Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
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Spain and Suffering
An oil tanker carrying twice as much oil as was lost by the Exxon Valdez in 1989 split in two today and sank in the Atlantic Ocean, threatening to cause an environmental disaster on the Spanish coast 133 miles away. The tanker “Prestige” first ran into trouble almost a week ago when its hull cracked […]
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Sound Off
Some 92,000 acres of mud and sand at the bottom of the Pacific Northwest’s Puget Sound is contaminated with dioxin, toxic metals, and PCBs (just for starters), all the result of industrial pollution. In turn, these nasties make their way into the sound’s critters. Crabs are poisoned, while orca whales, salmon, and even some herring […]
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Prairie Dogged
Faced with drought and plunging profits, Colorado farmers are under growing financial pressure to hawk their land to developers. Between 1993 and 2001, about 1.5 million acres of farmland in the state were put on the market and developed; 300,000 of the acres were sold in 2001 as a drought began to take hold. State […]
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The Rain in Spain Caused an Awful Lot of Pain
Thousands of tons of oil have begun to wash up on seaports and the beaches of Galicia, Spain, after the hull of a rusty oil tanker at sea cracked last week during a storm. The country has suspended fishing on parts of its northwestern coast and workers are trying desperately to limit any further damage […]
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Fire, Fire, Fire, Fire
Horrendous wildfires in Indonesia five years ago accounted for a whopping 13 to 40 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions that year, according to new research published by European and Indonesian scientists in the journal Nature. The fires were probably ignited by timber companies and farmers trying to clear the drought-parched land; ultimately, the […]
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Apollo 18
To meet energy demands without escalating the problem of global warming, humankind must embark on a research effort as grand in scale as the Apollo project to put a man on the moon, say scientists in a study published today in the journal Science. The 18 researchers — coming from government, universities, and even such […]
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Sulfuring Succotash
Refiners should have no problem producing nearly sulfur-free diesel by 2006, according to a report released yesterday by an advisory panel to the U.S. EPA. The panel was convened last year by EPA Administrator Christie Whitman to assess possible technological barriers to complying with a clean diesel rule issued in the final weeks of the […]
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Delhi Pickle
India, the nation that is hosting the eighth in a series of U.N. meetings on climate change, is using the occasion to chastise industrialized nations for pressuring poor countries to cut greenhouse emissions. Speaking at the meeting in Delhi, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee argued that emissions-reduction programs would undermine efforts by India and other […]
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Yukon Take Your SUV and Shove It
Despite increasing awareness of alternative-fuel technologies and growing concern over U.S. dependence on foreign oil, the fuel economy of American cars is only getting worse. Statistics released today by the U.S. EPA show that the average fuel economy of the new fleet of cars for 2003 is 6 percent lower than it was 15 years […]
