Climate Politics
All Stories
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Sleep With the Fishes
At least 20,000 chinook salmon and other fish have died in Northern California’s Klamath River in the last two weeks, but federal officials are unwilling to attribute the deaths to the Bush administration’s decision to divert water away from the river this year and into an irrigation project in southern Oregon. U.S. Fish and Wildlife […]
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Homeland Insecurity
Despite all the hype about guaranteeing “homeland security,” the Bush administration has scrapped plans to impose strict regulations to protect chemical plants from possible terrorist attacks. The decision, which was confirmed yesterday by U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, came after months of administration infighting and heavy lobbying efforts against new rules by the chemical industry. […]
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You’re Out of the Club
With the November elections nearing and tensions heating up in the New York gubernatorial race, the Sierra Club’s 40,000-member Atlantic Chapter voted last weekend to endorse Democratic candidate Carl McCall over Republican incumbent George Pataki. But not everyone’s happy about the vote: Chapter Chair Aaron Mair is arguing that the vote was informed more by […]
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Nepa’ed in the Bud
If you’ve been following environmental news lately (or duly reading the Daily Grist), you’ll have noticed an unusual number of stories involving the National Environmental Policy Act. The act, signed into law by President Nixon in 1970, requires all federal agencies to assess and limit the environmental impact of their activities. But the Bush administration […]
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Ashes of Fire
Every year, coal-fired power plants in the U.S. produce more than 100 million tons of ash, a byproduct of the burning process containing heavy metals or metal-like substances such as boron, selenium, arsenic, and magnesium. The energy industry claims the ash is benign, but many others fear that it is bad for the environment and […]
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De-railed
The U.S. House Appropriations Committee has voted to deny $1.2 billion in funding to Amtrak and pushed through a bill that threatens most, if not all, long-distance train service in the U.S. The Republican-backed bill would give the rail service $760 million next year — about $500 million less than the $1.2 billion proposed by […]
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All Griled Up
During his confirmation hearing in May 2001, J. Steven Griles promised the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that his former job with a lobbying firm, where he represented a broad array of utilities, mining companies, and energy producers, would not interfere with his new position as deputy interior secretary of the United States. […]
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Reid It and Weep
The Bush administration distorted a report to the U.S. EPA by deleting the views of government experts who sought to curb emissions from snowmobiles, according to Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Reid has released documents (which he says he obtained from an anonymous whistleblower) showing that the Interior Department removed pro-emissions-restrictions comments from a government report […]
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Schroeder’s Symphony
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats will remain in power by a narrow majority, thanks to a strong showing by his coalition partner, the Green Party. Commentators agree that the most remarkable achievement of the tight parliamentary elections belonged to Joschka Fischer, foreign minister and leader of the Greens. Despite the small size of the […]
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Acting Up
The Bush administration announced yesterday that it plans to consider new rules for enforcing the Clean Water Act. Some conservative lawmakers have been pressuring the administration to revise the enforcement rules since January 2001, when the Supreme Court imposed new limits on the scope of the act. Some interpreted that court ruling to suggest that […]
