Latest Articles
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Near Death Experience
Living in pollution hotspots ups chance of kiddie cancer, study says Many childhood cancers likely have environmental causes, according to a new study from the U.K.’s Birmingham University. Women who live within a half-mile radius of emission hotspots such as industrial areas and major roads, it says, are two to four times more likely than […]
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Receding Blair Line
Blair government tried to weaken E.U. climate-change targets The U.K. environmental community is all atwitter over revelations that senior officials in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government tried to remove tough greenhouse-gas reduction targets from the E.U.’s official climate policy. Specifically, they asked that language calling for 50 to 80 percent reductions (from 1990 levels, by […]
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Dimming hopes
Let's get one thing straight: Grist was into global dimming before global dimming was cool.
Now: A BBC documentary is pushing, with great hype (not to say hysterics), the notion that efforts to reduce fossil fuel use will reverse global dimming and thus -- irony! -- accelerate global warming. I have already grumpily blogged this once. Now the folks over at RealClimate, about whose site I use the adjective "indispensable" with numbing regularity, have addressed the subject, saying, in effect, Slow down, cowboy! We don't really know that much about dimming.
Now that some perspective has been added to the hype, I'm certain that wingnuts will stop forwarding around the new dimming stories as proof that driving SUVs is a virtue. Right?
Update [2005-1-21 15:17:39 by Dave Roberts]: More from RealClimate.
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Plenty
Everybody else is talking about it so, being joiners, we shall as well: Check out Plenty, a new glossy mag that dares to assert that "if we make the right choices, we can have a world of Plenty." I have not seen the magazine, but I agree with the sentiment. Check it out on your local newsstand.
(An aside to the folks responsible for the Plenty website: Splash screens are bad. And useless. FYI.)
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Betsy Rosenberg, green radio-show host, answers questions
Betsy Rosenberg. What work do you do? I’ve gone from 20 years of general news reporting and anchoring for the CBS Radio network to creating an environmental radio minute to hosting and producing a one-hour nationally syndicated eco-awareness program called EcoTalk. I transitioned from journalist to activist a few years ago when, in the wake […]
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Umbra on the outcome of the last pollutocrat contest
Dear Umbra, So, what were the results of the “pollutocrat” contest? I recall seeing several web postings by editors to “watch out” for this term, as if the rest of a letter’s content was somehow invalid if it was written as part of a contest. Sad. Did someone win or not? KevinParma, Ohio Dearest Kevin, […]
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RFK Jr. eyeing NY attorney general spot
Crusading environmental lawyer and Bush-basher Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is considering a run for state attorney general of New York, insiders say. He'd be a fitting successor to Eliot Spitzer, who's gone after pollution-spewing utilities with as much as gusto as he's gone after corporate malefactors on Wall Street.
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Veneman to head UNICEF
Outgoing U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman (never beloved by enviros) has been tapped to head UNICEF. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced her nomination yesterday; she was reportedly the Bush admin's top pick for the post. Here's hoping she does a better job of protecting the world's children than she did of protecting America's forests!
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MLK Jr.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day (despite Dick Cheney's objections), and while Grist is taking the day off, it's worth remembering both the incredible progress the U.S. has made on civil rights in a relatively brief time (Matt Yglesias has some good stuff on this subject) and one area where justice continues to lag, namely, the environment.
The low profile of the environmental justice movement within the larger green movement is a scandal, and one of the issues we'll be discussing more in our ongoing series on the (alleged) "Death of Environmentalism."
For more on environmental justice, check out this EPA page, the Environmental Justice Foundation, and the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark University, where we find the principles of environmental justice and this bit of history:
Just three decades ago, the concept of environmental justice had not registered on the radar screens of environmental, civil rights, or social justice groups. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Memphis in 1968 on an environmental and economic justice mission for the striking black garbage workers. The strikers were demanding equal pay and better work conditions. Of course, Dr. King was assassinated before he could complete his mission.
Of all the many quotes from perhaps the most quotable man of the last century, on this day environmentalists should above all heed this one: "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
