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Corporate Welfare: As Sure as Death and Taxes

Big tax breaks for companies not known for their eco-friendliness have wormed their way into a tax bill that has passed the House and another tax bill that is under consideration in the Senate. Enviro and consumer groups are criticizing tax breaks for the timber industry, oil and gas companies, and nuclear power plants. A […]

Silly Babbitt

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has buckled to the demands of ranchers and other land users along the upper Missouri River and declared that he will not put new restrictions on the area. He had sought to freeze new mining claims and other land uses along a stretch of the river and a surrounding 90,000-acre area […]

Rising Solar

Japan will launch an $85 million project next month to help Russia deal with environmental problems and conserve energy, reports the Yomiuri Shimbun in Japan. Much of the money will pay for research into the generation of electricity by natural gas, while funds will also go toward researching ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, promoting […]

A Bum Deal

Nevada’s two Democratic senators are pressing a bill that would force the Bureau of Land Management to sell land near California’s Mojave National Preserve as a site for a second Las Vegas airport, even before environmental studies can be done to determine its potential impact. The Interior Department, on behalf of both the BLM and […]

Reinventing the Wheels

EU ambassadors voted yesterday in favor of a bill that would force automakers to take back old cars and pay for the cost of recycling or reusing them, overriding opposition from Germany. The bill, which still needs approval from the EU parliament, would cover all cars produced in 2001 or later. By 2006, automakers would […]

Sit-In on the Dock of the Bay

Dockworkers, environmentalists, and the regional EPA office in Seattle joined forces yesterday to stop the first in a series of shipments of potentially toxic waste from Taiwan due to be shipped to Tacoma, Wash., this week, then on to an Idaho hazardous waste landfill. The waste was illegally dumped last year in Cambodia, where its […]

Gore Plays Heart and Soul

Vice Pres. Al Gore played the good environmentalist yesterday in New Hampshire, designating the Connecticut River, which winds through four New England states, as an American Heritage River and announcing that $819,000 will go toward projects related to the river. Gore canoed along the river with New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D), as friends, backers, […]

Californians Log Off

In an effort to improve water quality and protect fish populations, California Gov. Gray Davis (D) has proposed new regulations to tighten logging restrictions along streams on private forestland. But environmentalists say they don’t go far enough. The rules would represent steps toward strengthening the state’s 26-year-old Forest Practices Act, which many say has failed […]

Lettuce Have Standards

The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to offer up a second proposal for national organic standards by the end of this year. The first draft of proposed standards, unveiled in late 1997, elicited a record 300,000 public comments, most of them critical of the proposed rules, which, among other things, would have allowed some genetically […]

Uncrossing the Delaware

Fish populations in the Delaware River in Pennsylvania are making a striking comeback following a major river cleanup effort. In the last 20 years, levels of harmful ammonia and bacteria in the Delaware have been cut by about half, and the level of dissolved oxygen in the river, necessary for fish to breathe, has quadrupled. […]