It’s hard to get too upset at a friendly gathering like the Minnesota State Fair. While the great Minnesota get together usually sees more political traffic in election years, there was no shortage of GOP and DFL lawmakers on hand at the first day of the fair on Thursday.

Amid the flurry of big-ticket budget bills and spreadsheets that have overtaken the Capitol in the past week, the comparatively puny environmental budget bills moving through the Legislature have attracted little attention in most quarters.

Minnesota Senate District 50 Chair William Krueger banged his gavel on the podium in front of more than 100 DFLers crammed into a small room in the Fridley community center on Thursday night.

State Reps. Jeremy Kalin and Kate Knuth traveled to Copenhagen for the recently concluded international summit on climate change. While many environmentalists have expressed disappointment at the accord hashed out on the final day of the conference, the Democratic legislators insisted that the agreement provides a valuable framework for addressing the issue.

Minnesota state Reps. Kate Knuth, DFL-New Brighton, and Jeremy Kalin, DFL-North Branch, are headed for Copenhagen, Denmark, to participate in the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, a summit involving representatives of 192 nations.

A bill to establish a cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Minnesota has hit the brakes in the state Legislature. Instead, an ...

State Rep. Tom Hackbarth, R-Cedar, and his DFL colleague Rep. Jean Wagenius, of Minneapolis, on Friday presented starkly different views on how active state legislators ...