Latest Articles
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Buoys in the Hood
Hood Canal One of Growing Number of Dead Zones Hood Canal is dying in slow motion, victim of a growing oxygen-deprived “dead zone,” and there is little political will or means to save it. The misleadingly named body of water — it’s actually a fjord, closed on one end — is the deep-water arm of […]
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Earth Still Round, Still Warming
New Study Fills in Missing Piece of Global-Warming Science A new study published in the journal Nature has filled in a crucial missing piece in the science of global warming — one that has served as a talking point for climate-change skeptics. At issue is a seeming discrepancy: The lower portion of the earth’s atmosphere, […]
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Return on Investment
Energy Industry Cozy with Bush Administration, Says Report Most of the dirtiest power plants in the country are owned by 30 companies that, along with their trade association, have collectively raised some $6.6 million for President Bush and the Republican National Committee since 1999, says a new report. The companies’ intent, says Frank Clemente of […]
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Saving Some Green
Green-Building Techniques Come to Low-Income Housing Eco-friendly building materials and techniques, once the exclusive province of upper-class enviros, are moving slowly but steadily down the income scale. In cities across the U.S., governments are offering a range of subsidies and tax breaks to developers of low-income housing, encouraging them to use energy-efficient boilers and appliances, […]
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Going Apes
Great Apes Are Heading for Extinction Human beings’ endless efforts to kill each other have not reduced their overall numbers, but they may yet wipe out humanity’s closest genetic cousins, the great apes: gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans. Several of these charismatic — but apparently not charismatic enough — megafauna face extinction because of human […]
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List Me Baby, One More Time
Group Petitions for Protection of Hundreds of Imperiled U.S. Species A coalition of enviro groups, scientists, and artists petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service yesterday to add 225 species to the official federal list of endangered and threatened species. The 225 are now on a candidate list that affords them no protection. It was, […]
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Self Empowerment
California Businesses Hop on the Fuel-Cell Bandwagon A number of California businesses — rattled by the 2000 energy crisis, with its rolling black- and brown-outs, and the state’s generally unreliable electricity grid — are turning to hydrogen fuel cells to provide a reliable and self-generated source of power. The move is fueled (ahem) by the […]
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The Lead Badge of Courage
Vermont Senator Proposes Stricter Drinking-Water Legislation Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.) announced this week that he will introduce legislation that aims to eliminate lead from the nation’s drinking water. The Lead-Free Drinking Water Act, the first major proposed revision of the Safe Drinking Water Act in 14 years, would ban plumbing fixtures with more than 0.02 […]
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Terminator 4: Demise of the Machines
Schwarzenegger to Kill Machines, Again — This Time, the Polluting Kind California officials seeking to ameliorate the state’s persistent smog problems are focusing on a common group of culprits: old machines. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) is meeting with business groups, enviros, and legislators to develop a plan to rid the state’s roads of old cars, […]
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Climate change too slow for Hollywood, too fast for the rest of us
It’s always been hard to get people to take global warming seriously because it happens too slowly. Not slowly in geological terms — by century’s end, according to the consensus scientific prediction, we’ll have made the planet warmer than it’s been in tens of millions of years. But slowly in NBC Nightly News terms. From […]
