Latest Articles

Low CEQ IQ

U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman told the New York Times Magazine that U.S. President Bush in January hadn’t heard of the White House Office on Environmental Quality, the executive branch office responsible for enforcing the National Environmental Policy Act and coordinating the environmental policies of federal agencies. Whitman said that when Bush offered her […]

Send My Schregardus to Broadway

If the Bush administration withdraws from Clinton-era pollution lawsuits against power plants in the Midwest and South, Northeast states that also sued the plants will have a hard time continuing with the cases. The states don’t have the resources of the federal government, and they would have trouble building cases against plants more than 400 […]

15 Is Enough

The U.N. Environment Programme says forest-protection efforts worldwide should focus on just 15 countries that contain more than 80 percent of the most-intact forests left. UNEP says 88 percent of the targeted forests face little pressure from human activities. The 15 countries are Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, […]

Going Halfway

A group of Canadian natives has been blockading a Petro-Canada well in northeastern British Columbia since Monday to protest against a proposed 13-mile natural gas pipeline through traditional hunting grounds. About 100 protesters, led by members of the Halfway River First Nation, say they will prevent workers and equipment from entering a drilling camp until […]

Bahn Stormer

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder kvetched this week that taking steps to protect the environment was causing the cost of highway construction to soar. “I don’t have anything against frogs,” he said as he inspected a just-completed segment of a long-delayed highway, “but the expenditures we make for protecting the environment while building roads are enormous.” […]

Give a Honk, Don't Pollute

On top of warming up the earth, pollution from burning fossil fuels is killing thousands of people a year, according to a study published in the journal Science. For starters, Devra Lee Davis of Carnegie Mellon University and four coauthors found that if Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo, and Santiago employed technologies that now […]

Landfill, Ho!

Babies born to mothers living near landfills are more likely to suffer minor birth defects, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal. The 11-year study shows that pregnant women living near landfills in the U.K. had a 1 percent higher chance of having a baby with a congenital defect. That risk jumped […]

Don't Be a Hog

Factory hog farms, as well as the cattle and poultry industries, are pressuring the U.S. Congress to pass a bill that would use taxpayer dollars to help the farms pay for cleaning up their environmental messes. The U.S. EPA is considering costly regulations to reduce pollution from the livestock operations — and the industries don’t […]

Goldy Lax

Nevada’s gold-mining industry is eagerly awaiting the Bush administration’s expected decision to scrap Clinton-era rules designed to reduce the environmental impact of mining on public lands. One of the rules gives the federal government the right to block mining that is likely to cause “substantial irreparable harm” to public lands. The mining industry and enviros […]

Snow Shoos

A top official in Yellowstone National Park says the snowmobile industry has failed to provide useful information about new technologies that would justify overturning a ban on snowmobiling in the park. The Clinton administration made the decision to impose the ban by 2004, but snowmobile manufacturers later convinced the Bush administration to reconsider the move, […]