Articles by Grist staff

The Political Climate Is Changing, Too

The coal and utility industries are lobbying Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive energy task force to ease a clean-air rule so that major upgrades can be made at power plants without setting in motion tough pollution-control requirements. The Clinton-era U.S. EPA sued eight big utilities for upgrading power plants without also improving pollution controls. But […]

Log Rolling

Twenty Republicans in the U.S House, led by Reps. Sherwood Boehlert (N.Y.) and Constance Morella (Md.), joined with more than 100 Democrats yesterday in asking President Bush not to roll back the plan approved by the Clinton administration to ban road-building and logging on 58.5 million acres of national forestland. Boehlert said, “I believe our […]

Puget Sound Science

Environmentalists petitioned the feds yesterday to protect Puget Sound orca whales under the Endangered Species Act. The National Marine Fisheries Service has 90 days to review the request. If it thinks the petition is warranted, the agency will then have one year to decide whether to list the killer whales as threatened or endangered under […]

McCain Is Able

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) criticized the Bush administration yesterday for rejecting the Kyoto treaty on climate change. McCain said, “I don’t agree with everything in the Kyoto Protocol, but I think it is a framework we could have continued to work with. We could have fixed it.” In other climate news, Ford is expected to […]