Environmentalists had hoped that President Barack Obama would use the endangered status of polar bears to crack down on man-made contributions to global warming, but Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that the Obama administration will not go in that direction. As previously reported by AllGov in The Bright Side of Global Warming, the Coast Guard is already making contingency plans in case the Arctic ice pack melts enough to open up new shipping lanes. These developments would appear to be good news for oil companies, particularly Shell, which paid $2.1 billion for Arctic leases in February, but not so good for polar bears.
On another front, the classified portion of the 2010 Defense Department budget is now larger than the entire military budget of the nation of Russia, even though it represents only 7.5% of the complete Pentagon budget.
-David Wallechinsky