Idaho's War on Wolves Escalates.

The Washington DC council voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. However, this cannot take effect unless approved by Congress.

In some states, so many parents reject vaccinations for their children that it puts them at risk of dangerous disease.

The Australian government uses falsehoods to defend its decision to damage the Great Barrier Reef for a new coal terminal.

The big threat to the Great Barrier Reef is the CO₂ that the coal will release into the atmosphere. CO₂ dissolves in the ocean and makes it more acidic. This and the higher temperature both kill coral. In a twisted way, this is rational. If you assume that coal is going to be burned, the Great Barrier Reef is toast and there's no use protecting it. (This is the same assumption that the US State Department used to disregard the harm that the Keystone XL pipeline is going to do.)

This is tantamount to assuming that billions of humans and millions of species are going to be wiped out. The temperature will keep rising (from CO₂ already in the atmosphere, methane released from melting permafrost, etc.) long after civilization is no longer functioning sufficiently to transport coal from Australia to China.

Here are some other ways that global heating threatens extinction.

If the heating took place across a period of millennia, organisms might adapt to it. If so much land were not occupied by humans and their farms, organisms might move to new places to find the conditions they need. But this can't happen now.

Recent pipeline spills have made people aware that underwater oil pipelines carrying corrosive tar sands oil could pollute the Great Lakes.

Can we believe the claim that these pipelines have never leaked? How would they know? If the pipelines ran across the bridge, leaks would be visible. Putting the pipelines underwater allows leaks to go unnoticed. They are now planning to use robots to inspect the pipelines 4 times a year. That means 90 days between inspections. I suppose that until now inspections have been even more infrequent.