Latest Articles

Hitting the Bottle

Bottled water is no safer than tap water, but it can cost as much as 1,000 times more, according to a study released today by the World Wildlife Fund in Geneva. The group said that bottled water sales are soaring because people are concerned that tap water may be polluted. However, the study found that […]

Real Good!

President Bush today is ordering employees at all 500,000 federal buildings to dim lights, turn off office equipment not in use, and conserve energy in other ways to reduce the chance of energy shortages this summer. Casual dress will even be allowed on hot days, to limit the need for air-conditioning. A spokesperson for California […]

Pioneer Hybrid

Despite the five-month waiting list for Toyota Priuses in the U.S., Toyota has no plans to boost production numbers for its four-door gas-electric hybrid, which gets between 45 and 52 miles per gallon of gasoline. Toyota and Honda (its two-door Insight rates between 61 and 68 mpg) are planning to build fewer than 20,000 hybrid […]

Jacques Be Nimble

French President Jacques Chirac was expected to woo green voters today and propose that the public be granted a constitutional right to a clean environment. In a speech released ahead of time, Chirac was planning to call on parliament to draft language for the French Constitution that would put environmental protections “on a par with […]

Green Berets

After spending 12 million dollars, the U.S. Army has come up with a nifty new something — a more eco-friendly bullet (rad!) that is just as effective at killing as past lead-based ones. The “green ammunition” uses a less toxic tungsten composite that the Army says will significantly reduce the soil contamination caused each year […]

The Political Climate Is Changing, Too

The coal and utility industries are lobbying Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive energy task force to ease a clean-air rule so that major upgrades can be made at power plants without setting in motion tough pollution-control requirements. The Clinton-era U.S. EPA sued eight big utilities for upgrading power plants without also improving pollution controls. But […]

Log Rolling

Twenty Republicans in the U.S House, led by Reps. Sherwood Boehlert (N.Y.) and Constance Morella (Md.), joined with more than 100 Democrats yesterday in asking President Bush not to roll back the plan approved by the Clinton administration to ban road-building and logging on 58.5 million acres of national forestland. Boehlert said, “I believe our […]

Puget Sound Science

Environmentalists petitioned the feds yesterday to protect Puget Sound orca whales under the Endangered Species Act. The National Marine Fisheries Service has 90 days to review the request. If it thinks the petition is warranted, the agency will then have one year to decide whether to list the killer whales as threatened or endangered under […]

McCain Is Able

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) criticized the Bush administration yesterday for rejecting the Kyoto treaty on climate change. McCain said, “I don’t agree with everything in the Kyoto Protocol, but I think it is a framework we could have continued to work with. We could have fixed it.” In other climate news, Ford is expected to […]

Dutch Oven

Royal Dutch/Shell said yesterday that a significant oil spill had occurred in Ogoniland, Nigeria, where the company has volatile relations with local residents. The company said it did not yet know the volume of the spill, but suggested the cause was arson near one of its facilities. Ledum Mittee, president of the Movement for the […]