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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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

The Dredge Report

U.S. EPA Administrator Carol Browner last night said she would propose ordering General Electric to dredge PCB-contaminated hot spots along a 40-mile stretch of the upper Hudson River in New York. GE dumped large volumes of the chemicals in the river over a 30-year period, before it was against the law; it stopped doing so […]

Injunction Junction, What's Your Function

A Seattle federal judge agreed yesterday to allow the National Marine Fisheries Service to implement its own restrictions on fishing in waters considered critical habitat for the endangered Steller sea lion, whose population has dropped 80 percent since the 1970s. The judge lifted his own injunction banning trawl fishing in the Bering Sea and Gulf […]

Top of the POPs

Some 600 delegates from more than 120 countries began a week of talks yesterday in Johannesburg, South Africa, to try to reach agreement on a treaty to ban 12 persistent organic pollutants (POPs), chemicals such as PCBs and several pesticides that have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and genetic abnormalities in humans and wildlife. […]

Blessed Art Thou, a Monk Swimming

Pres. Clinton announced the creation yesterday of the largest protected area in the U.S., 84 million underwater acres off of Hawaii. The new reserve extends 1,200 miles northwest of the main Hawaiian islands, encompassing atolls and islands and 70 percent of the nation’s coral reefs. Clinton’s order designates 4 million acres of the reserve for […]

Pesticide Company to Stop Smokin' Roaches

The U.S. EPA today is announcing a ban on the commonly used pesticide diazinon because of health threats to children. Marketed under such names as Spectracide and Real-Kill, diazinon is used in household ant and roach killers, as well as garden and lawn sprays. The EPA has reached a voluntary agreement with the pesticide’s chief […]

Another Watts Riot

Electricity demand is so high in California — the state is operating at 95 percent capacity — that state and utility officials are asking residents to save energy by turning on their Christmas lights a few hours later at night. Southern California Edison, for example, asked its customers to wait to turn on their sure-to-be-heartwarming […]