Climate Politics
All Stories
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Eight Bawl
Environment ministers from the Group of Eight — the world’s industrialized powers — met over the weekend for a round of talks in preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held later this year in Johannesburg, South Africa. Although the issue of climate change was not on the agenda (much to the […]
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Science Fry Day
A $10 million annual fellowship program that provides money to graduate students in environmental science, policy, and engineering has been eliminated by the Bush administration, officials announced late last week. The fellowships, which were part of the U.S. EPA’s Science to Achieve Results program, were the only federal monies specifically earmarked to fund environmental studies […]
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Al Gore Rhythm
Speaking at the Florida Democratic Party Convention — widely regarded as the first stop on the 2004 campaign trail — former Vice President Al Gore attacked the Bush administration on Saturday for favoring corporate America and trashing environmental protections. In his most outspoken speech since the 2000 presidential campaign, Gore decried the return to “the […]
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Lies, Lies, and Videotape
A picture is worth a thousand words: So reasoned Interior Secretary Gale Norton when she mailed copies of a videotape of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to major television stations and encouraged news producers to use the footage in their coverage of the debate over drilling. (In contrast to videos of the Arctic Refuge produced […]
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Supremely Bad Judgement
The Florida Supreme Court dealt a blow to environmentalists and landowners yesterday by ruling that property owners in the state must continue to foot most of the bill for Everglades restoration, despite overwhelming support for a 1996 amendment to the state constitution that would have made polluters pay instead. The court determined that the amendment, […]
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Boxer Takes Off Her Gloves
Senate Democrats accused the Bush administration yesterday of slowing the pace of toxic waste cleanups under the Superfund program as a favor to industry, which historically has picked up most of the tab for the costly cleanups. A Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee asked Superfund officials to explain why the administration dropped 25 sites […]
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Hop on POPs
The good news: President Bush will ask Congress to support a global treaty to phase out 12 highly toxic chemicals. The bad news: He will not back a provision of the treaty that would make it easier to eliminate other toxics as well. If ratified by at least 50 nations, the treaty on persistent organic […]
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Guinn-ess Record
In the first-ever gubernatorial veto of a presidential decision, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn (R) yesterday rejected George Bush’s proposal to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Federal lawmakers granted the state veto power over any presidential decision related to Yucca Mountain in 1982; now, two decades later, […]
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Timber Boom II
The Bush administration has indicated that it will rewrite the Northwest Forest Plan, the nation’s first attempt to manage a broad ecosystem across an entire region of the U.S. In an development welcomed by timber interests, U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth has asked regional heads of the USFS, the Bureau of Land Management, and […]
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Information Underload
So much for the information age: Some U.S. lawmakers are trying to limit access to data on the federal government’s farm subsidy program. Last fall, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group touched off a political firestorm by posting on the Internet a database of farm subsidy recipients from 1996 to 2000. Information on the site was […]
