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Ohm, My Goodness!

Energy conservation has saved California $34 billion since 1977, roughly $1,000 for each resident, and has played a big role in helping the state’s economy grow, according to a new state-commissioned report. The report comes as the California legislature is considering bills to extend beyond 2001 a four-year-old charge on utility bills that helps fund […]

Trade in Those Mittens for Oven Mitts

January through March of this year was the warmest such three-month period in the U.S. during the past 106 years of record keeping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA Director James Baker said, “The scientists are now telling us they can’t explain what we have seen without including a significant part of […]

Won't You Be My Nader?

Friends of the Earth, which created a stir by endorsing Bill Bradley over Al Gore in the Democratic presidential primary, may shun Gore again in the general election and give its backing to Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. FOE President Brent Blackwelder said yesterday that the group has been talking to Nader’s staff. Meanwhile, Nader […]

Tell Us Something We Don't Know

Yup, global warming is happening and humans seem to be to blame, according to an early draft of a long-awaited report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This new preliminary analysis by the IPCC, an international collaboration of top scientists sponsored by the U.N. and the World Meteorological Organization, comes to the same basic […]

Buddy, Can You Spare a Bear?

Canadian enviro groups are getting upset over a plan to remove a few dozen grizzly bears from British Columbia and reintroduce them to the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness of Idaho and Montana. This is just the latest effort to use Canadian wildlife to replenish depleted American populations; the U.S. government has already taken Canadian lynx and gray […]

Why Be Normal?

House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) will oppose granting China permanent normal trade relations, arguing that a trade deal with the country needs to encompass greater protections for the environment, human rights, and organized labor. Gephardt’s decision, which he is set to announce tomorrow, is a big setback for the Clinton-Gore administration, which has made […]

Captain's Courageous

Enviros and human rights activists are celebrating after Russia’s Supreme Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s acquittal of anti-nuclear activist Alexander Nikitin, who had been accused of revealing state secrets while working with a Norwegian environmental group. Nikitin, a former navy captain, was arrested in 1996 for writing a report about Soviet nuclear submarine accidents […]

Ivory Illiquid

In a victory for conservation groups, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe yesterday withdrew controversial proposals to expand international trade in ivory. In a compromise deal reached at a meeting of the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, delegates agreed that ivory sales will be delayed for at least two years, until a […]

West Virginia, Mountain Maim-ah

The Clinton-Gore administration disappointed some enviros yesterday as it made official for the first time its position on mountaintop-removal mining, a controversial technique used in West Virginia. A federal judge ruled last year that the mining technique, in which the tops of mountains are blasted off to get at coal deposits and the debris is […]

No More Weepin' and A-Whalin'

Japan and Norway failed on Saturday in their controversial push to overturn an international ban on commercial trade in whales. Delegates from 150 nations at a meeting of the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species rejected proposals that would have allowed trade in gray and minke whales. Whale defenders were heartened that Japan […]