The MBTA is broke – and, for that matter, broken. According to the MBTA, it is facing a $161 million dollar budget gap. So bad is the MBTA’s financial situation that, last year, it resorted to using hairnets to protect trolley motors. read more..

The nation’s attention may be focused right now on the twists and turns of New Hampshire’s First in the Nation primary. But new pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency put a more troubling spotlight on New Hampshire – and on its largest utility, Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH).  According to the data, PSNH is the region’s top toxic polluter, and PSNH’s coal-fired power plant in Bow, Merrimack Station, releases more toxic pollution to the environment than any other facility in New England. Because of PSNH, New Hampshire as a whole is first in New England in toxic pollution. The numbers tell a striking story.  In 2010, Merrimack Station released 2.8 million pounds of toxic chemicals to the environment, mostly in air pollution.  That’s an astonishing 85% of read more…

The announcement of a fare increase is never welcome news for transportation users, and Tuesday’s bombshell from the MBTA that it is proposing a hike of between 35% and 43% across the board come July, accompanied by drastic service cuts, made it a very unhappy New Year around the Commonwealth. CLF, along with our fellow members of Transportation for Massachusetts (T4MA) — a diverse coalition of Massachusetts organizations working for an environmentally sustainable, reliable and affordable transportation system — oppose a fare increase that by itself can’t begin to fix the T’s financial problems and is inherently unfair. T4MA objects to the MBTA’s proposal because it attempts to solve a much larger problem of insufficient funding for public transportation exclusively on the back of transit riders, who are traveling in read more…

Even when the worst of the current worldwide economic crisis ends, the U.S. economy will have fundamentally changed. What will that new economy look like? We may see slower economic growth, with more gradual ups and less precipitous declines. Perhaps fewer hours will be worked on average per year, but with higher productivity per hour. Whatever the changes, we will need to develop a new way of measuring how well our society is doing to supplement - or even replace - gross domestic product. read more..

Alewife and blueback herring, collectively known as “river herring,” are a linchpin of the Atlantic ecosystem and key prey species for countless marine and freshwater animals. But today, where millions of these fish once swam, they now number in the thousands, or even mere hundreds. The National Marine Fisheries Service agreed that a "threatened" listing under the Endangered Species Act may be warranted for river herring - click here to send your comments to NMFS and ask them to conduct a comprehensive, scientifically-sound review of the status of river herring and save this important fish. read more..

Sometimes, the failure to act is as harmful as an act itself. Yesterday, I sent a letter to Patricia Aho, Commissioner of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, whose recent failure to act on water certification standards for Flagstaff Lake has resulted in the state losing its ability to have any say in the matter for the next 25 years. You can access a copy of that letter here, or read it in full below. read more..

I was so sad to read that Alexandra Dawson died recently. After working alongside her here at CLF, I’m sure of one thing: she gave whatever illness took her away one hell of a fight. That’s just the kind of person she was. read more..

The top 10 blog posts from CLF's Scoop in 2011. read more..

The run-up to the holidays is always a busy time of year, and can make us all feel a bit overstretched. That’s certainly true at CLF. In fact, at times this fall it has felt like we’ve been at a pre-holiday pace since Labor Day. In preparing an internal President’s Report in December, I realized I could only capture a fraction of our accomplishments – the tip of a large iceberg of great work that we love to do. read more..

The Cape Wind offshore wind project moved one big step closer to construction yesterday when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) affirmed the MA Department of Public Utilities’ (DPU’s) finding that the project’s costs are reasonable in light of the many benefits it will bring. Massachusetts’s highest court upheld the November 2010 decision of the DPU, which approved a critically important contract between Cape Wind and National Grid in which the electric utility agreed to purchase half of Cape Wind’s output. Cape Wind opponents had appealed the DPU’s decision— the latest in an endless stream of ill-fated maneuvers intended to block the nation-leading clean energy project from being built. CLF intervened in the appeal proceeding with fellow environmental groups NRDC and Clean Power Now, making the case that the DPU’s read more…