Latest Articles
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Joint Commission Issues Smokin' Report
Canada and the U.S. should ban the export of water from the Great Lakes because the lakes don’t have a surplus, says a preliminary report released yesterday by the International Joint Commission, the U.S.-Canada agency that regulates the lakes. Canada yesterday threw its support behind a commission recommendation for a six-month moratorium on the large-scale […]
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Wavy Gravy
Major Canadian cities dump more than 1 trillion liters of sewage with little or no treatment into oceans and other bodies of water each year, according to a study by the Sierra Legal Defense Fund, which calls the waste treatment problem “a national disgrace.” The worst offenders among the 21 cities studied were Victoria, Halifax, […]
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Amazon.Gone
The Amazon rainforest will be cleared within 80 years if multinational companies continue to log at the current rate, Greenpeace warned yesterday in its annual report. Illegal commercial logging is responsible for 80 percent of the trees that are taken from the forest each year, and most of the profit from sale of the timber […]
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Flaky Tuna Rules!
A coalition of environmental groups plans to file suit today against the feds, seeking to overturn what they see as a weakening of labeling standards for “dolphin-safe” tuna. In April, the U.S. government expanded the number of fishing methods that qualify as dolphin-safe, including one called encirclement, a previously banned method that involves closing in […]
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All They Hate is Dust in the Wind
Leaders from Los Angeles and California’s Owens Valley today will sign an agreement to resolve a bitter, long-running dispute over water and dust. In 1913, a Los Angeles-bound aqueduct began diverting water from the Owens River, causing Owens Lake to dry up. The dried sediments cause severe dust storms and give Owens Valley the worst […]
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Finders Keepers, Polluters Weepers
Citizens across the U.S. have formed 35 “water keeper” programs, in which volunteers monitor pollution in rivers, bays, and channels and along coastlines, working to boost enforcement of environmental laws. The Clean Water Act empowers citizens to bring legal actions against polluters when local, state, and federal governments do not. The keeper programs are modeled […]
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License to Kill
Police forces across England are on alert after environmentalists threatened to sabotage four new government testing sites for genetically modified crops. The British government, saying it was committed to openness in dealing with GM technology, on Monday made public on the Internet the location of the four sites, and also announced that 75 new sites […]
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What I Did on My Summer Vacation
August is prime R&R time for lawmakers, who are kicking back in their home states and pressing the all-important constituent flesh. No such vacation at the Sierra Club, however, where summer means it’s time to drive lawmakers crazy by running ads against them. On the receiving end of the group’s radio spots this time around […]
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Paper or … Uh, Paper?
The South African government is considering a ban on plastic bags as a way to help clean up its littered streets and landscapes, Mohammed Valli Moosa, the nation’s new environment minister, said yesterday. He also said the government may impose a compulsory returnable deposit on all bottles to ensure they aren’t tossed into the street […]
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Ford Cells Out
Ford Motor Co. announced yesterday that it would develop an experimental fuel-cell car powered by a hydrogen-burning internal combustion engine by year’s end. The company, which just opened a hydrogen fueling station at a Michigan research lab, said it is making progress in developing an on-board fuel processor that would generate hydrogen from gasoline, then […]
