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Oil in a Day's Work

Capitol Hill hosted competing demonstrations yesterday over proposed oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Unions reps, black and Latino business leaders, Orthodox Jews, industry bigwigs, and war veterans gathered on the Capitol lawn in Washington, D.C., to hear U.S. Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) argue that drilling in the refuge would be […]

Trunk Driving

A plan to save one of the last remaining wild herds of elephants in Vietnam got off to an inauspicious start earlier this week, with the deaths of two elephants. A team of elephant experts spotted the two on Monday and shot them with tranquilizer darts, hoping to sedate them for the long trip from […]

Start Spreading the News

Finally, some good news for New York: The Big Apple beat out 49 other U.S. cities in a Sierra Club analysis of spending on mass transit and programs to reduce vehicle-generated smog. According to the group’s air pollution report card issued yesterday, New York is the only big city in the country to spend more […]

Polar Opposition

Last month, the leader of an Eskimo village in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service claiming that the Alaska Wilderness League, which works to prevent oil drilling in the refuge, misrepresented itself to obtain nonprofit 501(c)(3) tax status. The complaint alleges that the AWL is a lobbying group […]

Sunny Dispositions

San Francisco may be making headlines with its innovative plan to radically expand solar power generation, but other places deserve kudos as well, according to a study released last week by Greenpeace. The study, produced before the San Francisco plan was approved by voters last week, compared both planned and installed solar energy systems in […]

Double Tall, Hold the Pesticides

Starbucks announced this week that it will pay an extra 10 cents per pound for coffee beans that are grown on environmentally and socially responsible farms. The announcement, which was made at a growers conference in Costa Rica, comes at a time when a world coffee surplus has depressed wholesale prices to 40 cents per […]

Markey's Mark

Drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would mark a departure from more than three decades of government practice, according to a new report by the General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency. The report shows that some type of energy extraction takes place in 13 percent of refuges, but that […]

The Throng Song

Throngs of environmental activists are protesting a shipment of nuclear waste making its way by train from France to Germany, and at least 100 have been detained by the police. The six containers of radioactive waste originated at a reprocessing plant in La Hague, in northern France, and will be stored in Gorleben, Germany, 375 […]

Monkey Business

Illegal trafficking in wildlife has become Brazil’s third-most profitable illegal activity after arms and drugs smuggling, generating up to $1 billion annually. An estimated 38 million wild animals are stolen from the country’s forests every year, according to a new report by the National Network Against the Trafficking of Wild Animals (RENCTAS). Eighty-two percent of […]

Nema-toads

A federal appeals court upheld a Vermont law last week requiring manufacturers to label items that contain mercury. The 1998 law, the first of its kind in the United States, was challenged by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association on behalf of companies that produce fluorescent light bulbs containing mercury. NEMA argued that labeling the products […]