Latest Articles

Coal in His Stalking

More bad news from the Bush administration: The U.S. EPA is planning to relax Clinton-era interpretations of the Clean Air Act by allowing owners of aging coal-fired power plants to upgrade their facilities without installing pollution controls. The policy change is bound to be unpopular with environmentalists, as well as with many Northeast states, which […]

Fuels Don’t Rush in

Environmental groups sued the U.S. government yesterday for violating a 1992 law requiring federal agencies to buy vehicles powered by alternative fuels. The suit, filed by the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Bluewater Network, charges 18 agencies for failing — in some cases miserably — to meet the terms of the […]

Physics Lab Tests Tensile Strength of Senator

And from the other side of the aisle … U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), normally thought of as environmentally friendly, is championing legislation to protect a mining company from any liability for environmental damage done in its 125 years of operating in the senator’s home state. The company, Homestake Mining, plans to close […]

Tijuana Ass

For decades, raw sewage from Tijuana has flowed into the Tijuana River, north through the United States, and into the Pacific Ocean, violating U.S. clean water standards. Efforts to clean up the waste have bogged down in the double-bureaucracy that plagues cross-border negotiations, with fully one dozen Mexican and U.S. municipal, state, and federal agencies […]

Coughing in a Winter Wonderland

Be glad you’re not on the planning committee for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. First there was terrorism to worry about; now there’s the weather. Salt Lake’s squeaky-clean image could suffer a blow if the world gets a glimpse of the woeful air pollution that plagues the city in the winter. Snow in Salt […]

Anniston Get Your Gun

For almost four decades, the Monsanto Company discharged toxic waste, including millions of pounds of PCBs, into creeks and landfills in Anniston, Ala. For most of that time, the company knew PCBs were highly toxic: Monsanto consultants placed fish in the contaminated creeks and watched them die within 10 seconds, and confidential internal reports acknowledged […]

Turning Over a New Leif

With a new, government-approved plan to become the world’s first hydrogen-based society, Iceland is emerging as the protagonist of the clean energy revolution. The nation plans to end its dependence on fossil fuels (and hence on foreign energy sources) through the use of fuel cells, which combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce energy, yielding water […]

Business As Usual

The U.S. government will no longer consider a business’s environmental track record when awarding federal contracts, following the Bush administration’s decision to rescind 11th-hour Clinton-era “blacklisting” regulations. The regulations required a business to have a satisfactory record on ethical, environmental, tax, labor, antitrust, and consumer protection laws to win government contracts worth more than $100,000. […]

‘Tis the Treason

It was a grim holiday season for Grigory Pasko, a Russian journalist who was sentenced on Dec. 25 to four years in prison on charges of high treason. A military reporter with an interest in environmental issues, Pasko documented the Russian Navy’s practice of dumping old weapons and nuclear waste into the ocean. The treason […]

Minority Report

Officials in charge of reviving the Florida Everglades have created an outreach program to encourage minority involvement in the region’s decades-long, multi-billion dollar restoration plan. The $11 million outreach program accords with 2000 legislation that granted federal funding for Everglades restoration and called on the South Florida Water Management District and the U.S. Army Corps […]