The Biden administration is expected to deny permission for a 211-mile industrial road through fragile Alaskan wilderness to a large copper deposit, handing a victory to environmentalists in an election year when the president wants to underscore his credentials as a climate leader and conservationist.

The Biden administration plans to schedule three oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico over the next five years, a reversal of the president’s campaign promise to stop all new offshore drilling under his administration. 

The Interior Department, which oversees oil leases, said the sales are necessary because of last year’s clean-energy legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. The agency said the law mandated that millions of acres of oil and gas leases needed to be offered by the administration in exchange for the expansion of offshore wind projects.

It’s been decades since Madonna Thunder Hawk last saw the valley she grew up in on the Cheyenne River Reservation. It lies buried under the Missouri River. The United States government sent the river rushing over the reservation’s largest town in 1960 as part of a series of post-war federal flood control projects.

Even a winter packed with rain and snow could not bring the Colorado River crisis to an end. The river is still drying out. And on Tuesday, government officials announced two historic proposals to prevent the system and the some 40 million people it sustains from crashing.

The Biden administration proposed actions Tuesday that would significantly reduce water supplies in seven western states amid severe drought conditions that stretch back decades.

The Department of the Interior (DOI) released a draft proposal that highlighted two potential actions it could take to combat the Colorado River Basin's deteriorating water levels. The two proposals would each consist of federally-mandated supply reductions for states that are dependent on the river system which provides water for more than 40 million Americans and is vital for western states' economies.

The Colorado River is in a dire state. The river, which provides water for 40 million people, is drying up rapidly due to the ongoing megadrought in the southwest. Over the last century, the river's flow has dropped by 20 percent, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Experts have long feared what it will mean for life in the Southwest as we know it, if the situation were to worsen.

But now, we have a glimpse into what life could be like if the crisis worsens to the point where drastic measures need to be taken.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, announced Friday he will block a key Department of Interior (DOI) nominee from moving forward over her climate activism.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) criticized the Biden administration for turning down a recommendation for an oil leasing sale that Interior staff concluded would improve energy security.

Manchin was responding to an Interior Department memo that shows the agency explored charging a lower royalty for offshore oil and gas leases in Alaska's Cook Inlet in order to lure more bidders but declined to due to climate change concerns.

There’s not much consensus these days in the fractious U.S. House of Representatives. But for two proposals presented to the chamber floor on Feb. 6, there was a rare glimpse of what bipartisan accord looks like.

The House—in proceedings orchestrated by Speaker Pro. Tem. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—adopted a pair of bills granting Native American tribes’ requests for trust designations on lands in Tennessee and California, ceding them to the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) as shields against development.

The seven states that rely on water from the shrinking Colorado River are unlikely to agree to voluntarily make deep reductions in their water use, negotiators say, which would force the federal government to impose cuts for the first time in the water supply for 40 million Americans.