Latest Articles

Long Island Sound-off

Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York’s Democratic Senate candidate, yesterday attacked the environmental record of her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, and talked up her own green convictions. On a campaign tour of Long Island, Clinton touched on everything from drinking water quality to suburban sprawl, from high breast-cancer rates in the area to dying lobsters in […]

Riding the Heat Wave

With California suffering from a heat wave and on the brink of exhausting its electrical power supply, Gov. Gray Davis (D) this week mandated new energy conservation measures in the state. Under his executive orders, the government will develop a strategy for making state-owned buildings more sustainable and energy-efficient, with eco-friendly lighting, windows, and heating […]

Putting His Asbestos Foot Forward

GOP vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney and the energy company he runs, Halliburton Co., have contributed more than $150,000 to members of Congress who co-sponsored legislation that would curtail the ability of workers to sue companies over asbestos exposure. Coincidentally (ahem), about 273,300 lawsuits have been filed against Halliburton and its subsidiaries since 1976 by […]

Rough Riding

Giddy Republicans — confident they will wipe the floor with Al Gore and return to the White House this fall after eight years in the wilderness — gathered here this week for a conflict-free crowning of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney. While Bush was promising to be a “unique leader for a unique […]

Air Apparent

Spurred by Beijing’s bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics, China is pledging to ramp up its effort to clean the country’s air. Last year, Beijing’s air qualified for the government’s best rating, Level 1, only once — when the government shut down industries for the 50th anniversary of communist China — and a quarter of […]

Laissez-fair?

U.S. enviros said yesterday that a Clinton administration plan for making international trade negotiations more eco-friendly is a good first step but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Under rules proposed by the White House last month, U.S. trade negotiators would be required to review how draft trade agreements would affect the environment and to solicit […]

Johnny Bad-Seed

Even as the controversy around genetically modified (GM) crops escalates, few people are aware that a biotech revolution in forestry is also underway, with GM trees being developed and tested around the globe. Some have been engineered to grow cherries in unusual colors or apples that don’t turn brown even hours after being sliced. Others […]

Graham Slam

Environmentalists yesterday called on Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), a potential Democratic vice presidential candidate, to come out against a proposed commercial airport in south Florida, saying the expansion of the former Homestead air force base would bring development and pollution that would devastate the nearby Everglades and Biscayne national parks. The Sierra Club and Friends […]

Polluting Wisconsin paper companies choose an odd mascot

No doubt you’re annoyed by the calendar-quality images of nature being used to pedal everything from SUVs to shampoo to batteries. Now a coalition of paper companies in the Fox River Valley, near Green Bay, Wis., has taken this advertising tactic to a new low, bringing a little dark comedy to a community engaged in […]

Wishful Sinking

With international negotiations on the Kyoto climate change treaty set to continue this fall, the U.S. is proposing that countries get the same amount of credit for using forests and farmland to absorb carbon dioxide as they would for reducing CO2 emissions from power plants and cars. The State Department says the carbon-sink effect in […]