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Why won’t Lisa Jackson/Nancy Sutley visit a mountaintop removal site?
I think at the Obama administration we all believe that everybody has the right to live in a clean, healthy environment and a prosperous economy. And we’re working towards that. We need to reach out to communities whose voices have been ignored and where there are disproportional impacts, whether it’s environmental protection or promoting [a] […]
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Nuclear companies face reactor design problems, ethics questions
Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor design. Federal regulators have expressed serious safety concerns about the design for 14 of the nation’s 25 proposed new nuclear reactors, raising questions about the future of what the industry calls its “renaissance.” The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced last month that Westinghouse failed to demonstrate that the building designed to shield its […]
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Copenhagen news & views: follow all the latest
There were plenty of hints over the past month that world leaders would down-shift expectations for drafting a new, international climate treaty in Copenhagen next month. Still, when news broke over the weekend that key nations, including the United States, were planning to push a final treaty into 2010, it came as shock to climate […]
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One doctor’s quest to sound the alarm on ‘wind turbine syndrome’
By the time the pediatrician Nina Pierpont settled in upstate New York, she had already built a rather diverse and full career. As the Connecticut native tells it, she studied birds in the Amazon jungle on her way to earning a Ph.D. in behavioral ecology, then enrolled in medical school, completing a degree and practicing […]
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An Appalachian tale
Editor’s Note: Author Ann Pancake grew up in the heart of West Virginia coal country. Her 2007 novel Strange as this Weather Has Been is the story of one family’s struggle against the relentless destruction of its beloved mountains. I went home to West Virginia a couple weeks ago. October is the most beautiful season […]
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Greenpeace calls on world leaders to stop rainforest destruction
Photo courtesy Greenpeace International via FlickrLast week, Greenpeace activists blocked rainforest destruction in Indonesia’s Kampar Peninsula by chaining themselves to excavators. Activists then draped a bright red “Obama You Can Stop This” banner over the destruction and called on the world’s leaders to stop deforestation at next month’s climate talks in Copenhagen. The protest came […]
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Salvadoran mudslides: A plea for climate change solutions and holistic water policy
Torrents of mud and boulders flattened villages in El Salvador recently, leaving over 100 people dead and thousands homeless. From all indications, climate change will be most acutely felt in an escalating frequency and ferocity of floods and droughts. It’s chilling to think that we ought to expect much more of this kind of devastation […]
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Can perfect markets induce capital investment?
Question: are there any examples of a completely free market inducing investment in mature, capital-intensive industries? I’m not sure there are. More problematically, I’m not sure that economists and policy makers appreciate this reality. The result is that we continue to create markets — from electricity to CO2 — that by design are incapable of […]
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Is “we’re going to burn the coal anyway” an argument for carbon sequestration?
I’m involved in an ongoing email debate over the wisdom of “clean coal” — that is, coal power plants that capture and sequester their carbon dioxide emissions. It will eventually be published on a State Dept. website, and then in Grist. In the meantime, a preview of sorts. A frequent argument one hears in favor […]
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Will South Carolina become the nation’s new Yucca Mountain?
The Savannah River. Photo courtesy Mountain Hermit via Flickr Earlier this year, President Obama canceled the federal government’s plans to store high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and weapons facilities at the controversial Yucca Mountain site in Nevada — but now there are concerns that South Carolina could become the permanent dumping ground for […]
