Climate Politics
All Stories
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Lead Us Not Into Temptation
Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have accused the Bush administration of stacking a government advisory panel on childhood lead poisoning with members sympathetic to lead-related industries. The 12-member panel advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on averting such poisoning, and in the past, the CDC has appointed the panel’s members. Now, […]
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The Seeds of Discontent
Despite a teeming black market for genetically modified seeds in Brazil, the country’s leading presidential candidate says he would not lift a four-year ban on biotechnology anytime soon. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the leftist Workers’ Party, who by all appearances was the victor in the first round of elections, held this weekend, opposes […]
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Smoky Signals
The superintendent of Yosemite National Park announced yesterday that he would retire rather than accept a transfer to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where he would have been called upon to oversee two controversial projects opposed by environmentalists and others. One project involves building a road across the largest undeveloped wilderness in the eastern U.S. […]
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Sleep With the Fishes
At least 20,000 chinook salmon and other fish have died in Northern California’s Klamath River in the last two weeks, but federal officials are unwilling to attribute the deaths to the Bush administration’s decision to divert water away from the river this year and into an irrigation project in southern Oregon. U.S. Fish and Wildlife […]
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Homeland Insecurity
Despite all the hype about guaranteeing “homeland security,” the Bush administration has scrapped plans to impose strict regulations to protect chemical plants from possible terrorist attacks. The decision, which was confirmed yesterday by U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, came after months of administration infighting and heavy lobbying efforts against new rules by the chemical industry. […]
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You’re Out of the Club
With the November elections nearing and tensions heating up in the New York gubernatorial race, the Sierra Club’s 40,000-member Atlantic Chapter voted last weekend to endorse Democratic candidate Carl McCall over Republican incumbent George Pataki. But not everyone’s happy about the vote: Chapter Chair Aaron Mair is arguing that the vote was informed more by […]
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Nepa’ed in the Bud
If you’ve been following environmental news lately (or duly reading the Daily Grist), you’ll have noticed an unusual number of stories involving the National Environmental Policy Act. The act, signed into law by President Nixon in 1970, requires all federal agencies to assess and limit the environmental impact of their activities. But the Bush administration […]
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Ashes of Fire
Every year, coal-fired power plants in the U.S. produce more than 100 million tons of ash, a byproduct of the burning process containing heavy metals or metal-like substances such as boron, selenium, arsenic, and magnesium. The energy industry claims the ash is benign, but many others fear that it is bad for the environment and […]
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De-railed
The U.S. House Appropriations Committee has voted to deny $1.2 billion in funding to Amtrak and pushed through a bill that threatens most, if not all, long-distance train service in the U.S. The Republican-backed bill would give the rail service $760 million next year — about $500 million less than the $1.2 billion proposed by […]
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All Griled Up
During his confirmation hearing in May 2001, J. Steven Griles promised the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that his former job with a lobbying firm, where he represented a broad array of utilities, mining companies, and energy producers, would not interfere with his new position as deputy interior secretary of the United States. […]
