climate change
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NorthMet tries new tricks to gain approval
Matt Doll, Minnesota Environmental Partnership The NorthMet copper-nickel mining project (formerly PolyMet) proposed near Babbitt and Hoyt Lakes hasn’t exactly met with success in the past few years. NorthMet’s state pollution permits…
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Major climate lawsuit to stay in Minnesota court
Matt Doll, Minnesota Environmental Partnership Last week, the United States Supreme Court declared that the State of Minnesota’s lawsuit against several oil giants for deception on climate change would stay in state-level…
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Minnesota weather is getting weirder
Matt Doll, Minnesota Environmental Partnership Most people in Minnesota have heard the famous phrase about our weather patterns. “We have two seasons, winter and road construction.” It’s not literally true, of course,…
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Minnesota Takes Two Steps Backward on Energy Policy
The Minnesota Environmental Partnership is proud to feature the following post as part of a series of columns as part of a Student Voices Series issues. This is part of a continuing collaboration with…
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Crop Insurance: Good Enough for Monsanto-Good Enough for Sustainable Ag
From the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction department: In 2007, Monsanto talked the USDA’s Risk Management Agency into giving farmers a discount on crop insurance premiums if they planted the company’s triple-stacked GMO corn. Reportedly, some…
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A Graphic View of Diversity’s Power
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a good infographic can be the equivalent of thousands of pounds of soil. That thought occurred to me recently while viewing the cool…
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Cover Crops: Insuring Against Disaster
Thanks to the recently passed 2014 Farm Bill, federally subsidized crop insurance is an even bigger player in determining what the landscape looks like. That’s troubling, considering that in recent years that…
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Flash Flood? Flash Drought? Time for a Little Slow Soil
The U.S Drought Monitor released its latest figures yesterday, verifying what we already knew: Minnesota is extremely dry. In fact, 55 percent of our state now falls under the “severe drought” or…
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The (Growing) High Price of an Unreformed Crop Insurance Program
By Adam Warthesen, Land Stewardship Project Just when you think the facts and figures around federal subsidized crop insurance can’t get any more outlandish, new numbers emerge exposing the out-of-control spending and…
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Teaming with Soil Microbes (part 1)
On a crisp morning in September, North Dakota farmer Gabe Brown held two handfuls of soil and searched for signs of life—theoretically not a difficult task considering one teaspoon of humus contains…