Latest Articles

Happy Earth Day! Anybody Got a Life Vest?

U.K. Report Warns of Rising Flood Dangers and Costs The U.K. government marked Earth Day with characteristic British cheer, releasing a report warning that much of the country is going to experience flooding in coming decades. According to an expert government panel, the cost of physical and psychological damage from floods in the U.K. is […]

Earth to Public: Come In, Public …

Earth Day Prompts Flurry of Electoral Rhetoric; Public Yawns Earth Day during a big election year inevitably prompts a flurry of earnest talk about the environment and which candidate is better for it, and today is no exception. President Bush touted his love of wetlands in Maine; John Kerry blasted Bush’s environmental record in Houston, […]

Action Heroes

How You Can Make a Difference for the Planet With today’s environmental problems so large, abstract, and intractable — see warming, global — you’re probably wondering what you, one individual, can do on Earth Day to help. (If you’re one of the people surveyed by Gallup — see above — perhaps you don’t care, but […]

Join the Club

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 […]