Articles by Grist staff

Study predicts Australia's Aborigines to suffer most from climate change

SYDNEY — Australia’s outback Aborigines will be among the worst affected by climate change as soaring temperatures likely cause more disease and spur distress about the changing landscape, a new report shows. The expert report, published in the latest edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, argues that the country’s remote indigenous communities are the […]

EPA nominee to be asked about regulating perchlorate in drinking water

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.org. It was written by Joaquin Sapien.

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In the latest volley of a years-long battle involving the Environmental Protection Agency, the military and the White House, the EPA announced last week that it will delay its decision on whether to set a drinking water standard for perchlorate, a chemical in rocket fuel that has been found at harmful levels in drinking water across the country. The announcement that the EPA won't act until it receives advice from the National Academy of Sciences puts the contentious decision onto the already-heavy regulatory agenda awaiting Lisa Jackson, President-elect Barack Obama's pick to head the EPA.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works committee, has promised to raise the issue of perchlorate at Jackson's confirmation hearing tomorrow. Boxer has called the EPA's decision "to walk away from this problem and shrug off this danger...immoral."

The EPA estimates that as many as 16.6 million Americans are exposed to unsafe levels of perchlorate, which studies link to thyroid damage that can slow brain development in children.

Jackson, former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, is no stranger to the perchlorate controversy. New Jersey was urged to regulate [PDF] the chemical in October 2005 by a panel of state scientists, environmental activists and industry leaders. But three years later, the DEP still hasn't completed a draft of the rule.

The panel made its recommendation after a statewide study revealed that unsafe levels of perchlorate had been found in six of 123 public water systems the state sampled in 2004. Each of those water systems serves more than 10,000 people [ PDF, p. 41].

Jackson's predecessor, Bradley Campbell, promised to propose a perchlorate standard for drinking water by Jan. 31, 2006. But when Jackson moved from assistant commissioner to commissioner in February 2006, that deadline had passed. Standards were still being discussed last month, when Jackson left the DEP to become chief of staff for New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.

New Jersey DEP spokeswoman Elaine Makatura said the three years it has taken the DEP to develop a perchlorate regulation is not "atypical" and that the rule is now being reviewed by DEP's legal department and by the state's attorney general.

Father of 'deep ecology' dies at 96

OSLO — Norway’s perhaps most famous philosopher Arne Naess, who invented the concept of “deep ecology,” has died at the age of 96, his publisher said Tuesday. “Arne was a very open-minded person, not very orthodox, and interested in many fields,” his editor Erling Kagge told AFP, confirming that Norway’s foremost philosopher of the 20th […]

British PM eyes 'historic opportunities' for change with Obama

LONDON — The arrival of Barack Obama in the White House presents the world with “historic opportunities” on key issues including climate change and terrorism, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Tuesday. Brown told The Sun newspaper that he and the US president-elect, who takes office next Tuesday, had a “historic chance to move the […]