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  • Beltway green groups need to turn up the heat

    Inside the Beltway, the climate movement is comatose. During the Clinton-Gore years, while the U.S. dragged its feet in international climate negotiations, the major national environmental groups allowed themselves to be used by the administration. Seduced by the former vice president’s rhetoric, the groups watched their issue disappear from the political arena when Al Gore […]

  • Cutting emissions to raise profits

    As the epidemic of accounting scandals continues to spread and the term Corporate Responsibility rings with the oppressive severity of an 11th Commandment, it’s nice to catch a little glimpse of the brighter side: A growing number of U.S. companies have been making voluntary pledges to reform their internal operations in order to cut the […]

  • Tackling climate change at the local level

    Sister Evelyn Mattern had two goals in mind as she stood vigil recently with a Protestant colleague in a gas mask, singing, “This Air is My Air!” at the North Carolina statehouse. Her short-term aim was to lend support to stricter regulations for the state’s coal-fired power plants. Yet she also had a loftier, long-range […]

  • Industry is talking about climate change. Why aren't the presidential candidates?

    Like the nine-foot-deep blanket of ice at the top of the world, America’s denial of the climate crisis is melting. In hot water in the Antarctic. Photo: Michael Van Woert, NOAA. And like the North Pole, it is melting from the top down. Over the last year, in the wake of steady alarms from leaders […]

  • How the U.S. government could push solar power into the big time

    The environmental movement has displayed remarkable strength since the first Earth Day in 1970. It has battled heroically to safeguard the world's health, diversity, and beauty, and it has been astonishingly successful. However, as the Earth's odometer rolls over into a new century, the Earth is facing a new threat -- global warming -- that dwarfs earlier perils.

  • Bhopal — or RuPaul

    Friday marks the 15th anniversary of a very unhappy occasion. On Dec. 3, 1984, a Union Carbide industrial plant in Bhopal, India, released a deadly cloud of the gas methyl isocyanate into the air, killing at least 6,500 people (and some say more) and injuring tens of thousands. Ever since, Union Carbide and Bhopal have […]

  • Bird in the Hand Worth Two for Bush?

    While you were smoothing on suntan lotion or stoking the barbecue this weekend, Texas state legislators were madly finishing up work before their midnight May 31 deadline. Gov. George W. Bush‘s tax cuts and education initiatives got most of the attention, but we kept our gaze trained on the environmental bills likely to come up […]