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The Emissionary Position

Canada Considers Adopting California Vehicle Emissions Regulations If automakers do not agree to improve the fuel efficiency of cars sold in Canada by 25 percent by 2010, the country will consider adopting California’s new law curbing carbon-dioxide emissions from automobiles, said Canada’s environment minister in a speech yesterday. Canada, unlike the U.S., signed the Kyoto […]

The Longline of the Law

Government Bans Longline Swordfishing to Protect Turtles In an effort to protect endangered sea turtles, the U.S. government has banned California’s swordfish fleet from operating in a large swath of the Pacific Ocean. The ban — announced yesterday by the National Marine Fisheries Service — applies only to “longline” fishing, in which large baited hooks […]

Same #$%@, Different Use

Scientists Turn Excrement Into Electricity — Really Scientists in the U.S. have developed a method to convert raw human waste — or as the scientists call it, “number two” — into electricity, putting a brown spin on the green-power movement. Oops, did we say “movement”? Okay, okay, we’ll try to be serious: The process works […]

Dust Busted

Manhattanites Sue EPA Over Mishandling of Enviro Hazards from Sept. 11 The U.S. EPA mishandled the environmental hazards caused by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and put thousands of New Yorkers at risk, charges a class action lawsuit filed by 12 lower Manhattan workers and residents yesterday in U.S. District Court. The suit claims […]

Bark A’Lounging

Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels Messing With Amazon Ecology Researchers have discovered that areas of the Amazon rainforest previously considered pristine are in fact undergoing drastic changes, likely due to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The discovery was a bit of an accident — researchers tracked changes in plots of isolated rainforest to […]

The Wind Also Rises

Wind Power Keeps on Growing, Says Report Wind power has made such inroads that it’s no longer “alternative,” says an industry report released today. Total world power capacity generated by wind rose by more than a quarter last year, to 39,294 megawatts. The U.S. and Europe together accounted for 88 percent of the total, with […]

Green Card

New Scorecard Measures Sustainability Progress in Northwest Nightly newscasts report on the stock market and the GDP. But do these common measures really tell us how society is faring? Northwest Environment Watch, a Seattle-based think tank, doesn’t think so. Today it released its first annual Cascadia Scorecard, intended as a better assessment of the overall […]

PR You Serious?

Forest Service Hired PR Firm to Sell Logging Plan Remember that controversial U.S. Forest Service plan unveiled in January that aims to triple commercial logging in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains? The one they said would “protect small communities” and create “forests with a future”? The one that critics said flew in the face of wide […]

Dispatches from an international conference on genetically modified corn

Carmelo Ruiz is a Puerto Rican journalist, a research associate of the Institute for Social Ecology, a fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program, and a senior fellow of the Society of Environmental Journalists. This week he is attending the Maize and Biodiversity Symposium.. Tuesday, 9 Mar 2004 OAXACA CITY, Mexico So here I am in […]

Wanderlost

Migratory Routes Increasingly Threatened One of the significant but little-noted shortcomings of wildlife preserves is that they only protect animals that stay put. Biologists who study large-scale animal migrations worry that many of nature’s most spectacular feats of persistence and survival are threatened by habitat loss and development. For instance, each winter pronghorn antelope travel […]