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Summers Hot
In a rare public dispute, Treasury Secretary-designate Lawrence Summers yesterday said the U.S. would vote against a controversial World Bank loan to China that environmentalists have criticized. The $40 million loan would pay for the resettlement of 58,000 poor Chinese farmers from an overcrowded, badly eroded area to traditionally Tibetan land, also considered environmentally sensitive. […]
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Giving Public Lands the Shaft
The Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday gave initial approval to a bill that would protect Western mining interests from tougher environmental rules proposed by the Interior Department. A 1997 Interior Department ruling limited the acreage of mining sites on federal lands, but this bill would exempt hundreds of mining operations from the ruling. Earlier this year, […]
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Koop Has the Vinyl Word
Millions of dollars worth of vinyl toys pulled from store shelves at the behest of Greenpeace and other groups pose no medical threats, according to a panel of leading physicians and scientists chaired by C. Everett Koop, former U.S. surgeon general. A report by the panel found no scientific evidence that two plastic softeners known […]
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Panda-monium
In a bid to save the endangered giant panda, Chinese scientists have successfully cloned an embryo and will try to implant it in a host animal’s uterus. The researchers had initially thought they would need three to five years to be successful in their effort, but they now believe they can produce a cloned panda […]
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Ouch, That Mega-Hurts
As more Americans move to get rid of old personal computers, the nation may face a significant environmental problem. PCs contain traces of toxic chemicals such as mercury, and one survey found that old computer monitors are one of the largest sources of lead in landfills. A report released this month by the National Safety […]
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Russians Play Roulette with Pollution
Many Russian towns, heavily polluted by decades of emissions from filthy factories, are facing a devil’s choice between keeping factories running and thus endangering residents’ health or shutting them down and impoverishing residents. In the southern town of Karabash, where a 90-year-old copper-smelting plant long spewed pollution, two-thirds of the children in the town suffer […]
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Lynx Report Un-Vail-ed
A recent government report unearthed by environmentalists notes “substantial” evidence that rare Canada lynx live on land that the Vail ski resort in Colorado wants to use for a multimillion-dollar expansion. In a lawsuit now before a federal appeals court, environmentalists allege that the U.S. Forest Service approved Vail’s expansion plans without regard for the […]
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Does This Deal MacBlo?
Environmentalists are wary of a deal announced yesterday in which U.S.-based Weyerhaeuser will pay nearly $2.5 billion in stock for Canada’s MacMillan Bloedel, merging two major North American timber and paper companies. MacMillan Bloedel has been at the center of many environmental conflicts over old-growth logging in British Columbia. Last year, the company announced that […]
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Feds Want to Pass Wind to Consumers
The federal government today will announce a new plan to buy 5 percent of its electricity from wind-generated sources by 2010, the first move in an effort to shift 5 percent of total energy use in the U.S. to wind over the next decade. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson says that wind, which now provides 0.1 […]
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A Not-So-Glowing Future
Germany is nearing a deal with its major utilities to close all the nation’s nuclear power plants by 2023. If a formal round of talks scheduled for tomorrow goes as planned, each of Germany’s 19 nuclear plants would be phased out after 35 years online, the first one going out of service in 2003 and […]
