Climate Politics
All Stories
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Military Might What?
After failing last year to wrest from Congress a wholesale exemption from many environmental laws, the Pentagon is trying to rally public support for its campaign this year. The Defense Department says that laws such as the Endangered Species Act have interfered with training and other programs in the past. It’s a hassle to have […]
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Test Ban Treat
Here’s one unintended consequence of the impending U.S. war against Iraq: The Bush administration has delayed a formal challenge to the European Union’s ban on genetically modified food. Recently, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick blamed the ban for widespread starvation in the developing world and said the administration was considering taking a case against Europe […]
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First Down
The parent company of a power plant in eastern Ohio has become the first of 36 energy utilities to be tried for causing smog and health problems in the Northeast. In a lawsuit that began yesterday, the U.S. Justice Department accused FirstEnergy Corporation of significantly upgrading its W.H. Sammis plant without installing new pollution controls, […]
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Refuge-nix
Six GOP senators are throwing a wrench in the Bush administration’s plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. The six — Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, John McCain of Arizona, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, and Mike DeWine of Ohio — announced last […]
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An INS project threatens Southern California lands
On a sunny afternoon in Southern California, a Border Patrol agent watched as a man climbed the metal fence that divides the beach between the U.S. and Mexico. When the man dropped onto U.S. sand, the agent yelled, and the man’s friends hauled him back over to the other side of the fence. The fence […]
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The Bye Sierras
The management of California’s public forests will change radically if U.S. Forest Service Regional Forester Jack Blackwell gets his way. This week, Blackwell proposed allowing timber companies to cut more medium-sized trees from 11 million acres of forestlands in the Sierra Nevadas. The Sierras were heavily logged throughout the 1980s, destroying crucial habitat for species. […]
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Mass-ive Attack
Massachusetts, Maine, and Connecticut will sue the U.S. EPA for violating clean air laws and imperiling the health of citizens by failing to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, the states’ attorneys general announced yesterday. In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, the attorneys general will argue that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels should be regulated under the Clean […]
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Sweet Home, Alabama
A federal appeals court has ruled that Alabama is failing to adequately enforce water-pollution laws, thereby paving the way for citizens of the state to sue under the national Clean Water Act. Under the terms of that act, citizens may go to court to enforce the law only if the state has failed to prosecute […]
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Montreal Expose
The Montreal Protocol, the international treaty to protect the ozone layer, has been hailed as the most effective environmental agreement ever signed. Now, though, it’s efficacy could be jeopardized, because the Bush administration is calling for some exemptions to a part of the treaty that calls for a global ban on the pesticide methyl bromide […]
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Haden Go Seek
In a blow to environmentalists, a federal appeals court has overturned a ruling preventing the U.S. government from issuing permits to mountaintop-mining operations. The operations access coal seams by shearing off huge slabs of mountains; the increasingly common process has resulted in tons of rock and dirt being dumped into valleys and streams. Last year, […]
