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Sweeney Among the Corps-n-gales

Three top officials at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rigged an economic study to justify spending $1 billion to expand a system of locks along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, according to a Pentagon investigation released yesterday. The report by the Army’s inspector general also found that the agency has an institutional bias toward […]

Lame Duck Tales

In its last seven weeks, the Clinton administration is preparing a raft of environmental regulations. Standards for organic food labels, new limits on sulfur in diesel fuel, and protections for almost 60 million acres of roadless national forestland will be among the high-profile regs. Other regulations will likely include limits on mercury releases from power […]

Heir Apparent's Air Is Apparent

Texas’s top environmental officials approved a major new plan yesterday for cleaning up the air of Houston, the country’s smoggiest city. The plan by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, which would bring the area into compliance with federal clean air standards by 2007, would cap the speed limit in an eight-country region at 55 […]

Don't Lend Me Your Ears

An outside scientific advisory panel told the U.S. EPA yesterday that the genetically modified corn StarLink has a “medium likelihood” of causing allergic reactions in some people, but that so little of the corn is now in the food supply in the U.S. that there is a “low probability” that significant allergy problems will arise. […]

Keeping Those Skaters In-line

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has drafted new rules for off-road vehicles (ORVs) that would not necessarily lead to new limits on their use but would give managers in the field more leeway to clamp down in order to protect the environment. The new strategy by the BLM, which manages more land than any […]

The Dredge Report

U.S. EPA Administrator Carol Browner last night said she would propose ordering General Electric to dredge PCB-contaminated hot spots along a 40-mile stretch of the upper Hudson River in New York. GE dumped large volumes of the chemicals in the river over a 30-year period, before it was against the law; it stopped doing so […]

Injunction Junction, What's Your Function

A Seattle federal judge agreed yesterday to allow the National Marine Fisheries Service to implement its own restrictions on fishing in waters considered critical habitat for the endangered Steller sea lion, whose population has dropped 80 percent since the 1970s. The judge lifted his own injunction banning trawl fishing in the Bering Sea and Gulf […]

Top of the POPs

Some 600 delegates from more than 120 countries began a week of talks yesterday in Johannesburg, South Africa, to try to reach agreement on a treaty to ban 12 persistent organic pollutants (POPs), chemicals such as PCBs and several pesticides that have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and genetic abnormalities in humans and wildlife. […]

Zed, last of his species, in "Carbon Culture Sink"

Both Gore and Nader could have won with this more sensible election system

From the standpoint of most environmentalists, very little went right on election day. Ralph Nader fell short of getting 5 percent of the vote, so the Green Party won’t qualify for federal matching funds in 2004. And it seems likely that Al Gore, despite receiving more of the popular vote than his Republican rival, won’t […]