To prevent Earth's average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, several teams of researchers say that cumulative carbon emissions must be limited to no more than 1 trillion metric tons. The findings, released April 30 in the journal Nature, are daunting because human activity has already exhausted more than half that allotment since the Industrial Revolution began. Human activity will likely emit the rest of that budget in just a few decades, even if emissions are held at the current rate. The two-degree limit comes from the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a target to reduce the impacts of climate change.

From the Indigenous Environmental Network, April 25:

Anchorage, Alaska — At the first global gathering of Indigenous Peoples on climate change, participants were outraged at the intensifying rate of destruction the climate crisis is having on the Earth and all peoples. Participants reaffirmed that Indigenous Peoples are most impacted by climate change and called for support and funding for Indigenous Peoples to create adaptation and mitigation plans for themselves, based on their own Traditional Knowledge and practices. Indigenous Peoples also took a strong position on emission reduction targets of industrialized countries and against false solutions.

Greenhouse gases contribute to air pollution that may endanger public health or welfare, the US Environmental Protection Agency found April 17, under a scientific review ordered in 2007 by the Supreme Court. The proposed finding states: "In both magnitude and probability, climate change is an enormous problem. The greenhouse gases that are responsible for it endanger public health and welfare within the meaning of the Clean Air Act."

A three judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit vacated April 17 the Bush-era program for leasing of land for oil and gas drilling on the US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) along the Alaskan coast. The court held that the Department of Interior had not carried out an environmental sensitivity study in accordance with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) when it ranked the sensitivity of various program areas in the Beaufort, Bering, and Chukchi seas only in terms of the physical characteristics of the shoreline of those areas.

Last year it was the oil shock. This year it's the econo-cataclysm. Either way, there's a lesson here. But how many people are going to get it? From AP, April 6:

WASHINGTON — U.S. highway deaths in 2008 fell to their lowest level in nearly 50 years, the latest government figures show, as the recession and $4 per gallon gas meant people drove less to save more.

As the 20th anniversary of the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill dawned March 24, the federal and Alaska state governments have yet to collect all that the oil company agreed to pay. A final $92 million claim for harm to wildlife, habitat and subsistence users filed in 2006 has languished ever since.

Environmental and energy groups across New York state are calling on Gov. David Paterson to back away from promises he made to power producers to rewrite the state's role in nation's first plan to cut global warming pollution, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). According to a March 6 story in the New York Times, the governor made a deal with the Independent Power Producers of New York (IPPNY) last fall to re-open the regulations after the group failed to pressure the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to weaken the RGGI rules.

Five people were arrested March 5 as they blocked an access road to protest blasting near a dam on the Edwight "mountaintop removal" coal mining site operated by Massey Energy in West Virginia. It was the latest in a wave of protest actions against mining operations that blast off the tops of Appalachian mountains and dump the rock waste into valley streams below.