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Kerrying the Weight of the World

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a presidential hopeful, took a swipe at George W. Bush yesterday by blasting the president’s environmental record. “Almost as soon as this administration took office, they invited in the chief lobbyists to rewrite the very laws that were intended to protect our land, our water, and our air,” charged Kerry. He […]

Antoinette Gomez, Sustainable South Bronx

Antoinette Gomez is an environmental consultant working with Sustainable South Bronx, a grassroots environmental justice organization. She is also a fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program. Monday, 10 Feb 2003 BRONX, N.Y. My day begins in my home office (one benefit of being a consultant) with follow-up calls on two projects. In January I began […]

Gaza Stripped

As if the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians weren’t producing enough problems, the U.N. now says the clash is creating a big environmental mess in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A study conducted by the U.N. Environment Programme over the last five months documented increasing water pollution, loss of natural vegetation, indiscriminate waste dumping, […]

Chutes and Bladders

Kids who romp around on wooden structures in playgrounds could face a higher risk of contracting lung or bladder cancer than those who don’t come into contact with the equipment, the head of the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission said on Friday. Nearly all wooden playground equipment in the U.S. has been treated with the […]

Executive Carte Blanche

Chalk one up for Big Energy and its boosters in the White House. On Friday, the General Accounting Office abandoned its efforts to force Vice President Dick Cheney to turn over information about which people he met with while heading up the administration’s secretive energy task force. The GAO, Congress’s investigative arm, had been fighting […]

Smart Attack

Smart-growth policies, designed to put a damper on runaway development and preserve local character, have recently come under attack in a handful of U.S. communities. In Loudon County, Va., on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., nearly 200 lawsuits were filed last week against the county’s growth-control policies. Also last week, the mayor of Erie, Colo., […]

When You Dish Upon a Star

Minnesota would become the first state in the U.S. to effectively ban phosphorus in automatic-dishwashing detergent if a bill working its way through the state legislature gets the eventual thumbs-up. Phosphorus, which helps to remove those oh-so-unsightly spots from glasses and dishware, ultimately gets flushed out of homes and into lakes and streams, where it […]

Af-gone

Afghanistan’s most significant wetland area is now almost as dry as a bone, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Satellite imagery shows that 99 percent of the Sistan wetlands, which stretch into Iran, have dried out since 1998. The main source of water to the wetlands, the Helmand River, has been flowing at far […]

Hydra-gen

President Bush yesterday tried out several neat-o gadgets powered by hydrogen fuel cells (a video camera and cell phone, among others) and reinforced the lofty language of his State of the Union speech, saying that he would ask Congress to spend $1.2 billion on “a new national commitment to take fuel-cell cars from the laboratory […]

Umbra on jet streams

Dear Umbra, Why does the jet stream move from west to east? Joe Pittsburgh, Penn. Dearest Joe, To get a decent bagel? Image: NASA. There are actually two main global jet streams, the “polar” in the Northern Hemisphere and the “subtropical” in the Southern Hemisphere. The ridiculously simple answer to your question is that jet […]