Ellen Knickmeyer

The Trump administration on Wednesday moved to topple California as a leading voice against climate change, charging in a federal lawsuit that the state exceeded its constitutional authority by joining with a Canadian province in a program to cut climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions.

The Trump administration on Friday began an all-out challenge to California’s authority to set its own automotive emissions standards as government agencies opened an antitrust investigation and told state officials that they appear to be violating the law in a deal with four automakers to reduce pollution. The U.S. Justice Department opened an antitrust probe into the July deal between...

The Trump administration moved on Monday to weaken how it applies the 45-year-old Endangered Species Act, ordering changes that critics said will speed the loss of animals and plants at a time of record global extinctions . The action, which expands the administration’s rewrite of U.S. environmental laws, is the latest that targets protections, including for water, air and public...

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff is recommending that the agency cut back on inspections at the country’s nuclear reactors, a cost-cutting move promoted by the nuclear power industry but denounced by opponents as a threat to public safety. The recommendations, made public Tuesday, include reducing the time and scope of some annual inspections at the nation’s 90-plus nuclear power plants. Some...

The Environmental Protection Agency will allow farmers to resume broad use of a pesticide over objections from beekeepers, citing chemical industry private studies that the agency says show the product is only a lower-level threat to bees and other wildlife. Friday’s EPA announcement makes sulfoxaflor the latest bug- and weed-killer defended by the Trump administration despite lawsuits alleging environmental or...

The Environmental Protection Agency failed to document any threats or security risks that warranted spending more than $3.5 million on unprecedented around-the-clock bodyguards for then-chief Scott Pruitt, the agency’s internal watchdog concluded on Tuesday....
The EPA allowed Pruitt and his administrative team to increase the security detail to 19 agents, up from six for Pruitt’s predecessor. That “undocumented decision represents an...

The acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that the United States needs a single standard for fuel efficiency for cars and trucks, signaling a possible showdown with California and other states that could throw the car market into turmoil....
Andrew Wheeler spoke to a small group of reporters at EPA headquarters, ahead of a Trump administration proposal that’s...

California fire authorities said Sunday they have turned a corner in battling several of the wildfires that have devastated wine country and other rural parts of Northern California over the past week.

Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt had a top aide seek a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel and perform other personal chores for him, including house-hunting and booking personal travel, according to testimony released Monday. Millan Hupp’s transcribed interview last month before a panel of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staffers marks the first public accounting from...

Newly released emails show senior Environmental Protection Agency officials collaborating with a conservative group that dismisses climate change to rally like-minded people for public hearings on science and global warming, counter negative news coverage and tout Administrator Scott Pruitt’s stewardship of the agency. John Konkus, EPA’s deputy associate administrator for public affairs, repeatedly reached out to senior staffers at the...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general is opening an investigation into Administrator Scott Pruitt’s use of multiple email accounts. Inspector General Arthur Elkins said in a letter released Tuesday that his office will review the matter, the latest in a series of federal investigations of Pruitt’s travel, security and spending and other issues.

The lobbyist whose wife rented a condo to Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt at $50 a night sought EPA committee posts for a lobbying client, according to a newly released EPA memo. J. Steven Hart’s seeking those appointments from his wife’s former tenant, Pruitt, shows “the extent to which the special interests providing him with gifts have sought specific...

The two top officials in charge of security and toxic-waste cleanups at the Environmental Protection Agency have abruptly left their jobs, days after EPA administrator Scott Pruitt told lawmakers that his subordinates were to blame for alleged ethical lapses that have prompted more than a dozen federal investigations of the agency. In statements Tuesday, Pruitt praised the two men —...

One year after the worst structural failures at a major U.S. dam in a generation, federal regulators who oversee California’s half-century-old, towering Oroville Dam say they are looking hard at how they overlooked its built-in weaknesses for decades. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is telling owners of the 1,700 other hydroelectric dams it regulates nationally that it expects them to...

Each time I turn the key to lock my front door, I think I might be leaving home for the last time. I’ve covered my share of stories about people fleeing catastrophes, but I’m living the life of a fire evacuee for the first time....
“Take care, sweetie,” one woman said in my community on the edge of the small, rural,...

Jose Garnica worked for more than two decades to build up his dream home that was reduced to ashes in a matter of minutes by the deadly firestorm striking Northern California.

A spirited Hillary Clinton took on the Trump administration Tuesday in one of her first public speeches since she lost the presidential election, criticizing the country’s Republican leaders on everything from health care to the shortage of women appointees in top administration positions. Cracking jokes about her November defeat and her months out of the limelight since, Clinton spoke to...