Climate Cities
All Stories
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Return of the Smog Monster
Southern California Air Quality Takes a Turn for the Worse After years of gradual improvement, Southern California’s air quality took a tumble this summer, falling to its worst levels since 1997 due to the combined effects of hot weather and increasing emissions. Taken as a whole, the region’s air quality has dramatically improved in the […]
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Wheelie Great
Car-Free Day Helps Clear the Air in Europe Citizens in more than 1,000 cities around the world were treated to cleaner air and less congested streets yesterday on the sixth annual car-free day. The event was particularly popular in Europe, where air pollution has had a higher profile since August, when poor air quality accompanied […]
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Sake It to ’em
Tokyo High Court Hears Long-Running Pollution Case In the latest development in a seven-year court case, the Tokyo High Court yesterday began hearing a lawsuit that accuses the Japanese government, the Tokyo metropolitan government, the Metropolitan Expressway Public Corporation, and several diesel-vehicle manufacturers of endangering the health of the city’s citizens by failing to stem […]
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Taking Leaves of Our Senses
U.S. Cities Lose 20 Percent of Trees Urban sprawl and highway construction have gobbled up greenery at a startling rate, leaving U.S. cities with 20 percent fewer trees than they had just 10 years ago, according to the environmental group American Forests. In a study released as part of the annual National Urban Forest conference, […]
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Grand Shift Auto
Car Ownership Surging in Beijing The number of registered cars in Beijing jumped to 2 million last month, doubling in just six years. Now one in five households in the Chinese capital owns a car, a huge shift from the situation a decade ago, when most cars were owned by the government and the city’s […]
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Meet the New Mobile, Worse than the Old Mobile
New Snowmobiles to Be Permitted in Yellowstone Are Dirtier Than Old Models A new generation of ostensibly cleaner and quieter snowmobiles turns out to be more polluting than older models, according to tests by the U.S. EPA. In a controversial Bush administration decision, the new snowmobiles were approved for use in Yellowstone and Grand Teton […]
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Community-based forestry takes root in the U.S.
Can a “forest economy” be good for the forest? A new movement known as community-based forestry says yes. Also referred to as community forestry, CBF is dramatically different from most forest management practiced in the U.S., and increasing numbers of environmentalists are championing the cause. Land of the trees, and home of the brave. Photo: […]
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The Fat of the Land
Study Links Obesity to Suburban Sprawl No, it’s not a national thyroid problem: The U.S. obesity epidemic is caused in part by suburban sprawl, according to a study released yesterday by the National Center for Smart Growth. The study, which involved more than 200,000 people in 448 counties, was the first comprehensive examination of the […]
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Lessons from Blackout 2003
Things started to go awry near Cleveland at 3:06 p.m. on Aug. 14, more than an hour before the largest North American blackout in history. A transmission line carrying 345 kilovolts of power overheated, sagged into a tree, and automatically shut off to protect itself from melting entirely. Instantaneously, the colossal current of electricity it […]
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Summer Hummer Bummer
Hummers Destroyed by ELF in Southern California Dozens of Hummer H2s and other large SUVs were burned and defaced on Friday, the result of arson and vandalism at four car dealerships in Southern California. The Earth Liberation Front, a loosely knit association of militant activists, claimed responsibility for the actions, saying they were intended to […]
