Latest Articles

Anne of Green Fables

Former EPA Chief Anne Gorsuch Burford Dies at 62 Anne Gorsuch Burford’s tenure at the U.S. EPA is a fascinating slice of history. Elected to the Colorado legislature at 34, she was part of a group dubbed the “House Crazies” for their drive to reduce government size and regulation. Her intelligence, combativeness, and striking looks […]

An excerpt from Boiling Point by Ross Gelbspan

Under the administration of George W. Bush, the White House has become the East Coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, and climate change has become the preeminent case study of the contamination of our political system by money.

Carbon Stink

States Sue Power Companies Over Carbon Dioxide Emissions Eight states and New York City filed suit today against five of the largest power companies in the U.S., which they say are responsible for roughly 10 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. The suit is filed under a relatively obscure federal common law of public […]

Pombo and Pombo-er

Anti-Enviro California Rep Blocks Wilderness Designation For years, citizens, enviro groups, and Washington state lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have worked together to craft compromise legislation to create the Wild Sky Wilderness Area, a 106,000-acre swath of Washington’s Cascade Mountains. The resulting bill has passed the U.S. Senate twice, unanimously. It now appears, […]

Bagger Advance

International Pressure Against Plastic Bags Grows Somewhere between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year. They’re made of petroleum products, and they end up in landfills, adorning the landscape, or choking marine creatures — about 100,000 a year, according to the environmental group Planet Ark. Several countries have enacted measures […]

Lung Disease

Deforestation in Brazil Leads to Massive CO2 Emissions Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has made that country one of the world’s top 10 sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide pollution. Often called the “lungs of the world,” the Amazon is bigger than the continental U.S., and loses an area bigger than New Jersey every […]

Reports of pending EPA enforcement actions are, shall we say, premature

Is this power plant in trouble? Nah. Photo: USGS. What’s this on the wires? The U.S. EPA is gearing up to prosecute a new batch of new-source review (NSR) cases against polluting power plants? Could it be that the Bushies have suddenly taken a keen interest in enforcing a Clean Air Act rule that they […]

Refiner-Ease

EPA Goes Easy on Oil Refineries The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is running an investigatory series (remember investigatory journalism?) on the EPA and its relationship to the nation’s 145 oil refineries. During the Bush administration, there’s been a precipitous drop in clean-air enforcement actions against refineries, which are some of the nation’s top polluters. They spew […]

Social Lite

More Businesses Flock to U.N.’s Social-Responsibility Compact The five-year-old United Nations Global Compact, which held its first summit in New York City last month, is the world’s biggest corporate social-responsibility initiative, with some 1,700 signatories. And what business wouldn’t want to sign on? In exchange for endorsing principles — principles with no mechanism for enforcement […]

Bhopal-Bearer

Judge Orders Payments to Bhopal Victims Released Yesterday, the Supreme Court of India ordered the government to release the remaining compensation owed the victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak, the world’s worst industrial disaster, which left some 20,000 people dead, 120,000 chronically ill, and groundwater poisoned to this day. The original compensation paid by […]