Climate Technology
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Oh, What a Bad Feeling
Toyota has been getting a lot of kudos recently for its low-emissions hybrid vehicle, the Prius — but the car company increased its carbon emissions in the U.S. during the 1990s more than any other major automaker in the country, according to a report released this week by Environmental Defense. The group said Toyota increased […]
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Cruise Control
Norwegian Cruise Line, the fourth-largest cruise company in the world, will pay a $1.5 million fine for illegally dumping oil and untreated wastewater into the ocean, and subsequently lying about its actions. The company kept a false logbook and for three years lied to the Coast Guard about unlawful discharges off the coast of Florida; […]
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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 […]
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Balkan Death Grip
Fleeing extreme poverty, thousands of Albanians are squatting in and near the abandoned Porto Romano chemical plant — one of the most severely contaminated sites in the Balkans, with soil and groundwater pollutants at 4,000 times the levels considered acceptable by the European Union. Despite admonitions from United Nations experts, the Albanian government has failed […]
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99 Bottles of Beer in a Dumpster
For the first time in at least a decade, Congress is considering a national bottle bill, thanks to the efforts of Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.), head of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Jeffords, who has battled for such a bottle bill for nearly 30 years, introduced a measure today that would shift […]
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Oh, I’m Glad I’m Not in the Land of Cotton
For the first time, genetically modified insects have been released in the wild, in a secret location in the cotton fields of Arizona. The insects, pink bollworms, were modified by scientists to effectively destroy their own species; they are designed to be sterile, so that when they mate with natural bollworms, no offspring will result. […]
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Khmer Green?
A new kind of battle is taking place in Cambodia, this one between conservationists and international paper companies. Cambodia’s central Cardamom Mountains were a stronghold of the Khmer Rouge, and as such were avoided by timber companies and others who feared being kidnapped or killed. With the Khmer Rouge largely subdued, however, timber companies have […]
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An excerpt from Eco-Economy by Lester R. Brown
In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres," in which he challenged the view that the sun revolved around the Earth, arguing instead that the Earth revolved around the sun. With his new model of the solar system, he began a wide-ranging debate among scientists, theologians, and others. His alternative to the earlier Ptolemaic model, which placed the Earth at the center of the universe, led to a revolution in thinking, and ultimately to a new worldview.
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Dropping the Bali
Negotiations at a two-week meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to establish the agenda for the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development ended in stalemate on Friday. Delegates could not agree on several key issues and were ultimately forced to admit defeat; former Indonesian Environment Minister Emil Salim, who chaired the meeting, blamed the failure on a […]
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Public interest groups fight for elbow room in Indonesia
Thousands of people have gathered on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, to talk about poverty and environmental degradation in preparation for the August 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. Yet the big question among public interest participants here is not how to solve the world’s woes, but rather whether they […]
