The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a version of Resources Committee Chair Dick Pombo’s revision of the Endangered Species Act, which calls for major changes to the nation’s premiere environmental law. Pombo, a California Republican, says the existing law is too cumbersome in the courts and too costly for landowners and developers.
Is Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA), the chairman of the House Resources Committee, joking? Did he really circulate a razed-earth anti-parks bill as a rather mean-spirited joke, or was he for real? It’s a little hard to tell with him, but the national parks sections are certainly laughable. In any case, the idea of making wildlife "pay its passage" is not new: In the 1997 film Fierce Creatures, a sequel to the fabulous A Fish Called Wanda, an evil magnate modeled on Rupert Murdoch takes over a small British zoo and demands that it produce a 20 percent return. Among his bright ideas: hanging bank-promoting advertising sandwich boards on the big cats.
The Canadian government has joined the last-ditch effort by activists to prevent oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Citing a 1987 bi-lateral agreement to protect the Porcupine River caribou herd that migrates from the Canadian Yukon to ANWR’s coastal plain each year, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew is urging the U.S. to honor its 18-year commitment by halting its drilling plans.
Ford Motor Co. chairperson and CEO Bill Ford announced last week that his company will make hybrid gas-electric versions of half of its models across its Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicle line-ups by 2010. Perhaps not coincidentally, the announcement comes on the heels of record high gas prices around the country. Ford's 2006 Escape hybrid […]
With Hurricane Katrina shutting down an estimated five percent of American oil refining capacity, and oil prices already at an all-time high, investors are starting to look seriously at renewable forms of energy as the next big thing. Share prices in several small American companies producing solar panels and related equipment–including Evergreen Solar, DayStar Technologies, Energy Conversion Devices and Spire–have more than doubled over the past year. Meanwhile, Cypress Semiconductor hopes to raise more than $100 million for a spin-off IPO of its solar subsidiary SunPower this fall. Analysts think that the damage from Katrina will only help these companies raise more money via the public markets and close the cost gap between traditional forms of power and renewable sources.
Environmentalists are accusing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of buckling to industry pressure to relax standards governing the testing of human health responses to pesticide exposure. The agency’s new rules–advertised to "categorically" protect children and pregnant women from pesticide testing–reportedly allow for several troubling exceptions, including sanctioning the use of "abused and neglected" kids as test subjects and allowing for "ethically deficient" human research if it is considered crucial to "protect public health."
My cousin, Rebecca Mark, is an English professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her home on Pine Street is only a few blocks from the historic university, and from what she’s heard it took on three and a half feet of water.
The Hurricane Katrina fiasco has been blamed on President Bush, on poorly prepared or corrupt state and local governments, and even (by Rush Limbaugh) on a “culture of entitlement” that persuaded people they should stay in their homes and let the feds take care of them. But blaming it on environmentalists? That’s a new one.
Apparently, some of the world’s largest automakers were listening when California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he had a dream of a "hydrogen highway" running through his state and beyond. Last week, General Motors, Honda and BMW acknowledged that they would each be producing small runs of hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars for California’s roads within five years. Analysts expect most of the initial production models, probably numbering in the hundreds of vehicles statewide, to be used as part of public and municipal fleets.
The director of renewable energy for China’s national policy-making bureau told an international energy conference in Beijing last week that his country is considering boosting its commitment to solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric power by as much as 50%.
