Articles by Grist staff

Well, at Least He Keeps Some of His Promises

White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said yesterday that U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman had spoken in “confusion” on Sunday when she announced that Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive energy task force would not recommend oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Fleischer went on to directly contradict Whitman, saying that the task force […]

Funereal Disease

Pyres of animals being burnt in the U.K. because of the foot-and-mouth disease are producing more dioxin than all of the country’s factories combined. The burning has put the country on pace to double its annual dioxin emissions. Meanwhile, the government has admitted that it hasn’t conducted an assessment of the health effects of the […]

Something in the Air

Almost all doubt has been removed that particulate pollution causes significant health problems, according to U.S. EPA scientists working on a draft review of the issue. The review takes into account 3,000 new health studies published since 1997, the year that the agency decided to move forward with a new standard for particulates. The pollution […]

Standards and the Poor

In a precedent-setting decision for the environmental-justice movement, a federal judge last week blocked the opening of a cement additive plant in a poor black neighborhood in Camden, N.J. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection gave the go-ahead to the plant last October after determining that it would not exceed federal air-pollution limits. But […]