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Be My Ballantine

Pres. Clinton will propose a $2.4 billion package of programs to combat global warming, including $200 million to promote the sales of energy-efficient U.S. technology abroad, White House officials said yesterday. That’s a 40 percent increase over what Congress approved for similar programs last year, but White House environmental staffer Roger Ballantine said the administration […]

Float Like a Butterfly … We Hope

Mexican officials are cracking down on illegal logging that threatens the winter habitat of hundreds of millions of migratory monarch butterflies, but they have yet to halt the tree-chopping completely. The government and sustainable development groups are working to promote monarch ecotourism in the nation’s central Michoacan state as a way to create jobs and […]

Letter Rip

Leaders of green groups are pushing Pres. Clinton to put his money where his mouth is on trade and the environment. In a letter to the prez, the enviros praise his recent speeches about the importance of including environmental and labor concerns in trade matters, but they say his words have been contradicted by action […]

Oh, We Got Trouble — With a Capital T and That Rhymes with P and That Stands for Population

Re: Daily Grist Dear Editor: What a great magazine! Now that I subscribe to the Daily Gist, I clutch my cuppa java as I pass through your cloud of gloom. Better gloom than darkness. However, I’m mystified that we don’t hear more about the big P — population. Why? All these summits, all this talk […]

Just Plane Wrong

A British Columbia airline has gotten a slap on the wrist for refusing to sell a ticket to a Greenpeace activist. Pacific Coastal Airlines tried to defend itself by saying that it provides transportation to many loggers and logging industry employees and that having a Greenpeace worker on its plane could “compromise safety.” But the […]

Where There's Smoke, There's Sick Kids

Mexico City residents are choking on record levels of dirty air this week, after suspended-particle pollution hit an all-time high on Monday. Outdoor activities at schools and youth sports centers were prohibited, and parents were warned to keep kids indoors. Factories in the southeastern part of the city were ordered to cut back operations by […]

Slippery Slope

BP Exploration, a part of the oil giant BP Amoco, yesterday agreed to pay $15.5 million for failing to immediately report the illegal disposal of hazardous materials at an oil field on Alaska’s North Slope. A BP contractor dumped thousands of gallons of toxic waste at the Endicott oil field between 1993 and 1995, one […]

No Nukes Would Be Good News

Japan’s worst nuclear accident — a September 1999 incident at a nuclear fuel plant in Tokaimura — exposed 439 people to radiation, up from a previous estimate of 69, government officials say. Greenpeace Japan thinks the new estimate is still too low. In other troubling nuclear news, Ukraine officials said yesterday that they had temporarily […]

A Forests-Gone Conclusion

Indigenous peoples from Alaska and the Peruvian Amazon joined enviros Monday in calling on the U.N. to act quickly to stop a global crisis of deforestation. This week in New York, the U.N. opened a final session of talks on forest protection that may result in the establishment of a legally binding convention to regulate […]

Dissed Oriente

A Manhattan federal judge says he is leaning toward ruling that an environmental lawsuit filed against Texaco by Ecuadorian Indians should be tried in Ecuador, as Texaco prefers, rather than in the U.S. But the judge will consider arguments about whether Ecuador’s courts are independent and impartial, particularly in light of the nation’s recent military […]