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Sierra Club Members Reject Immigration-Focused Candidates A record number of Sierra Club members voted in the group’s just-concluded board election and decisively rejected a controversial slate of candidates who had called for curbs on immigration as part of a population-control strategy. With nearly 23 percent of the club’s 757,000 members voting, candidates backed by the […]

Demetrio do Amaral de Carvalho champions East Timor’s environment

De Carvalho. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. East Timor is the world’s newest country. Once a Portuguese colony, the tiny Southeast Asian nation covers half of a 300-mile-long coral island. When Portugal withdrew from the island in the mid-1970s, East Timor became a disputed territory, and for decades it was devastated by civil war and Indonesian […]

Study finds mandatory caps work better than voluntary programs to limit pollution

Smokestacking the deck? Photo: USGS. This just in, from the Department of Near-Tautologies: Mandatory emissions caps rein in power-plant pollution more effectively than voluntary programs. That’s the conclusion being drawn from a report on the environmental records of the 100 largest electricity companies in the U.S., released last week by an alliance of bottom-liners and […]

The Sound of Science

“Sound Science” Movement Threatens Endangered Species Act Long-time opponents of the Endangered Species Act — perhaps the most efficacious, far-reaching environmental legislation in U.S. history — are back under a new guise. A movement to add “sound science” provisions to the act, while it sounds innocuous, actually threatens to paralyze enforcement. Inspired by a preliminary […]

The Hydrogenator

California Governor Gives a Boost to Hydrogen Infrastructure California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) is trying to kick-start the so-called hydrogen revolution. Yesterday, he signed an executive order establishing a public-private partnership aimed at building a network of some 200 hydrogen fueling stations in the state by 2010, at an estimated cost of $100 million. (California […]

King Mekong

Mekong Dams Could Wipe Out Some of Last Healthy Inland Fisheries Across the world, thirst for cheap electricity from hydroelectric dams has strained inland fisheries, and now one of the world’s last relatively wild rivers faces the same fate. The Mekong River flows some 2,800 miles from the Tibetan ice fields, through the mountains of […]

Rudolf Amenga-Etego beats back the privatization of Ghana’s water supply

Amenga-Etego. Photo: Dave Wendlinger. The western African nation of Ghana, tucked under the chin of the continent, is dominated by the enormous Lake Volta, a sprawling reservoir that arcs through the midsection of the country. Though there appears to be water, water everywhere, an estimated 70 percent of Ghana’s people lack access to clean, piped […]

Margie Eugene-Richard of Louisiana battled Shell on behalf of her neighborhood

Eugene-Richard. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. The Old Diamond neighborhood of Norco, in far southern Louisiana, sits between a Shell Chemicals plant and an oil refinery owned by a Shell joint venture. “We’re like the meat in the sandwich,” says Margie Eugene-Richard, 62, who grew up just 25 feet from the fenceline of the chemical plant. […]

New “quiet” snowmobiles in Yellowstone are anything but

A vroom with a view. Photo: Greater Yellowstone Coalition. You might think a winter job in the snowy recesses of Yellowstone National Park would guarantee perks along the lines of, say, peace and quiet. Au contraire. In light of a recent study conducted for the National Park Service, many Yellowstone employees are being advised to […]

No Campaign, No Gain

Kerry to Make Environment Central Campaign Issue As Earth Day approaches, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is publicizing his plan to make environmental protection a central campaign issue. This is a notable departure from Al Gore’s strategy in the 2000 election, wherein the Democratic candidate was muted on the issue, hoping to dodge the “environmental […]