Latest Articles
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We Do More Spinning Before 9 a.m. Than Most People Do All Day
It seems the General Accounting Office has been busy of late; in a report completed in May that surfaced yesterday at a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the congressional auditors found little evidence to support the Bush administration’s claims that environmental regulations are interfering with military training. The administration has asked […]
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Slippery Slope
Cleaning up the mess left by the oil industry on Alaska’s North Slope could cost anywhere from $2.7 billion to $6 billion, but oil companies have so far set aside just a fraction of that money and are not under any legal obligation to meet specific cleanup standards, the General Accounting Office announced yesterday. The […]
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Yuck.
The U.S. Senate voted yesterday to approve storage of nuclear waste from around the nation at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, ending, for the moment, one of the most contentious environmental battles of recent decades. The 60-to-39 vote was a blow for environmentalists and Nevadans, who dubbed the plan the “Screw Nevada Bill” when it was preliminarily […]
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Down the Hatch
With the Senate poised to vote as early as today on a proposed nuclear waste disposal site at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, two wavering lawmakers have agreed to support the site in exchange for a favor in their own state. Republican Sens. Robert Bennett and Orrin Hatch, both of Utah, met yesterday with Energy Secretary Spencer […]
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Frog Days of Summer
For the first time, scientists have found evidence linking agricultural runoff to the rise in grotesque hind-limb deformities in frogs. In the past, the deformities were associated with a common parasite, the burrowing trematode worm, which seemed to affect the development of tadpoles. Now, writing in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National […]
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Bread and Butterfly
Like a lot of Americans, millions of monarch butterflies spend their winters in Mexico. Trouble is, the Mexican government has been unable to protect the monarch’s forest habitat from illegal logging. Reasoning that illegal logging stems from necessity — the 200,000-odd largely impoverished people who live in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve clear the lands […]
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Lack of Response Ability
The U.S. EPA is “not fully prepared” to handle a large-scale nuclear, biological, chemical, or radiological attack on the country, according to an internal assessment by the agency. The report was commissioned by EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman in response to the attacks of Sept. 11 and strongly suggests that if those attacks had involved […]
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Plant Nein
A controversial decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service not to set aside protected areas known as “critical habitat” for eight imperiled plant species has been challenged by a federal judge in California. The ruling by Judge Irma Gonzalez was greeted triumphantly by environmentalists, although it merely orders the USFWS to reconsidered its position […]
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National Parking Service
Washington, D.C., is cursed with some of the heaviest traffic and worst air pollution in the country. But the obvious solution — reducing the number of drivers on the road — faces a major obstacle: the federal government, which supplies free parking, thereby eliminating a major incentive to take public transportation. The federal government is […]
