Climate Politics
All Stories
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Hop on POPs
The good news: President Bush will ask Congress to support a global treaty to phase out 12 highly toxic chemicals. The bad news: He will not back a provision of the treaty that would make it easier to eliminate other toxics as well. If ratified by at least 50 nations, the treaty on persistent organic […]
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Guinn-ess Record
In the first-ever gubernatorial veto of a presidential decision, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn (R) yesterday rejected George Bush’s proposal to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Federal lawmakers granted the state veto power over any presidential decision related to Yucca Mountain in 1982; now, two decades later, […]
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Timber Boom II
The Bush administration has indicated that it will rewrite the Northwest Forest Plan, the nation’s first attempt to manage a broad ecosystem across an entire region of the U.S. In an development welcomed by timber interests, U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth has asked regional heads of the USFS, the Bureau of Land Management, and […]
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Information Underload
So much for the information age: Some U.S. lawmakers are trying to limit access to data on the federal government’s farm subsidy program. Last fall, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group touched off a political firestorm by posting on the Internet a database of farm subsidy recipients from 1996 to 2000. Information on the site was […]
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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 […]
