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Great, Salt Lake!
Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt (R) created a special state office yesterday dedicated to blocking a proposal to store 44,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation, 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The Goshute tribe says it has the sovereign right to accept the waste, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory […]
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Leap, Frogs
Federal scientists have found that commonly used pesticides in California’s Central Valley are contributing to the decline of frogs in the state. The research found that the pesticides diazinon and Dursban are blown east into Yosemite National Park and elsewhere in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where they are absorbed in the frogs’ bodies. The chemicals […]
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Battery Will Get You Nowhere
California air quality regulators once hoped that battery-powered, zero-emission cars would lead the charge for cleaner air in the state, but today they are shifting their allegiance to more commercially viable cars that produce some emissions. In 1990, the California Air Resources Board mandated that 10 percent of all vehicles sold in the state by […]
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Capitalist Pigs
In what could be a harbinger of things to come should George W. Bush become president, environmental groups and family farm advocates yesterday unveiled a campaign in which hotshot lawyers from 15 law firms will help them fight pollution from factory hog farms. Taking a page from the tobacco war books, environmental lawyer Robert F. […]
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Sweeney Among the Corps-n-gales
Three top officials at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rigged an economic study to justify spending $1 billion to expand a system of locks along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, according to a Pentagon investigation released yesterday. The report by the Army’s inspector general also found that the agency has an institutional bias toward […]
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Lame Duck Tales
In its last seven weeks, the Clinton administration is preparing a raft of environmental regulations. Standards for organic food labels, new limits on sulfur in diesel fuel, and protections for almost 60 million acres of roadless national forestland will be among the high-profile regs. Other regulations will likely include limits on mercury releases from power […]
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Heir Apparent's Air Is Apparent
Texas’s top environmental officials approved a major new plan yesterday for cleaning up the air of Houston, the country’s smoggiest city. The plan by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, which would bring the area into compliance with federal clean air standards by 2007, would cap the speed limit in an eight-country region at 55 […]
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Don't Lend Me Your Ears
An outside scientific advisory panel told the U.S. EPA yesterday that the genetically modified corn StarLink has a “medium likelihood” of causing allergic reactions in some people, but that so little of the corn is now in the food supply in the U.S. that there is a “low probability” that significant allergy problems will arise. […]
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Keeping Those Skaters In-line
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has drafted new rules for off-road vehicles (ORVs) that would not necessarily lead to new limits on their use but would give managers in the field more leeway to clamp down in order to protect the environment. The new strategy by the BLM, which manages more land than any […]
