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  • Creature Discomforts

    Endangered Species May Soon Be Imported to U.S., Under Bush Proposal The Bush administration wants to radically alter conservation policies to allow hunters, circuses, the pet industry, and leather importers to bring endangered animals into the U.S. from other nations — dead or alive. Since its adoption in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has been […]

  • No Heir Apparent Until Air’s Apparent

    Documents Show Sharp Dispute Took Place Over 9/11 Air Quality Information Newly released government documents are finally providing Congressional Democrats with what they’ve been looking for: information about who was responsible for censoring data about Manhattan’s air quality following the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Those documents reveal “screaming telephone […]

  • Holmstead Act

    EPA Official Gave Misleading Testimony on Clean Air, Say Whistleblowers Meanwhile, all isn’t well inside the U.S. EPA, either. Last year, Assistant Administrator for Air Policy Jeffrey Holmstead testified before Congress that Bush administration efforts to ease clean air enforcement rules wouldn’t interfere with pending lawsuits against dirty power plants — but two former agency […]

  • Will a softer McCain-Lieberman bill prove to be harder-hitting?

    Even though Sens. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) decided to soften the terms of their climate bill last week, the document may go down in history as one of the hardest-hitting gambits in the U.S. fight against global warming. In fact, easing the demands of the bill — which proposes a mandatory cap […]

  • Live MTBE-Free or Die

    New Hampshire Sues 22 Oil Companies Over MTBE Pollution In a first-of-its-kind move by a state, New Hampshire filed suit against 22 oil companies yesterday, blaming them for contaminating drinking water with the fuel additive MTBE. The companies added the chemical to their gasoline to make it burn more cleanly, but it has leached into […]

  • A Monumental Decision

    Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Challenge to National Monuments The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a pillar of former President Clinton’s environmental legacy yesterday when it refused to hear challenges to the creation of seven national monuments in five Western states. The Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm, argued that Clinton overstepped the bounds […]

  • Caveat Farmer

    Bush Insulates Pesticide Makers from Lawsuits The Bush administration is doing a big favor for pesticide manufacturers by instituting a new policy that will curb farmers’ ability to sue the companies if their products don’t work as promised. In a significant policy reversal, the U.S. EPA has reinterpreted a federal law and now claims that […]

  • Suit to Kill

    California and Other States to Sue EPA over Greenhouse Gases California intends to sue the U.S. EPA over the Bush administration’s recent decision that the agency doesn’t have the authority to regulate emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, Gov. Gray Davis (D) announced on Friday. Nine other states, including Illinois, New York, […]

  • Run Out on a Rail

    Senate Rejects White House Proposal to Restructure Amtrak A White House plan to restructure Amtrak was, uh, derailed yesterday by nearly unanimous bipartisan opposition in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The six-year Amtrak reauthorization bill proposed ending federal operating subsidies for the passenger rail service, opening some routes to private operators, and […]

  • The Bush administration lets a profitable energy-efficiency program lapse

    As of yesterday, Oct. 1, the most successful program in U.S. history for improving energy efficiency in federal buildings is toast. The demise of the Energy Savings Performance Contracting program is no insignificant matter, seeing as how the federal government is the single biggest energy-user in the nation. Taxpayers spend $4 billion per year to […]