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Duh.
The U.S. government is finally conceding that workers who helped make nuclear weapons at 14 plants have higher-than-normal rates of a wide range of cancers, most of them fatal. The conclusion comes from a draft report prepared at the request of Pres. Clinton. Since the Manhattan Project began 57 years ago, the government has until […]
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Tickle Me, Elko
Hundreds of disgruntled Nevadans paraded through Elko, Nev., with 10,000 shovels on Saturday to protest a federal environmental policy that is keeping the U.S. Forest Service from rebuilding a washed-out road. The residents want to reconstruct a dirt road in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, but the USFS says the project would lead to erosion that […]
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Ready, Set, Kyoto
While most industrial nations and developing countries are pumping out more greenhouse gases than ever, Japan’s carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 3.8 percent in 1998. About 60 percent of the decline is attributed to the country’s economic slump, but some resulted from efficiency improvements, according to Japan’s Environment Agency. The nation intends to continue reducing […]
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Free Trade Experiences Labor Pains
Pres. Clinton on Saturday talked up the importance of environmental and labor issues in global trade, speaking in Davos, Switzerland, to the World Economic Forum, an elite gathering of corporate and political leaders. Clinton, a major booster of globalization throughout his presidency, has modified his approach somewhat in the aftermath of the failed World Trade […]
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On With the No-Show
The environment has mostly been a no show in the presidential race, reports Grist’s boy on the bus, writing this morning from New Hampshire, where the nation’s first primary will be held tomorrow. The race has been unusually substantive, with banter on a host of issues, but the environment hasn’t shared the limelight so far, […]
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Cap'n Crunchy
Captain Climate, outfitted in a red cape and leotard, and his sidekick Boy Atmosphere have been trailing the presidential candidates around New Hampshire, trying to get them to explain what they plan to do about global warming. The Captain tells reporters he has time-traveled back from 2050 and a world nearly destroyed by climate change, […]
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Frank Bean-Counters
The World Bank has admitted in a new internal report that its nine-year-old forest strategy has been a failure and that the bank has succeeded neither in protecting forests nor in helping the poor communities that depend on them. In 1991, the bank adopted a new strategy to deflect criticism that its activities were abetting […]
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Salmon in Hot Water
Canada’s largest salmon fishery, on the Fraser River, could become the first tangible casualty of climate change, according to a new report prepared for the Canadian government by a group of scientists, academics, and bureaucrats. Temperatures in the Fraser River have been gradually rising for years, and if temperatures rise even a degree or two […]
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Gore's Warm-up Act
In his State of the Union address last night, Pres. Clinton called global warming “the greatest environmental challenge of the new century,” and said that “if we fail to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, deadly heat waves and droughts will become more frequent, coastal areas will be flooded, economies disrupted.” He stressed that cutting emissions […]
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Pump and Circumstance
Enviros in New England worry that the region’s ski resorts are disrupting ecosystems by pumping large amounts of water from rivers and ponds to make snow for their slopes. The region now has plenty of natural snow, thanks to recent storms, but earlier this season New England had a glaring lack of the white stuff […]
