the past 25, at least, negotiating teams for the seven states on the Colorado River have worked to overcome a new crisis, invariably driven by two entities: the state of California and the federal Bureau of Reclamation (BOR). For a quarter-century, [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel The Washington Monument, Washington, D.C.’s most recognizable landmark, attracted over 2 million visitors in 1966, 1 million in 1994, and less than 250,000 by 2024. The National Park Service’s timed ticket system makes visiting the monument much harder for travelers, and the iconic structure [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel Building a new subdivision is complicated. Almost every city and county in America have master plans dictating “conforming uses” of land. Most specify lot and home sizes, rules for vehicle access, water supply, sewage disposal, flood control, affordable housing and park space. Those are [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel No folk music collection is complete without the all-time classic 1967 LP, Arlo Guthrie’s debut, the entire first side of which was the 18-minute opus called “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” It was a sarcastic and irreverent narrative protesting the Vietnam-era draft, beginning with an innocent [...]
