Climate Politics
All Stories
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Mr. Green Jean
One North American leader attending the summit in Johannesburg — Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien — took significant steps toward establishing his green legacy at home yesterday by unveiling a major expansion of the national parks system and promising to ratify the Kyoto Protocol by the end of the year. His plan to create 10 […]
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Hazing Ritual
It might be officially nicknamed the Golden State, but sometimes, it’s more like the Yellowish-Brown State: California continues to lead the U.S. in dirty air, with nearly twice as many “smog days” as any other state in the union, a recent report by an environmental group found. According to the study of government air-quality data […]
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The Empire Strikes Back
Apparently sick of playing the bad guy at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the U.S. struck back yesterday, proclaiming itself “the world’s leader in sustainable development.” To bolster that claim, U.S. delegates in Johannesburg announced joint government and private-sector initiatives, including a $53 million effort to protect forests in the Congo Basin and $43 […]
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Marketing the revolution in clean energy
Last month, 10 solar-powered race cars zipped around a 1.5-mile NASCAR track at the legendary Texas Motor Speedway, some of them reaching the dizzying speed of 35 miles per hour. With all its technological novelty and timely political implications, the Dell and Winston Solar Challenge (named for the computer and cigarette companies that sponsored it) […]
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Week Links
The first week of the World Summit on Sustainable Development has seen a mix of surprising twists and predictable problems. On the surprising end: Two very different organizations, Greenpeace International and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, have agreed to join forces to combat climate change. The two groups plan to work together to […]
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Gambling on the Courts
Armed with $4 million, the state of Nevada is preparing for the legal battle of a lifetime: the effort to keep the federal government from establishing a high-level radioactive waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Charles Cooper, one member of the high-profile legal team retained by the state, said yesterday that he was “very encouraged” about […]
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Fish Out of Water
The White House has declined to appeal a U.S. federal court ruling that would provide water to the agriculture industry in California’s Central Valley potentially at the expense of Northern California’s fish and wildlife — a move that has provoked anger among environmentalists. In the earlier court case, the Westlands Water District, a 600,000-acre irrigation […]
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Compassionate Conservation?
In the first of what the Bush administration hopes will be a series of public-private partnerships to create national wildlife refuges without using taxpayer dollars, the utility company Entergy is donating 600 acres of land along Louisiana’s Red River to the government. The Entergy donation could be the first parcel of a 50,000-acre Red River […]
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Knowing the Cost of Every Thin and the Value of Nothing
The plan unveiled by President Bush earlier this week to make it easier to thin forests in the name of fire prevention has touched off a firestorm of its own, enraging environmentalists who see it as a giveaway for the timber industry and a backdoor out of environmental protection measures. Moreover, environmentalists see the Bush […]
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Spoilers-r-us
If there had been any doubt that the U.S. would play the role of pariah at the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development, it was banished yesterday when White House officials announced their goals and strategies for the meeting, which begins next week in Johannesburg, South Africa. The U.S. delegation’s plan is, essentially, to stonewall: […]
