Latest Articles

The Truck Stops Here

Speaking of the blue-green alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups, plus the trucking industry, filed suit yesterday to prevent the U.S. government from allowing some 30,000 Mexican trucks onto American roads. On Friday, the Bush administration is scheduled to sign regulations that would allow Mexican trucks to cross the border for the first […]

Abandon Ships

About 15 percent of the world’s nitrogen- and sulfur-based pollution is produced by ships — some 30,000 of them worldwide — yet the vessels are among the least controlled pollution sources on the planet. That wouldn’t change much under rules proposed by the U.S. EPA yesterday. The new regulations, modeled after a five-year-old international accord […]

Mr. Green Genes?

When you’ve skyrocketed into the public eye, become an overnight billionaire, and successfully mapped the human genome, what do you do next? Why, find the solution to global warming, of course. J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist who gave the federal government’s Human Genome Project a run for its money and accelerated the pace of […]

Cells Sell

The internal combustion engine took one small step toward obsolescence yesterday, when General Motors announced the addition of an 80,000-square-foot research facility in upstate New York that will be wholly dedicated to the commercialization of fuel cells. Fuel cells generate electricity by mixing hydrogen and oxygen; the only byproduct of the process is water. The […]

Lies, Damn Lies, and Economic Analyses

In an unprecedented act, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced yesterday that it would suspend work on about 150 congressionally approved water projects to review the economics used to justify them. The move follows last week’s decision by the Corps to suspend its deepening of the Delaware River to review the economic analysis, one […]

Goodbye, Farewell, So Lung

About one in two Americans breathe unhealthy air, according to a report released today by the American Lung Association. In real numbers, that translates to more than 142 million Americans living in areas where the U.S. EPA has found smog levels to be unhealthful. A lot of those areas are in — you guessed it […]

Middle Earth in the Balance

Seems like everyone but the U.S. is working on a way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that fuel global warming. Yesterday, the New Zealand government proposed levying a tax of about $10 per ton of CO2 to meet the targets of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The tax would go […]

Holy Sinkhole!

Central Florida’s main source of drinking water is being contaminated by a toxic leak from one of the nation’s oldest Superfund sites, according to federal authorities. Ten years ago, the U.S. EPA ended the cleanup of a Tower Chemical plant that manufactured pesticides for the citrus industry; now, an unidentified pesticide-related chemical has seeped from […]

Who, Moi?

Responding to criticism that his government has overseen the widespread destruction of forests, Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi announced yesterday a plan to strictly enforce bans on timber cutting. Moi also announced that he would seek support from the U.N. Development Programme for a campaign to plant trees. Sounds good, but Moi has not historically […]

From the Town of Bed Rock

In a triumph for environmentalists, a federal panel has reversed a U.S. Bureau of Land Management decision to grant three coal-bed-methane (CBM) mining leases in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. The Interior Department’s Board of Land Appeals determined that the BLM granted the leases based on a 1985 resource management plan that addressed the potential impacts […]