Latest Articles

Caveat Farmer

Bush Insulates Pesticide Makers from Lawsuits The Bush administration is doing a big favor for pesticide manufacturers by instituting a new policy that will curb farmers’ ability to sue the companies if their products don’t work as promised. In a significant policy reversal, the U.S. EPA has reinterpreted a federal law and now claims that […]

Suit to Kill

California and Other States to Sue EPA over Greenhouse Gases California intends to sue the U.S. EPA over the Bush administration’s recent decision that the agency doesn’t have the authority to regulate emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, Gov. Gray Davis (D) announced on Friday. Nine other states, including Illinois, New York, […]

Detroit Yuck City

Illegal Dumping Pushes Up Toxic Contamination in Great Lakes Toxic pollution in Great Lakes waterways has jumped 25 percent over the past six years, thanks at least in part to rampant illegal discharges from large industrial facilities and sewer plants. Meanwhile, government enforcement efforts on both the national and state levels are stagnating, meaning that […]

Cheap Tricks I

Toyota Says Hybrids Can Be Inexpensive to Manufacture Defying conventional wisdom, Toyota unveiled its new hybrid-car production site in Toyota City, Japan, yesterday and sent a clear message to other automakers: Gas-electric hybrids can be manufactured inexpensively. Such cars have traditionally been thought of as too costly to be practical, and Toyota and Honda, the […]

I’ll Take Mongolia for $1,000, Alex

Increased Mining in Mongolia Could Threaten Environment Say “Mongolia” and most people think of yaks and yurts — that is, if they think of anything. But these days, mining companies have a very different image of Mongolia: an untapped source of gold, copper, and other natural resources that can be exploited on the cheap and […]

Cheap Tricks II

New Solar Panels Would Be Inefficient — and Inexpensive Usually, inefficient energy sources are an environmentalist’s worse nightmare — but the opposite might be the case for a new type of solar cell. True, the new cells would only capture about 10 percent of the sun’s energy (roughly half of what conventional solar cells capture), […]

Run Out on a Rail

Senate Rejects White House Proposal to Restructure Amtrak A White House plan to restructure Amtrak was, uh, derailed yesterday by nearly unanimous bipartisan opposition in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The six-year Amtrak reauthorization bill proposed ending federal operating subsidies for the passenger rail service, opening some routes to private operators, and […]

The Kids Are Alright

Michigan Creates Volunteer Corps to Monitor Waterways What do you do if you’re a budget-strapped state with no money to pay for water-quality monitoring? Sign up the seventh graders, of course. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) signed an executive order this week to create the Clean Water Corps, which will enlist volunteers, some of them […]

Soft Sell

McCain and Lieberman Soften Climate-Change Legislation The sponsors of a groundbreaking climate-change bill in the Senate are softening their legislation in an attempt to attract more support. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) announced yesterday that a revised version of their Climate Stewardship Act would not contain a requirement that carbon dioxide emissions […]

The Bush administration lets a profitable energy-efficiency program lapse

As of yesterday, Oct. 1, the most successful program in U.S. history for improving energy efficiency in federal buildings is toast. The demise of the Energy Savings Performance Contracting program is no insignificant matter, seeing as how the federal government is the single biggest energy-user in the nation. Taxpayers spend $4 billion per year to […]