Currents

President Bush’s campaign chairperson, former Montana Governor Marc Racicot, said Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry is an environmental extremist whose policies would kill thousands of jobs.

Despite the end of the Cold War, the Bush administration is spending 12 times more on nuclear weapons research and production than on nonproliferation efforts to retrieve, secure and dispose of nuclear weapons materials worldwide, according to an analysis of Department of Energy programs released last week by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

With gasoline prices reaching new highs, analysts would expect Americans to limit consumption by reducing the number of miles driven. But overall growth in the economy means that people have more expendable income to pump into their cars" gas tanks, and as a result Americans are driving more miles than ever.

The head of Britain’s Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) last week issued a report stating that the Blair government is not changing fast enough to keep pace with the environmental problems facing that country and the world at large. Sir Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the SDC, said that Blair’s central objective remains conventional economic growth rather than the well-being of society and the planet as a whole.

The federal government is underwriting the largest study of U.S. children ever performed. The National Children’s Study will track 100,000 individuals from mothers’ wombs to age 21 in order to increase understanding of how the environment affects the health of America"s youth.

Ann Klee, currently general counsel to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, has been nominated by the Bush Administration to become general counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Rejecting the Bush administration’s latest effort to hide Cheney energy task force deliberations from the public, U.S. District Court Judge Paul F. Friedman issued a ruling last week forcing the administration to make public the records of the task force’s executive director and other federal agency employees responsible for the task force’s day-to-day operations.

In response to soaring gas prices and increasing pressure to shore up all potential domestic petroleum reserves, environmentalists are re-launching campaigns to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from development. And several branches of the federal government are making environmentalists" case a little easier, despite the wishes of the Commander in Chief.

The government of Kenya is lobbying the U.N.’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to give the African lion its most protected status. Kenya’s Wildlife Services estimates that the overall population of the king of beasts—now numbering about 23,000—has been cut in half over the past decade due to habitat loss, a decline in prey, and unsustainable trophy hunting.