Climate Politics

Executive Disorder

Industry unhappy with Bush’s back-up air-pollution plan President Bush’s Clear Skies legislation has stalled out in Congress, unable to muster support even from a sufficient number of Republicans. To compensate, Bush is planning to implement some of the bill’s provisions by issuing executive orders — for instance, an order establishing a mercury-emissions trading program. But […]

Ex-FBI agent charges feds with radioactive coverup at Rocky Flats

The plotline sounds as absurd as a made-for-TV movie: An FBI agent exposes deadly contamination at an old nuclear-weapons plant, but the federal government conceals the findings. Years later, Congress votes to convert the tract into a wildlife refuge and open it to school field trips and public recreation. The site becomes a poster child […]

You’re Fired Up

Former Berkeley professor fights biotech industry Former University of California at Berkeley professor and one-time biotech supporter Ignacio Chapela is fighting against what he alleges are huge sums of money being used by the biotech industry to influence research at U.S. universities. After what he says was a coordinated PR push by the industry, the […]

Bush judicial nominees could shake the foundations of environmental law

William G. Myers III is George W. Bush’s choice for a lifetime position on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That court’s jurisdiction covers three-quarters of all federal lands, in nine Western states where contentious battles rage over energy, mining, timber, and grazing. Which way will the scales of justice tip? Unlike most judicial […]

Ford: “Tough”

Two California drivers fight Ford to keep their electric vehicles An around-the-clock protest began Friday in Sacramento, Calif., to save two electric vehicles from being repossessed and scrapped by their maker. The electricity-powered Ford Ranger pickup trucks were two of many produced by Ford Motor Co. during a new-vehicle pilot program in 1999 and then […]

The Axis of Intransigence

U.S. pushes to remove global-warming references from disaster talks The U.S. delegation to an upcoming global conference on natural disasters is pushing to have references to global warming removed from the U.N. action plan to be ratified there. The document cites global warming as one factor among many leading to “a future where disasters could […]

Receding Blair Line

Blair government tried to weaken E.U. climate-change targets The U.K. environmental community is all atwitter over revelations that senior officials in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government tried to remove tough greenhouse-gas reduction targets from the E.U.’s official climate policy. Specifically, they asked that language calling for 50 to 80 percent reductions (from 1990 levels, by […]

Two Enviros Walk Into a Bar …

Power Corrupts; Renewable Power Corrupts Renewably

Guantanamo military base to be powered partly by wind We’ve got good news and bad news. Bad news first? OK: The U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is the alleged site of government-sanctioned torture, practiced on suspects whose guilt is at best uncertain, likely to leave a permanent moral scar on the nation’s […]

Clear Skies and Present Danger

Clean Air Act more effective than proposed Clear Skies bill, panel says A new report by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the Bush administration’s proposed reform of current air-quality standards will effectively do less to reduce pollution than existing Clean Air Act regulations, much as critics, including John Kerry (remember him?), charged during […]