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GOP tries to force Big Coal’s poison pill on tax cut bill
Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green. GOP leadership in Congress has decided to use must-pass payroll tax cut legislation as a vehicle to push key polluter priorities, despite a veto threat from the White House. House Republicans have attached a rider to extend a Clean Air Act loophole for the coal industry, daring a White House veto. […]
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Critical List: Canada out of Kyoto; the Napsack should be on your Christmas list
Canada is officially out of Kyoto, because it has no chance of meeting its targets and doesn't want to pay the fines. A Russian research team has found plumes of methane bubbling out of the Arctic Ocean. But maybe we should chill out about it, because methane's not as horrible as carbon dioxide? The EPA […]
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Coming soon: Street View-style maps of the country’s endangered rivers
Internet time-wasters, start your engines. A nonprofit called Below the Surface is gearing up to map 27 of the country's most endangered rivers using the same technology that gave the world Google Street View. That means 360-degree shots of beautiful, polluted, shrinking, over-tapped waterways for the world to click on (and, hopefully, get fired up […]
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What are we made of? One word: Plastics
This story originally appeared in Urbanite. In What’s Gotten Into Us? Staying Healthy in a Toxic World, McKay Jenkins sounds an alarm on the chemicals that we unknowingly ingest and inhale daily.Photo: J.M. GiordanoAfter the discovery of a tumor near his hip, McKay Jenkins, married, father of two, began investigating the manufacturing and consumer use […]
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White House goals for cleaning the Gulf: Fix stuff
After the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, the Obama administration decided to dig deep into the environmental problems that faced the Gulf Coast and, in the way of governments everywhere, set up a task force to study the issues. This week, that task force released its report. According to the report’s introduction, the president's directive to […]
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Once more, from the top: Shutting down dirty coal plants won’t cause blackouts
Could Americans soon be forced to suffer through rolling blackouts and power shortages because of a heartless, hapless, tyrannical EPA, as conservatives and dirty utilities are suggesting? The short answer is, no. The long answer is, no. But the long one requires a bit of explanation. A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) conference on electrical-system […]
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Chicago losing disgusting distinction as sole U.S. city that doesn’t treat sewage
Now that condos and a Trump Tower line the banks of the Chicago River, the Windy City is finally thinking about making it less gross. It's one of America's most exploited waterways — in 1900, the city literally reversed the river’s flow to keep all the sewage it channeled from entering Lake Michigan — and […]
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Obama proposes new emissions standards on eve of U.N. meeting
Obama's proposed rules to reduce CO2 pollution should be applauded, given the hostile, anti-science political environment they're coming from.
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London fights air pollution with glue
If your house were infested with mosquitos, you might put up flypaper strips to trap them. London mayor Boris Johnson is taking roughly the same approach to air pollution — he's having street sweepers spray a calcium-based adhesive onto the ground to trap particulate air pollution. It sounds like a stupid idea, and maybe it […]
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Most polluted body of water in U.S. comes back to life
In the no-man's-land between Brooklyn and Queens, a 3.8-mile-long river known as Newton Creek has attained the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted bodies of water in all of North America. And yet the toilet of New York City's industrial revolution for the past 150 years is slowly coming back to life, […]
