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Quitos Never Prosper
Major environmental groups in Ecuador, led by Fundacion Natura, banded together yesterday to announce their official opposition to a billion-dollar pipeline project that would double the country’s crude oil output. Ecuador’s Energy Ministry is expected to decide whether to grant the project an environmental permit early in June. The pipeline would go straight through the […]
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Carr Crash?
Voters in British Columbia, Canada, yesterday got rid of the country’s most left-leaning provincial government, headed by the New Democratic Party, and overwhelmingly voted for the conservative Liberal Party instead. In the final days of the campaign, NDP leader Ujjal Dosanjh pleaded with environmentalists to “come home” to his party and vented against Green Party […]
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The Finnish Line
The Finnish parliament began debating a controversial plan yesterday to bury waste from Finland’s nuclear power plants at a site some 1,600 feet underground. If the plan is approved, Finland will become the first country in the world to store nuclear waste deep underground. Environmentalists are protesting the proposal. Meanwhile, the Japanese government is poised […]
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Cool Air, Just Don't Breathe It
Environmental officials in Utah yesterday eased air-quality rules temporarily to allow communities in the state to rev up diesel generators so that residents can blast their air-conditioning this summer. Some cities fear they will experience blackouts this summer, as a lack of rain, inadequate conservation, and ties to the energy crunch in California have led […]
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Infertile Crescent
The largest wetland in the Middle East has shrunk by 90 percent since 1970, a change that has had a “devastating” impact on humans and wildlife, says the U.N. Environment Programme in a report to be released later this year. The UNEP says that dams and drainage projects have been the two main causes of […]
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All We Are Is Soot in the Wind
A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., yesterday sided mostly with the U.S. EPA and backed an order forcing factories and power plants in the Midwest and the South to reduce their emissions. Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania petitioned the EPA in 1997 to order hundreds of polluters in upwind states to cut their […]
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Assault and Paper
In a move that could put U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman in the hot seat again, a scientific advisory committee to the EPA voted unanimously yesterday to send on a long-delayed report to the agency that concludes that dioxin should be more tightly regulated. The committee found that dioxin is an air pollutant that […]
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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Reboot
At long last, electronics recycling in the U.S. is beginning to take off. In May 1999, only about 15 percent of used computers, TVs, VCRs, and the like were being recycled, but the figure may now be as high as 25 percent, says Peter Muscanelli, president of the International Association of Electronics Recyclers. Unlike in […]
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The Return of Nothin' Brazil
The amount of logging in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has risen to the highest level since 1995, provoking the country’s government to renew its pledges to reduce deforestation. Last year, 7,659 square miles of forest — an area about the size of Belgium — were lost to logging. Mary Allegretti, the government’s official who […]
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That's About the Seize of It
President Bush’s energy plan is expected to recommend that the federal government be allowed to use eminent-domain authority to seize private property for electric transmission lines. Guess who isn’t very excited about this idea? It’s your old anti-enviro buddies — Mr. and Mrs. Western Republican Leader and their friends, the property-rights movement. The amount of […]
