Climate Politics
All Stories
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Dirty Duncing
The majority of the nation’s dirtiest power plants are getting even dirtier, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. The report was based on U.S. EPA data on smog, soot, and global warming emissions from power plants from 1995 to 2000. It found that greenhouse gas emissions increased 8 […]
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Seam Stress
After Sept. 11, the folks in the White House found a favorite tune — the need to decrease U.S. reliance on foreign oil any which way but through conservation — and it seems they just can’t stop singing it. First it was used to promote drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; now, in a […]
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The improbable story of how Bogota, Colombia, became somewhere you might actually want to live
“We had to build a city not for businesses or automobiles, but for children and thus for people,” said a man in a speech last year. “Instead of building highways, we restricted car use. … We invested in high-quality sidewalks, pedestrian streets, parks, bicycle paths, libraries; we got rid of thousands of cluttering commercial signs […]
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My Dear Watson
Responding to pressure from the energy industry, the Bush administration is seeking to remove the U.S scientist who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Robert Watson, chief scientist at the World Bank, has been the unpaid chair of the IPCC for nearly six years. In that capacity, he has been outspoken in his belief […]
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Lake Manna From Heaven?
The U.S. EPA has unveiled a new Bush administration plan to protect and restore the Great Lakes. The plan aims to reduce PCB concentration in some Great Lakes fish species, restore or enhance 100,000 acres of wetland in the Great Lakes Basin, decrease introductions of invasive species, and accelerate the clean-up of contaminated sites. However, […]
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One World, One More Agency
What the world needs is another regulatory agency. That is the conclusion of legal and environmental experts at the Tokyo-based U.N. University, who believe a new world environmental organization, as well as an international environmental court, could help make sense of the more than 500 environmental agreements and agencies operating around the world. In a […]
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What Fuels These Mortals Be
Surprise, surprise: The U.S. Department of Transportation decided yesterday not to increase fuel-efficiency requirements for sport utility vehicles and other light trucks for the model year 2004. The decision comes after the Senate voted last month against a sharp increase in Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, instead directing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a […]
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Right in the Solar Plexus
From the believe-it-or-not department: To cover the costs of printing its 170-page energy plan last May, the Bush administration tapped into the Department of Energy’s solar and renewable energy and energy conservation budgets. Documents released under court order by the DOE on Monday night indicate that $135,615 of the renewables and conservation budget was spent […]
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Is the U.S. nuclear industry writing its own ticket on security?
Over the last 15 years, the nuclear power industry has lobbied the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Congress to weaken security requirements at atomic plants, even as the threat of terrorism has grown. But in reality, as Shelley Smithson shows in Part I of this series, nuclear energy security is already poor. In drills conducted by […]
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Parroty, Not Parody
In the latest disheartening news about the energy task force, documents released Monday night by the Energy Department show that an executive order on energy policy released by President Bush last May was copied nearly verbatim from the energy policy proposed to the administration by oil lobbyists. On March 20, representatives from the American Petroleum […]
