Breathtaking: A Texas District Court Judge has issued a ruling defining the air in Texas as a "public trust" that merits government protection, thus ruling against the (obscenely named) Texas Commission on Environmental Quality -- an agency whose highly questionable positions over the years have included that the jury's still out on climate change, and that only water should deserve the public trust designation typically associated with special regulatory protections. We anxiously await Gov. Rick Perry's eloquent explanation of how and why air, unlike water, isn't a shared natural resource on which all life depends. Washington Post

Withdrawal symptoms: Everybody's been talking about the decision by Apple to withdraw from the EPEAT green registry, which is already causing the company lost business and a good, old-fashiond P.R. nightmare. (Metaphysical puzzle for the day: Can Steve Jobs angrily and publicly fire someone from heaven? Discuss.) But just what is this EPEAT thing, anyway? Macworld

Desperate tactics: The American Tradition Institute, which occupies one of the easier-to-reach intellectual rungs on the right-wing think-tank ladder, has made a name for itself by issuing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for e-mails shared among climate scientists. Now the ATI's litigation director, Christopher Horner, has set his sights on e-mails between climate scientists and journalists, with an eye toward finding "material that is of potential use in discrediting a scientist," according to one lawyer at the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Climate Desk

An avoidable tragedy: While trying to divert the path of a meandering river that threatened to erode the nesting area for endangered leatherback sea turtles, workers in Trinidad ended up excavating waterlogged sand filled with thousands of eggs and hatchlings. Witnesses to the devastation in the tiny, eco-tourism-dependent coastal town of Grand Riviere reported seeing the eggs and baby turtles "wantonly crushed by a heavy machine operator." Fox News

Bill of goods?: So was the U.S. Dept. of the Interior taken in when it accepted, as a condition of approval, Shell's assertion that the oil giant could recapture up to 90 percent of any oil that might accidentally be spilled in soon-to-be-drilled Arctic waters? "That's a wildly optimistic number, never achieved in a major oil spill, even in much calmer waters than the Arctic's," according to one (appropriately) skeptical editorial writer. Los Angeles Times

The fires next time: What's the proper role of government policy in preventing raging wildfires of the sort that are (still) devastating parts of Colorado? A group of fire experts and policy analysts debate the topic. New York Times

Reputation restored: As caterpillars, monarch butterflies eat one plant and one plant only -- milkweed -- meaning that they pose absolutely no threat to most gardens. So when one monarch lover saw that Ortho, the maker of well-known garden pesticides, was committing an insect injustice by featuring a monarch caterpillar on its packaging, he started a one-man caterpillar anti-defamation campaign. Los Angeles Times

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