Latest Articles

Always a Bribe’s Made

Apparently inspired by the 2000 Gore-Nader brouhaha, the head of New Mexico’s GOP tried to bribe Green Party leaders to field candidates in upcoming elections in order to drain votes away from Democrats. The state’s Republican Party chair, John Dendahl, spoke with Green leaders about the possibility of making a six-figure contribution to their party […]

Life in the Stupid Zone

Writer Ed Quillen says that town and county planners should adopt a new category called the Stupid Zone. You know some Stupid Zone residents, I’m sure: those nearsighted folks who choose to live at the bottom of avalanche chutes, on top of earthquake faults, or in the middle of a 10-year floodplain. Like me, you […]

Thursday, 11 Jul 2002

Coca Is It! Coca Is It! Efforts by the United States to combat cocaine production in Colombia by spraying coca crops with herbicides are coming up against a provision requiring the spraying to meet the same safety standards as those in the U.S. Translation: The U.S. EPA must certify that the spraying “does not pose […]

99 Bottles of Beer in a Dumpster

For the first time in at least a decade, Congress is considering a national bottle bill, thanks to the efforts of Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.), head of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Jeffords, who has battled for such a bottle bill for nearly 30 years, introduced a measure today that would shift […]

Coca Is It!

Efforts by the United States to combat cocaine production in Colombia by spraying coca crops with herbicides are coming up against a provision requiring the spraying to meet the same safety standards as those in the U.S. Translation: The U.S. EPA must certify that the spraying “does not pose unreasonable risks or adverse effects to […]

Desperately Seeking Snoozin’

Despite mounting evidence that global warming has already begun to exact steep tolls on the environment, the Bush administration told Congress yesterday that it needs up to five years of additional scientific research before it will be ready to formulate a plan to address climate change. Speaking in front of the House Science Committee, Commerce […]

A Thousand Acres … Well, Make That 4.7

Global standards of living will plummet by mid-century unless human beings drastically decrease their use of natural resources, according to a report issued yesterday by the World Wildlife Fund. The main culprits in the overuse of resources are the world’s richest countries: the U.S., Canada, Japan, and most of Western Europe, according to “Living Planet […]

Lima Beaned

Roughly 1,000 Peruvian peasants arrived in their nation’s capital this week to demand that the government take action against contamination or seizure of land by mining companies. Peru is the world’s fifth-largest producer of copper and eighth-largest producer of gold, and the mining industry is responsible for half of the nation’s annual export income. But […]

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 […]

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 […]