Latest Articles
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
