Climate Technology
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They Brought Bad Things to Life
Meanwhile, in another legal victory on the other side of the country, a federal court yesterday rejected General Electric’s constitutional challenge to the U.S. EPA’s power to force the company to clean up the Hudson River. From the 1940s to the 1970s, GE dumped 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the upper Hudson, where 500,000 […]
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Hawkeyes on the Prize
Iowa will soon be home to the world’s largest land-based wind farm if MidAmerican Energy Company has its way. The power company plans to erect between 180 and 200 turbines capable of generating 310 megawatts of electricity and powering some 85,000 homes. If approved by the Iowa Public Utilities Board and state lawmakers, the $323 […]
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Overdrive
214,000,000 — number of vehicles in the U.S.1 290,000,000 — number of people in the U.S.2 2 — number of American cars on the Top 20 list in “The Greenest Vehicles of 2003,” produced by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (the other 18 are Japanese)3 22,802 — miles per year driven by the […]
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Mr. Blackwell’s Worst Polluting List
No surprise: Pickup trucks and oversized SUVs scored the lowest on the U.S. EPA’s latest ranking of vehicles based on tailpipe emissions. The list graded vehicles on a scale of 0 to 10. Large SUVs like BMW’s X5 and General Motors’ Hummer H2 earned a 0 and a 2, respectively, while most small and medium […]
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When Nature Emails
Ah, wilderness — the chirping of birds, the burbling of creeks, the melodic chime announcing that new mail has just arrived in your inbox. Yep, that’s right — or it will be if the Colorado Department of Natural Resources has its way. In an effort to boost revenue in the middle of a massive budget […]
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Wooda, Coulda, Shouldn’t
The U.S. Congress is readying to pass its catch-all domestic spending bill this week — and with it, a provision that would give the timber industry responsibility for managing millions of acres of national forests throughout the West. Under the provision, which was added at the last minute by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the U.S. […]
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Executive Carte Blanche
Chalk one up for Big Energy and its boosters in the White House. On Friday, the General Accounting Office abandoned its efforts to force Vice President Dick Cheney to turn over information about which people he met with while heading up the administration’s secretive energy task force. The GAO, Congress’s investigative arm, had been fighting […]
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A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Sustainability Go Down
The United Nations isn’t generally thought of as a marketing entity — but a little marketing savvy is just what’s needed to encourage sustainable consumption habits worldwide, according to the U.N. Environment Programme. Right now, the organization says, only 5 percent of people in developed countries maintain sustainable lifestyles, defined as “enjoying a good quality […]
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Taking a Smaller Bite Out of Grime
Polluting industries are getting off easy under the Bush administration, according to U.S. EPA data released yesterday by Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.). In the two years since President Bush took office, civil penalties for breaking environmental laws dropped by almost 50 percent, to $55 million, while criminal penalties dropped by more than one-third, to $62 […]
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Brown Mountain State?
The Green Mountain State is looking less and less green every day: Vermont environmentalists are increasingly concerned about the fate of the state under new Republican Gov. Jim Douglas. So far, Douglas has proposed an 8 percent cut in the Natural Resources Agency budget, pledged to reexamine a plan to protect lands in the Northeast […]
