News

TransCanada Keystone Pipeline Springs Two Leaks in Two Months, Meets Century Spill Quota

I was wrong: the June oil spew at Pump Station 22 near Roswell on the TransCanada Keystone Pipeline was not the first reported spill. Shortly after posting the DENR report on the Roswell incident, I received this DENR report documenting a 5-gallon leak at Pump Station 21 near Carpenter in Beadle County on May 21, 2010. This time a leaky valve was the culprit.

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Lplan2040

The new city-county comprehensive plan, called "lplan2040," has some good opportunities for citizen input. If you act today or tomorrow you can add your own ideas on the theme of BEAUTY, which includes natural beauty. Please also consider voting for the idea to "Expand Wilderness Park South" as well as the one called "Expand Prairie Corridor" that would link Spring Creek and Pioneers Park prairies with a hiker-biker trail. The "Expand Prairie Corridor" idea was submitted by Mayor Chris Beutler.

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Climate Change: The Last Resort

IT MAY seem premature to talk about last-ditch measures to deal with runaway climate change, but Ben Lieberman has it right. Lieberman, an energy expert at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think-tank, responded to the news that the US Senate will not pass any climate legislation this year by saying: "It's pretty clear that no post-Kyoto treaty is in the making -- certainly not in Cancun, and maybe not ever."

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Nelson: Views of State and Local Officials Must be Considered in Proposed Keystone Pipeline

Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson said Wednesday that he sent a letter to the U.S. State Department asking for an update and copies of correspondence concerning its efforts to gather analyses and viewpoints from federal, state and local officials about the Keystone XL pipeline proposed to be constructed from Canada through Nebraska.

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Guest Column: Cultivating Our Prairie Heritage

DARYL SMITH is a professor of biology and director of the Tallgrass Prairie Center at the University of Northern Iowa. Each year that I work on prairie reconstruction projects I become a more avid prairie preservationist. Prior to Euro-American settlement, the tallgrass prairie was an awesome place. It occupied the eastern part of the mid-continent grassland that dominated the horizon, from the forest margins of the Wabash River in western Indiana to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to the boreal forest of central Canada. Those long grasses held sway across Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota and northwest Indiana. Their dominance extended into southern Manitoba and across eastern Oklahoma and Texas to the Gulf Coast and a bit of Louisiana. Scattered outliers occurred in Ontario, Ohio, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama.

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