Latest Articles

Holmstead Act

EPA Official Gave Misleading Testimony on Clean Air, Say Whistleblowers Meanwhile, all isn’t well inside the U.S. EPA, either. Last year, Assistant Administrator for Air Policy Jeffrey Holmstead testified before Congress that Bush administration efforts to ease clean air enforcement rules wouldn’t interfere with pending lawsuits against dirty power plants — but two former agency […]

Bubble Trouble

Navy Sonar Is Causing the Bends in Marine Mammals, Report Says Sonar from navy ships appears to be giving whales and other marine mammals the bends, that infamous bane of scuba divers and other deep-sea adventurers, according to a report published in the latest edition of the journal Nature. Researchers from England and Spain found […]

Smelter Skelter

Enviros Protest Massive Dam in Iceland Extreme weather and remote locations can’t stop the forward march of, uh, progress, as Iceland’s Karahnjukar dam shows. The dam, which will be Europe’s highest, is being built in a huge wilderness area, much to the dismay of environmentalists. They fear it will drown highland vegetation, change the groundwater […]

Spitz-ing Mad

Attorneys General Accuse HUD of Noncompliance on Pesticide Law The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development isn’t abiding by a federal law governing pesticide use in public housing projects, according to attorneys general from 10 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Some 1.3 million families are exposed to unsafe levels of pesticides because of […]

Wheezy Does It

Even Comparatively Clean Air Could Exacerbate Asthma, Study Shows What constitutes a safe level of pollution? For children suffering from severe asthma, there might not be such a thing, according to research published in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. In a study of 271 kids under the age of […]

No More Sulfuring in Silence

China Bans Coal Plants in Big Cities In a much-needed and long-awaited gambit to improve air quality and reduce acid rain, China has banned coal-fired power plants in major cities across the nation. The ban applies to Beijing, Shanghai, and 21 provincial capitals, which together produce approximately 60 percent of China’s sulfur dioxide emissions. Sulfur […]

Will a softer McCain-Lieberman bill prove to be harder-hitting?

Even though Sens. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) decided to soften the terms of their climate bill last week, the document may go down in history as one of the hardest-hitting gambits in the U.S. fight against global warming. In fact, easing the demands of the bill — which proposes a mandatory cap […]

Cold, Hard Kashmir

Kashmir Gets an Amusement Park, but Enviros Are Not Amused The war-torn Indian province of Kashmir is hardly a place you’d go for amusement — but now, you can go there for an amusement park. That’s right: On Sunday, a private bank unveiled a brand-new amusement park in the town of Pahalgam in the Himalayan […]

Dollars Without Sense

Privatizing Forest Service Jobs Would Cost More, Study Finds A Bush administration plan to privatize hundreds of U.S. Forest Service jobs, from wildlife biologists to safety officers, would cost taxpayers more than continuing to pay federal employees, a new agency study has found. Under the Bush plan, as many as one-fourth of all 40,000 USFS […]

Can’t Get a Piece of the Rock

British Insurance Companies Would Not Cover Farmers Growing GM Crops The general public in the U.K. is deeply opposed to genetically modified crops, and now British farmers have yet another reason not to grow them: No one will insure them. A study by the agricultural organization Farm found that none of Britain’s five major insurance […]