Climate Politics

New Sours Review

Opposition to the Bush administration’s efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act is growing, with California, Wisconsin, and Illinois yesterday joining 10 Northeastern states in filing lawsuits against the U.S. EPA. At issue is a decision to weaken the act’s New Source Review rules, which historically have prohibited aged power plants from upgrading their facilities […]

F Is for Fish

The Bush administration received an “F” from the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition for failing to make progress on protecting endangered salmon in the Pacific Northwest. The coalition, which is comprised of regional environmental and conservation organizations, said the administration has not implemented three-quarters of the measures mandated under a salmon-recovery plan adopted in 2000. […]

What can we learn from Bush’s FreedomCar Plan?

Following the State of the Union address in which President Bush laid out his new FreedomCAR and Fuel Initiative, which was cheered by automakers and jeered by environmentalists, hydrogen fever swept from the Beltway into the printing presses and airwaves of mainstream media. CNN, Business Week, the New York Times, and U.S. News and World […]

Withering Heights

The Bush administration’s proposal for addressing climate change was subjected to withering criticism by 17 experts in a report released yesterday. The experts, who were convened by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences at the request of the administration, said that the proposal lacked “a guiding vision, executable goals, [and] clear timetables” and that its […]

Tony Tony Tony!

In a speech that compared the danger of environmental degradation to the threat of terrorism, British Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday outlined a sweeping plan to combat global warming. Blair called on his country, the European Union, and would-be E.U. members in Eastern Europe to cut carbon dioxide emissions 60 percent by 2050. That figure, […]

9021-woe

Remember that episode of 90210 where Brenda and Dylan fell ill from toxic gases leaking out of oil wells and into Beverly Hills High School? Actually, that never happened on the show — but according to famed environmental legal crusader Erin Brockovich, it happened in real life. Brockovich and her partner, Ed Masry, are preparing […]

In the Doghouse

The U.S. Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would review a clean air case that could determine when the federal government can overrule state environmental decisions. The case concerns the Red Dog mine in Alaska, which produces zinc and lead. Two years ago, when the mine sought to build a new diesel generator, the state […]

Homeland Insecurity

Oakless Creek Canyon

Flagstaff, Ariz., is shaping up to be the testing grounds for the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests initiative, a highly controversial effort to ease environmental reviews of logging projects on many Western public lands and ban reviews entirely in areas where forest fires could threaten human developments. Some 2,000 suburban Flagstaff homes are located just seven […]

Who will represent the voice of the world’s people?

Petitions have been arriving in a flurry in my email inbox lately. I have some doubts about the efficacy of all this petitioning and tend to be quick with the delete button, but one recent petition drew me in. The message itself — which stated that the United Nations was collecting signatures of people opposed […]