Latest Articles

Well To-Do

Farmers Across Asia Emptying Underground Water Tables Farmers in India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and northern China are setting themselves up for drought and famine in decades to come by pushing wells deep into the ground, emptying underground reserves at a rate faster than precipitation can replenish them. India’s government system of irrigation canals is decrepit, so […]

Good Times, Good Times

Federal Report on Global Warming Produces Beltway Drama When The New York Times reported yesterday on a new Bush administration report to Congress which acknowledged the human causes of global warming, characterizing it as an abrupt shift in policy, some Beltway wags speculated that the newspaper was trying to box the administration in and embarrass […]

Classified Adds

As Feds Classify More Info, Environment Could Be Affected Since 9/11, the Bush administration has upped secrecy at a growing number of agencies, all in the name of fighting terrorism. Much of the information newly deemed sensitive has direct implications for the environment and public health. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will no longer make safety […]

Don’t Be a Bad Sport

New Study Says Recreational Fishing Harms Endangered Species When it comes to overfishing and the depletion of stocks of threatened and endangered fish species, the focus is usually on commercial fishing. But a new study published today in the journal Science claims that recreational fishing has a much larger impact on those stocks than previously […]

Smears of a Clown

Auto Industry-Backed PR Firm Claims California Emissions Regs Will Kill A new ad campaign by the Sport Utility Vehicle Owners of America uses “Squeezy the Clown” to warn that proposed carbon-dioxide emissions regulations in California would force automakers to (gasp!) build smaller cars, which in turn will lead to increased traffic fatalities. (You see, they […]

Don’t Ask, Don’t Shell

Nigeria Hits Shell With $1.5 Billion Pollution Claim The Nigerian parliament has hit Shell with a $1.5 billion claim after the Ijaw tribe of the Niger Delta demanded compensation for health and economic hardship caused by the company’s polluting operations. The oil giant admits to 262 oil spill incidents in Nigeria in 2002, and that […]

Dismission: Impossible

New U.S. Government Report Acknowledges Human-Caused Climate Change President Bush famously dismissed a 2002 U.S. government report that acknowledged the human causes of climate change as something “put out by the bureaucracy.” Well, it looks like the bureaucracy’s at it again: A new administration report to Congress indicates that human production of heat-trapping greenhouse gases […]

Sunflower Power

Scientists Create Hydrogen Fuel from Sunflower Oil British scientists have discovered a way to power cars with sunflower oil. While biodiesel cars that directly burn cooking oil are fairly common, researcher Valerie Dupont and her colleagues have something else in mind, as they reported this week at an American Chemical Society conference. They’ve figured out […]

DMBM

Dave Matthews Band Tour Bus Dumps Doo-Doo on Boat Passengers An alleged environmental infraction by a Dave Matthews Band tour bus left passengers on a Chicago River sightseeing tour boat with a bad taste in their mouths — literally. While on a bridge over the river, the driver apparently emptied the bus’s waste tank with […]

Mainstream green groups opt out of GOP convention protests

Image: Indymedia.org. New York City expects protests at next week’s Republican National Convention to be the most widespread and strident to hit any political convention since Chicago in 1968, when the Democrats nominated Hubert H. Humphrey over Eugene McCarthy at the height of Vietnam furor, and chaos stole the political spotlight. Already GOP spinners have […]