Paul Hawken. It's hard to believe it was only a month ago that environmental hotshots Paul Hawken, Bruce Babbitt, Bill McKibben, and Terry Tempest Williams published a joint endorsement of Howard Dean in Grist. "We've concluded that the blast of clean air coming from the millions of Americans that constitute the Dean campaign is the best chance for [positive environmental] change," they wrote. "This democratic impulse seems to us an almost ecological imperative; something marvelous, and inevitable, blooming through the cracks in the concrete that the powers that be have poured over our political landscape." Shortly thereafter, Dean's campaign took …

Google Bans Ads from Environmental Group The popular search engine Google is facing accusations of censorship after it refused to carry ads from an environmental group that is protesting a major cruise line's sewage-treatment methods. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Oceana paid Google to run an ad that read "Help us protect the world's oceans" when people entered search terms such as "cruise vacation" and "cruise ship." The ad itself didn't mention the cruise line by name, but it pointed web surfers to a site that criticized Miami-based Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for dumping pollutants at sea. Google ran the ad …

Enviros Accuse Malaysia of Enabling Illegal Timber Smuggling The Environmental Investigation Agency and the Indonesian environmental group Telapak yesterday accused the Malaysian government of turning a blind eye to the widespread trafficking of timber illegally logged from Indonesia. According to an investigative report by the two groups, large quantities of the endangered tropical hardwood ramin are smuggled from Indonesia to Malaysia and made into furniture for export with falsified documentation. The illegal logging destroys the habitat of rare species such as orangutans, sumatran rhinos, and sun bears. The EIA and a number of U.S. environmental groups called on the U.S. …

Warning signs. Photo: Greenpeace. ExxonMobil and its predecessor companies stretching back to Standard Oil were responsible for a whopping 5 percent of the world's total carbon dioxide emissions between 1882 and 2002, thanks to the companies' operations and the burning of their products, according to a recent study put out by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies and Friends of the Earth International. The report exhorted Exxon shareholders to put pressure on the company to begin more aggressively developing its clean-energy portfolio and streamlining its operations. "There has already been some successful action by shareholders to change the direction of …

Senate Republicans, led by Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), are trying one more time to get the Bush administration's energy bill passed, but growing worries over the massive federal budget deficit are making it difficult. You see, Domenici and crew larded the bill up with billions of dollars worth of tax incentives and subsidies (on top of Bush's already-larded $18 billion original) in order to buy the votes needed ... oops, did we say "buy"? We meant "persuade"! With deficit worries reaching an election-year fever pitch, Domenici has promised to trim the fat, but doing so may cost him the votes of …

Egyptian Agro-Business Is Socially Conscious and Green to Boot In the arid Egyptian desert -- an area not typically associated with socially progressive entrepreneurship -- the Sekem Group is demonstrating how home-grown business can make both profit and positive change. Founded in 1977 by Ibrahim Abouleish, the agro-business has developed a wide range of products (herbal medicines, organic food and cotton, and more), and it provides good schooling, vocational training, and health care to its 2,000 employees and other local community members. At a time when many other businesses are struggling, Sekem actually grew by 25 percent last year. It …

Citigroup Adopts Green-Friendly Policies After four years of pressure and protests from the Rainforest Action Network, the world's largest financial institution announced today that it will adopt a comprehensive corporate policy stressing eco-friendly investment. Citigroup will carefully assess financing requests for projects that might adversely affect natural habitats and will not finance any logging in tropical forests (nor any "illegal logging" -- that's big of them!). The corporation will also develop a program to invest in renewable energy and sustainable forestry and will report the greenhouse gas emissions of any power project in which it invests. Said Ilyse Hogue, global …

Condom Factory in Brazil to Fight AIDS, Deforestation Giving new meaning to the promise of "protection," a new condom factory in northwest Brazil is expected to not only fight the spread of AIDS in that country (one of the world's hardest-hit by the disease) but also to slow the destruction of native old-growth forests. The factory -- which aims to produce 200 million condoms a year by 2006, helping to meet Brazil's 1.2 billion annual usage demands (go Brazil!) -- will use rubber from local rubber trees. By raising the value of rubber, it will make the surrounding forests more …

This morning, some 50 people powwowed in the chandeliered Ticonderoga conference room of the Hyatt Regency hotel on Capitol Hill for a conference entitled "Environmental Issues 2004: How to Get Results in an Election Year." There weren't more than a handful of environmentalists in attendance -- perhaps because the conference was hosted by the National Association of Manufacturers, known to be one of the most anti-environment industry groups in the country. The great attraction of the affair (which cost up to $150 a head) was its keynote speaker -- not an industry kingpin, not a bigwig GOP pollster like Frank …

Oil Pipeline Through Georgian Republic Runs Into Trouble A $3 billion, 1,000-mile pipeline -- slated to be pumping oil from the newly opened Caspian oilfields through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey to the world market by April 2005 -- has run into a whole mess of trouble. Environmentalists and many local groups are incensed that the pipeline, being built by BP, is set to run through the Borzhomi mountain gorge, a pristine and landslide-prone area that is the source of Borzhomi mineral water (Georgia's third-largest export) and many of the region's tourism dollars. Farmers are incensed that the land-development grants distributed …