Climate Politics

Donkey Kick

The Bush administration received a serious dressing-down in absentia last night over its misbegotten environmental policies, as five of the nine Democratic hopefuls aired their own green views during a League of Conservation Voters forum held in Los Angeles. Rather than detailing the differences in their own positions, most of the candidates who were present […]

Back to the Yellowstone Age

The Bush administration has asked the United Nations to remove Yellowstone National Park from a list of endangered World Heritage sites. “Yellowstone is no longer in danger,” wrote the Interior Department’s Paul Hoffman in a letter to the World Heritage Committee. There’s just one snag: The park staff disagree with Hoffman, saying Yellowstone still faces […]

What I Did With My Summer Vacation

Looking for a good summer camp? A weeklong environmental activist training camp being held this week in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest might be for you. Sponsored by Greenpeace, the National Forest Protection Alliance, and other, like-minded environmental organizations, the camp is teaching some 70 participants the finer points of civil disobedience. The camp is designed […]

Stow It

The U.S. famously declined to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, but yesterday it jumped on the bandwagon of another effort to control global warming: a research program dedicated to exploring technologies for capturing and storing carbon dioxide. Such technologies, collectively known as carbon sequestration, seek to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere through […]

The Dirk Side of the Moon

Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne (R), thought to be President Bush’s top pick to head the U.S. EPA after Christie Whitman leaves the agency at the end of this week, has overseen a decline in environmental quality in his home state. Since he assumed the Idaho governorship four and a half years ago, the state’s air […]

White House Whitewash

In a first-of-its-kind environmental survey released today, the U.S. EPA said that the nation’s air, water, and land are cleaner and better protected than they were 30 years ago, though sprawl and air quality, among other problems, continue to pose challenges for the nation. But the survey’s credibility was compromised by reports last week that […]

Whitman’s Sampler

Aw, Shoot

People accused of shooting endangered species are getting off the hook thanks to a U.S. Justice Department policy that some federal wildlife officials say amounts to a loophole in the Endangered Species Act. Adopted in 1998 under the Clinton administration, the policy requires government prosecutors to prove that a suspect knew the animal they were […]

Crop Circles

Negotiations between the U.S. and the European Union over genetically modified foods broke down yesterday in Geneva, furthering heightening trans-Atlantic tension and prompting the Bush administration to call on the World Trade Organization to begin hearing the dispute. At issue is a European ban on GM crops — a ban that the U.S. agricultural industry […]

Censor Censure

Bowdlerizing what was meant to be the first-ever comprehensive report on environmental problems facing the U.S., the White House has deleted most of the information the report contained on global climate change and reduced the remainder to a few vague paragraphs. The omitted sections referred to findings that climate change is at least partly caused […]