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Enviro group launches campaign against Victoria’s Secret catalogs

An enviro group called ForestEthics has trained its sights on the Victoria's Secret catalog, urging the company to make the shift to more eco-friendly paper and avoid fiber that comes from endangered forests. The real target is Victoria's parent company, Limited Brands Inc. Limited Brands procures coated paper from an International Paper Co. plant near Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada, which ForestEthics charges has damaged surrounding forests and wildlife. "We're exposing Victoria's Dirty Secret, which is that the million catalogs that it mails a day are destroying some of the world's last remaining old-growth forests and threatening endangered species," said ForestEthics' Tzeporah Berman. Limited Brands denies everything and claims to be environmentally sensitive, as does International Paper. Speaking of exposing, a Grist editor has volunteered to do further investigation into this vital story. He will report his results in a week. Maybe two weeks.

A visual guide to global pollution

New Scientist has a nifty piece running.  Eighteen months of satellite data was aggregated to show a pictorial representation of concentrations of nitrogen dioxide around the globe -- i.e., pollution.  Things aren't looking too good for the American Northeast, bits of Europe, or China.

The flu?

Following up on Shalini's post below:  Where the $#%! was the environment last night?  I actually think Bob Schieffer did a decent job overall, but he found time to ask about gay marriage, strong women, and ... the flu?  Listen, I love marriage, and gay people, and strong women, and I don't like the flu, and I don't want strong married gay women in this country coughing and sniffling, but those are relatively peripheral issues, are they not, compared to mercury in our fish? Soot in our air? Shortages in our water supply?  Oil and gas execs swarming over our public land like ants on a discarded Krispy Kreme?

Kerry wisely ignored the flu question and addressed health care squarely.  Bush unwisely ignored jobs questions and talked about education -- several times.  And Bob Scheiffer unaccountably ignored one policy area about which majorities in this country consistently express concern, over which the executive branch has considerable control: the environment.  A full debate transcript is here.

Final prez debate

Just watched the final presidential debate, and I guess the environment isn't a domestic issue. I say that because it came up more in the first debate, which focused on foreign policy, than it did last night.

Am I the only one repulsed by the cheesy question about strong women? Do compliments about Laura Bush really matter more to voters than arsenic in drinking water, global climate change, and the end of Superfund?

Another voice calling Kyoto a potential boon for business

L.A. Times business columnist James Flanigan has joined the ever-growing chorus asserting that Kyoto can -- even will -- be good for industry.  

"Global warming is suddenly looking like a hot business opportunity," he writes.  "The funny thing is nobody seems to fear the Kyoto Protocol anymore. In fact, some might even get rich off it."

Wince

As everyone likely knows by now, freshly-minted Nobel Prize Winner Wangari Maathai recently -- just a day after winning the prize -- claimed before a news conference that AIDS was "created by a scientist for biological warfare" to kill blacks. "Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys (since) time immemorial; others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that," she proclaimed.

Fact check yo’self before you wreck yo’self

Speaking of that question in the second debate, Environment2004 has got a withering piece up demolishing Bush's response, line by line. Half-way through you'll feel almost sorry for the guy, getting pounded like this.  But then you'll go back to feeling sorry for the environment.

Glenn Scherer

Okay, a special thanks to Gristmill readers for keeping this blog accurate and honest. I stand corrected, and with blog on my face. An excellent AP story written by Charles Hanley did indeed run starting on March 20, 2004, in many U.S. papers and worldwide, reporting a disturbingly large increase in atmospheric CO2 for 2003.

Well Run Dry

Many states lack money to enforce Clean Water Act Out of 17 states surveyed, 11 say they do not have the money necessary to fully enforce the Clean Water Act, according to a study by the nonprofit Center for Progressive Regulation. California, for instance, enforces only 23 percent of federal wastewater standards and only 60 […]

The story The New York Times didn’t cover

A look at U.S. mainstream media vs. foreign environmental coverage increasingly shows that Europe, Australia, and even India do a better job than we do.

A perfect example of the underreporting by the US press of extraordinarily important climate change news came on October 10th when The Guardian UK announced that, "An unexplained and unprecedented rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere two years running has raised fears that the world may be on the brink of runaway global warming."