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Consumers already outraged at high gas prices this summer have one more reason to fume. Last week’s announcement by UK-based BP that it was shutting down Alaska’s largest North Slope oil field after discovering dangerous corrosion along its feeder pipeline has driven prices at the pump to new record highs in some parts of the U.S. The oil field in question accounts for about eight percent of all domestic oil production.

Environmentalists are calling the new campaign to remove Yosemite National Park’s O"Shaughnessy Dam and restore the majestic canyon of the Hetch Hetchy Valley "a piece of unfinished work that John Muir left to his heirs." The battle over whether to dam Hetch Hetchy for drinking water and hydropower a century ago transformed Muir’s Sierra Club into a political force to be reckoned with, even though dam proponents won out.

You just can’t win with "progressives" who sometimes seem to want to fight each other because they can’t win very many of the real battles. We have a world to win, and they want to get all lathered up about "junk" mail and "spam?"

In the wake of peace accords signed last year, the remote and wildlife-rich rainforests of Indonesia are being felled faster than ever as former rebels trade their guns for chainsaws and an already booming timber black market goes gangbusters. Only the Congo basin and Amazon have more tropical forest than the islands that make up Indonesia, which have lost about 40 percent of their rainforests in the last 50 years.

Last week, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman announced that his department plans to invest as much as $250 million in alternative energy over the next five years. The idea, he said, is to spur American companies and universities to find more efficient methods of creating automotive fuels such as ethanol derived from renewable sources, including soybeans, wood chips and agricultural waste.

In the latest bad news related to human-induced climate change, scientists last week reported bottom fish and crabs washing up dead on Oregon beaches are the latest victims of global warming, which is reportedly causing oxygen-deprived "dead zones" along a 70-mile stretch of Oregon’s Pacific coast.