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Under pressure from Big Canned Tuna, FDA lax in mercury regulation

Under strong pressure from Big Canned Tuna, the Food and Drug Administration is crazily lax in regulating mercury in tuna. Among many examples: In 2000, a draft advisory to pregnant women listed canned tuna as a product highly contaminated with mercury; after FDA officials met with the three largest tuna companies, the final advisory left […]

Schlosser: Food industry abuses workers as matter of course

Of all the panels I attended at Slow Food Nation’s series, the most powerful for me was the one convened by Eric Schlosser on creating a “new, fair food system.” It featured labor-rights advocates from California and Florida — the poles of industrial fruit-and-veg production in the U.S. Working conditions get little play in sustainable-agriculture […]

Google knows what you’re doing

Oh, Google, what would we ever do without you? Check out this Google Maps-generated image of the region near Cannon Beach, Oregon:   The strange patchwork of brown? Those are clearcuts in the Coast Range. And many of them appear to be recent. What’s really great is that you can zoom in so close that […]

Note to media: Pork queen Palin is an earmark expert, not an energy expert

If you google “Palin ‘energy expert,'” you’ll find more than 10,000 hits. It’s no surprise that conservative shills like George Pataki and Haley Barbour use that label — heck, a major conservative talking point is that she’s a foreign-policy expert because “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia,” as Cindy McCain put […]

What I saw at the Iowa State Fair, the nation’s most popular annual food event

In “Dispatches from the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape. —– Get your deep-fried Twinkies! My roommate at college (one of those snooty, Northeastern Ivy-league institutions) was from rural […]

Honda rolls out new cheap hybrid with familiar name

At the Paris International Auto Show next month, Honda will unveil a prototype of its new low-cost hybrid: the Insight. A lot has changed since 1999, when the company debuted the first hybrid to hit American roads: the, um, Insight. Has Honda exhausted its supply of car names? Nay, says the company: “The name Insight […]

Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years

The “hockey stick” graph is a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past thousand years. It showed a sharp rise starting about a century ago. Global warming deniers and doubters have long attacked the graph asserting that we were as warm if not warmer hundreds of years ago. But a 2006 National Academy of […]

It begins with a T-shirt

Matt Stoller explains the magic of clean coal fairly well, but for a more sophisticated take, let’s turn to the Clean Coal Girlz at the RNC:

Another large section of Canadian ice shelf breaks loose

In a predictable yet mildly troubling reminder of the Arctic’s continued ice melt, researchers say yet another massive ice chunk has broken off from an ice shelf in Canada. The Serson Ice Shelf just saw its mass more than halved when two large sections broke off recently, leaving it about 47 square miles smaller. For […]

Republicans revert to base-rallying strategy

Tonight’s Republican speeches reveal quite a bit about how the rest of the election will play out. McCain began this election beloved by the press and expected to compensate for the lack of right-wing base enthusiasm by going hard for independents and swing voters, using his appeal as a straight-talking maverick. That strategy is in […]