Latest Articles
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Meet the New Plan, Same As the Old Plan
The story: President Bush’s plan to curb global warming, unveiled yesterday, didn’t contain many surprises. The president rejected mandatory, government-imposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions and instead said he would allocate $4.6 billion for financial incentives and new technology to combat climate change. In other words, the status would remain quo: U.S. industries could continue […]
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Motor Voters
Whatever else you might have to say about the people who brought us the gas-guzzler, you can’t accuse them of not being organized: As the Beltway battle over whether to toughen fuel-economy standards heats up, General Motors has ratcheted up its offense, calling on suppliers to ask their senators to oppose stricter rules. In a […]
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Plan Nein From Our Space Cadet
And the reaction: At home and abroad, the response to President Bush’s strategy for dealing with global warming was tepid at best. Pointing to counterexamples in Europe, U.S. critics disagreed with Bush’s claim that mandatory emissions limits would damage the economy and said the plan was simply a sweet deal for big business. Sen. Jim […]
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Shore: Enough
An innovative if controversial bill could protect offshore waters in California from oil drilling by allowing oil companies to swap drilling claims in California for others in the Gulf of Mexico. The legislation, introduced yesterday by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), and John Breaux (D-La.), would convert 40 offshore tracts […]
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Going Whole Log
Saying environmentalists and others should have been given a forum to protest new logging rules, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nullified some 100 logging permits yesterday, most of them for southeastern Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The permits allowed companies to run so-called “logging transfer facilities,” aka timber dumps in estuaries or other coastal […]
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Who Ya Gonna Bhopal?
Citing such past tragedies as the poisonous gas leak in Bhopal, India, that killed at least 7,000 people, the United Nations called yesterday for stronger safeguards on the production and storage of hazardous chemicals in developing countries. The call to action came during a U.N. Environment Programme conference held in Cartagena, Colombia, and attended by […]
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Gregory Gipson reviews Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray
"Beauty is so much in demand," A. R. Ammons writes in his magnificent poem, "Garbage," that "it's a wonder natural / selection hasn't thinned out anything not perfectly / beautiful." Nature, he adds, "likes a broad spectrum approaching disorder so / as to maintain the potential of change with / variety and environment."
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Going Whole Hog for Conservation
In welcome news for environmentalists, the U.S. Senate approved a farm bill yesterday that would double spending for conservation programs to $22 billion over the next decade. If it becomes law, the farm bill — which also includes provisions to clean up urban drinking water, protect forests from urban sprawl, and conserve wildlife habitat — […]
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Hot to Rot?
The U.S. EPA announced this week a two-year phase out of an arsenic-based preservative used to pressure-treat lumber against rot and insect damage. The treated wood is popular for use in fences, decks, and playground equipment, and its manufacturers and vendors — including Home Depot and other building-supply stores — currently face a class-action suit […]
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As the World Turns Differently
You think your days are already long? Just you wait: Scientists in Belgium have determined that days may become even longer as global warming occurs. In a study published in this month’s Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists, who hail from Belgium’s Royal Observatory and the Catholic University of Louvain, said that increasing levels of carbon […]
