In 2019, P. Daniel Smith, NPS acting director at the time, issued a directive that ordered every park to treat e-bikes “in a similar manner” to traditional bicycles. That policy, called the Smith Directive, led to a “Final Rule” that now governs how the NPS treats them; as such, it ...

With 2022 an election year for the state’s entire General Assembly, as well as the governor’s office, candidates are actively debating how to move to a clean energy grid and do it quickly. But what they need to talk about more is what a clean energy grid actually looks like. In 2020, ...

U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras’ opinion last week was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and a coalition of conservation groups in 2019 against the National Park Service for allowing e-bikes on non-motorized ...

The public backlash prompted some 24,000 emails and letters to the Park Service from groups and individuals. The American Hiking Society reaction was aghast, declaring an official position that “any vehicle that uses either an internal combustion engine or an electric motor for ...

FOUNTAIN HILLS, Arizona – A gray-haired dude jumped on his mountain bike and began pedaling into the Sonoran desert along a rocky, single-track path. The trail at McDowell Mountain Regional Park wound past towering saguaros, around paloverde trees in blooming splendor and through sand- ...

While the National Park Service failed three years ago to carefully study the potential impact of e-Bike use in the National Park System, a federal judge did not block their use but simply directed the agency to take “a hard look” at positive and negative impacts. U.S. District ...

The National Park Service’s rule that opened the parks system to e-bikes needs further environmental review, but tossing the rule isn’t warranted, a Washington, D.C., federal judge decided in a partial win for conservation groups. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and ...

The data fits with the experiences of Tim Whitehouse, a former senior attorney at the EPA who helped enforce water pollution laws in the 1990s and early 2000s. During his tenure, Whitehouse said, he felt the agency was supported by Congress, which provided higher funding and more ...

But some landowners in the path of proposed pipelines have expressed concerns about safety, damage to farmland and drain tile, and the use of eminent domain by companies to gain right-of-way. The PUC decided that pressurized carbon dioxide is a toxic or corrosive gas, therefore subject to ...

The PUC decided that pressurized carbon dioxide is a toxic or corrosive gas, therefore subject to the PUC’s existing regulatory authority. Attorney Hudson Kingston, representing Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, also testified that legislators “were saying that the ...

While carbon dioxide is not harmful to humans in small amounts — it’s exhaled in every breath we take — in high concentrations CO2 can displace oxygen within the gas plume. “The fact that purified and highly pressurized carbon dioxide gas can explode out of pipelines and suffocate ...

The Interior Department’s latest Freedom of Information Act report reveals both progress and slippage on the persistent backlogs that officials hope to whittle down with the help of a budget proposal coming before Congress this week. In the second-quarter report of 2020, the backlogged ...

2022 is close to turning into another record year for manatee deaths in Florida. In the first two months of the year, there have been 400 manatee deaths, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Now several conservation organizations have sued the Environmental ...

The data fits with the experiences of Tim Whitehouse, a former senior attorney at EPA who helped enforce water pollution laws in the 1990s and early 2000s. During his tenure, Whitehouse said, he felt the agency was supported by Congress, which provided both higher funding and more ...

In January 2022, Beyond Pesticides wrote about the emerging changes emanating from EPA in relation to its OPP ESA efforts: “Beyond Pesticides joined with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and three dozen allied groups to lay out what a ‘larger effort’ to ...

A bill restricting the sale of consumer products containing PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals,” has passed both the Colorado house and senate, and is on its way to the governor’s desk to become law. The bill stipulates some PFAS products will be banned as early as 2025. PFAS ...

But standing in the way of the new EPA vision is a lack of resources, staff, and more support from across the government. For one, the Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case that could sharply limit the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gasses that drive climate change. The ...

Chandra Rosenthal, Rocky Mountain office director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, lives near Robinson Park, located at 200 Fairfax Street. When the park’s playground got an update thanks to a 2017 Elevate Bond, Rosenthal was concerned that artificial turf was part ...

ight whales that washed up on the shores of Adak – near the tip of the Aleutian chain – back in the summer of 2018 are at the center of the suit. They are whales that relatively little is known about – called Stejneger’s beaked whales. It’s not even clear what their population is ...

The reason that Manata’s story is repeated all over the country is because state and local governments are not hospitable places for whistleblowing. This is due in part to an incoherent mosaic of state laws purporting to protect whistleblowers. According to a compilation of ...