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Living Worse Daily

In 1986, it rained for three weeks straight in Midland, Mich., headquarters of Dow Chemical Corp. A wastewater containment facility at a Dow plant on the banks of the Tittabawassee River overflowed, and waste from the plant was carried downstream into the Saginaw flood plain. In 1995, Michigan began finding elevated levels of dioxins — […]

Not-So-Super Power

Amid heated controversy over the Bush administration’s plans to weaken air pollution regulations, two environmental organizations and a large New Jersey utility are releasing today a new study ranking the worst polluters in the power industry. The study, “Benchmarking Air Emissions of the 100 Largest Electric Generation Owners in the U.S. — 2000,” tracked company […]

Get the Lead Out

Residents of northern Idaho are fiercely resisting a plan by the U.S. EPA to expand a 21-square-mile area into one of the country’s largest Superfund sites. That’s not so unusual — many towns resist Superfund designation, fearing that the stigma will drive away tourists and businesses. But some northern Idaho towns have filed a lawsuit […]

I Sing the Garbage Electric

Maybe President Bush can learn a thing or two about environmental policy during his visit today to Monterrey, Mexico’s third-largest city and home to an innovative program to turn rotting garbage into electricity. The city government is working with a local energy company to construct an electricity plant at the Salinas Victoria Landfill; the plant […]

I Glum From the Land Down Under

Meanwhile, in other news from the Southern Hemisphere, a committee composed of more than 100 representatives from Australia’s government agencies and the private sector has issued the country a damning environmental report card. The committee, which reports on the state of the Australian environment every five years, said there had been little progress since its […]

Wham, Bam, No Thank You, Graham

The Bush administration has announced plans to hire more scientists for its regulatory review office, seek more input from citizens and businesses, and adopt cost-benefit analyses for rulemaking. The White House’s point person on regulatory reform, John Graham, said the plan reflected the administration’s “commitment to science-based quality regulation.” Industry reps, who know they have […]

Scarey Larsen

An enormous section of Antarctica’s Larsen Ice Shelf collapsed and splintered into thousands of icebergs this week after one of the region’s warmest recorded summers. The section, designated Larsen B, was 650 feet thick and about the size of Rhode Island. Although scientists stopped short of attributing the collapse to global warming, they did say […]

Mind the Gap

Environmentalists and public-health advocates in California are upset over a new state regulation that allows low-level radioactive waste to be dumped in municipal landfills instead of federally regulated nuclear waste storage facilities. Citing the possibility of increased cancer risks, the Sierra Club and a nuclear policy group, the Committee to Bridge the Gap, are backing […]

Really Endangered Species

In a sweeping policy shift that has environmentalists deeply worried, the Bush administration is urging federal judges to roll back legal protections for almost two dozen populations of endangered species. Government officials say the rollbacks are necessary because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which both enforce the Endangered […]

Barns and Ignoble

“Factory farms” — huge, mechanized corporate operations — are a far cry from the American pastoral image (that little red barn on the hill). But such farms are becoming ever more common, and not just in the Midwest. In Pennsylvania, for example, large-scale hog farms have doubled in the last decade, provoking environmental, agricultural, and […]