Latest Articles
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Russian to the Brink
Russian environmentalists announced yesterday that they would take their government to court over its decision to accept spent nuclear waste from foreign countries for storage and reprocessing. The law allowing the country to import such waste was signed by President Vladimir Putin last summer. Proponents say it could generate up to $20 billion over 10 […]
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Burning Desires
Concerned about air quality and human health, community delegates to a four-day meeting in Durban, South Africa, yesterday called on the governments of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland to ban all waste incinerators and tighten controls over medical waste disposal by 2006. The three governments haven’t yet responded to the call, although South Africa is […]
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Sea Ya!
Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which used to be the world’s fourth-largest lake, has shrunk so dramatically that it has split into two separate bodies of water. The two rivers that feed it were diverted in the 1960s to water cotton fields; now just a trickle reaches the sea, and much of that is contaminated by […]
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Ski Bums
At anywhere from $40 to $70 a pop for lift tickets, downhill skiing is one of the country’s priciest sports — yet many ski resorts pay next to nothing for the federal land on which they operate. On average, resorts located on national forests fork over just 2 percent of their revenue to use the […]
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Mini Headroom
Can a miniature car gain a foothold in America, land of the super-sized everything? That’s what B.M.W. plans to find out: Last month, the company started selling the Mini Cooper, formerly the flagship vehicle of a British company, in large U.S. cities. So far, the car has done well — you’d have to put your […]
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Guinn-ess Record
In the first-ever gubernatorial veto of a presidential decision, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn (R) yesterday rejected George Bush’s proposal to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Federal lawmakers granted the state veto power over any presidential decision related to Yucca Mountain in 1982; now, two decades later, […]
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Peter Altman, Campaign ExxonMobil
Peter Altman is the national coordinator of Campaign ExxonMobil and executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition. Monday, 8 Apr 2002 AUSTIN, Texas The irony of being an environmental activist is that I spend much of my day sedentary, staying in my office and talking on the phone as I dial-in from […]
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Litter of the Law
The Chicago-based Oil-Dri Corporation, which, as the maker of Cat’s Pride, is the world’s largest kitty litter company, wants to dig an open-pit clay mine on public land outside of Reno, Nev. But county commissioners have effectively thwarted that plan by refusing to issue a permit to operate a processing plant for the cat litter […]
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U.N. Resolved
The Sixth U.N. Conference on Biodiversity opened in The Hague yesterday, with more than 2,000 delegates from 200 countries gathering to discuss the protection of the world’s plants and animals. The main agenda items for the two-week conference include encouraging governments to halt deforestation and designing a policy to share and protect global genetic resources. […]
