Latest Articles

Le Car-less

Tens of thousands of citizens in Paris, Geneva, Brussels, Rome, and some 150 other European cities left their automobiles at home yesterday to observe a car-free day, the second annual one in France and first in Italy. Enviros hope the day caused drivers to think about smog and their role in creating it. A French […]

Coming Soon: A 10K Salmon Run

A major electric utility in the Northwest, PacifiCorp, said yesterday that it would pay $17 million to remove a dam rather than cough up the $30 million that would have been needed to make it less harmful to fish. At 125 feet in height, the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in southwestern Washington […]

Tiger Salamander Lawsuits: They're Grrreat!

In a lawsuit filed this week against the feds, the Center for Biological Diversity is pressing to have the California tiger salamander and nine other critters in the West protected under the Endangered Species Act. The group says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has delayed protecting the animals for years though they are on […]

Peter Pence Gets Pounded

The poor in Britain are hit much harder by pollution than the rich, according to a new report produced by Friends of the Earth and the think tank Catalyst. In parts of Britain where the average annual household income is below 15,000 pounds ($25,000), there are 662 polluting factories, while in areas where the average […]

Californians to Stop Passing Gas?

The California Air Resources Board today will consider a first-of-its-kind crackdown on something usually not thought of as an environmental threat: small, portable gas cans. The cans are so leak-prone and ubiquitous — there are an estimated 10 million in California — that they are responsible for as much smog-forming pollution as 1 million cars, […]

New Kink for Perverse Subsidies

If the world’s governments took just a portion of the money they use for environmentally damaging subsidies and used it for conservation efforts, the world’s rich diversity of species could be preserved, according to a new study in the journal Nature. Researchers at the University of Cambridge calculated that governments spend between $950 billion and […]

Oil and U'wa Don't Mix

In a move that a Colombian Indian tribe says could mean the end of its culture and people, Colombia’s government yesterday granted Occidental Petroleum a license to explore for oil just outside a 543,000-acre reserve inhabited by the U’wa Indian nation. The company had initially sought permission to explore directly on U’wa land, but the […]

Fund for the Whole Family

Worldwide funding for family planning and women’s health has fallen billions of dollars below targeted levels even as the world’s population climbs toward 6 billion, the U.N. said yesterday. The U.N. will mark the birth of the planet’s 6 billionth citizen on October 12. The number of people in the world has doubled since 1960, […]

Not a Creature Was Stirring, Not Even a Grouse

Large swaths of sage and grassland desert in the West are the focal point of a contentious debate over protections for the sage grouse, a large bird that some enviros have taken to calling the “spotted owl of the desert.” The American Lands Alliance and other enviro groups are preparing to petition the feds to […]

They Weren't Wearing Their Lead Yarmulkes

Dozens of Israelis who worked at a nuclear reactor in a remote desert town are seeking millions of dollars in government compensation for cancer they claim resulted from their work. Years of attempts to settle the cases out of court have failed, and now the plaintiffs are pursuing a court case against Israel’s Atomic Energy […]