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Fight Club
The U.S. EPA and the Energy Department are engaged in fierce infighting over the White House’s proposed revisions to the Clean Air Act, according to internal EPA documents obtained by the New York Times. The battle pits EPA Administrator Christie Whitman and her agency against Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and high-powered energy lobbyists, who say […]
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Little Drummer Buoy
For almost a quarter-century, government and private research agencies dumped drums of radioactive waste into the waters just west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge — and now the waste is leaking into the Gulf of Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. Federal officials say they don’t have enough money to determine the extent of the damage; […]
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Doe, Oh Dear!
In the latest sad litany of pro-extraction industry decisions handed down by the federal government, the U.S. Forest Service said Friday that the Doe Run Company should be allowed to drill up to 232 holes in Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest to search for possible lead mining sites. About 80 percent of the nation’s lead […]
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Lori Urso, Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association
Lori Urso is the executive director of the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association. Tuesday, 19 Feb 2002 HOPE VALLEY, R.I. My week begins, as my last one ended, with lingering decisions: Decisions about our board and about fund-raising; about important things (like a half-million dollar habitat restoration project) and about incidental things (like where to store an […]
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Meet the New Plan, Same As the Old Plan
The story: President Bush’s plan to curb global warming, unveiled yesterday, didn’t contain many surprises. The president rejected mandatory, government-imposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions and instead said he would allocate $4.6 billion for financial incentives and new technology to combat climate change. In other words, the status would remain quo: U.S. industries could continue […]
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Motor Voters
Whatever else you might have to say about the people who brought us the gas-guzzler, you can’t accuse them of not being organized: As the Beltway battle over whether to toughen fuel-economy standards heats up, General Motors has ratcheted up its offense, calling on suppliers to ask their senators to oppose stricter rules. In a […]
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Shore: Enough
An innovative if controversial bill could protect offshore waters in California from oil drilling by allowing oil companies to swap drilling claims in California for others in the Gulf of Mexico. The legislation, introduced yesterday by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), and John Breaux (D-La.), would convert 40 offshore tracts […]
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Going Whole Log
Saying environmentalists and others should have been given a forum to protest new logging rules, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nullified some 100 logging permits yesterday, most of them for southeastern Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The permits allowed companies to run so-called “logging transfer facilities,” aka timber dumps in estuaries or other coastal […]
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Who Ya Gonna Bhopal?
Citing such past tragedies as the poisonous gas leak in Bhopal, India, that killed at least 7,000 people, the United Nations called yesterday for stronger safeguards on the production and storage of hazardous chemicals in developing countries. The call to action came during a U.N. Environment Programme conference held in Cartagena, Colombia, and attended by […]
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As the World Turns Differently
You think your days are already long? Just you wait: Scientists in Belgium have determined that days may become even longer as global warming occurs. In a study published in this month’s Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists, who hail from Belgium’s Royal Observatory and the Catholic University of Louvain, said that increasing levels of carbon […]
