Twenty-five years ago, the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island decimated what had been a bright future for nuclear power in the United States. While no one was killed and only a small amount of radioactivity escaped, no American utility has dared to build a new nuclear power plant since.
The problem with trying to keep up with President Bush is that it’s a war with many fronts: Beat him down over, say, wetlands protection, and he pops up with a new plan to ease restrictions on cutting down old-growth forests. Block his insane fixation with drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and he tries to kill legislation aimed at getting toxic mercury out of the environment.
A steep decline in birds, butterflies and native plants in Britain supports the theory that humans are pushing the natural world into the Earth’s sixth bigextinction event and the future may see more and more animal species disappearing.
The Environmental Protection Agency reported last week that it has taken Love Canal off its Superfund list, declaring clean-up work in the area complete. The contamination of soil and groundwater in the Niagara Falls, New York neighborhood spurred Congress in 1980 to pass its landmark Superfund legislation mandating clean-up of industrial pollution sites across the U.S.
According to recently released figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, the growth rate of the world population has slowed down considerably over the last decade. In 2002, humanity added 74 million people to its global population, down from 87 million added per year a decade ago.
Government scientists monitoring the health of the skies from atop Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii’s Big Island are reporting that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have reached record-high levels in the global atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace over the past year.
The politics of paper are not as simple as they seem. E’s forthcoming May/June cover story is all about paper: how it’s produced, how it gets recycled and non-wood alternatives. But the more I looked into the paper issue, the more complicated it became.
For the last two weeks I’ve been touring the Pacific Northwest and northern California in support of E’s new book: Feeling the Heat: Dispatches From the Frontlines of Climate Change (Routledge). It’s safe to say that audiences here (ranging from 12 people to more than 100) are receptive to our message that global warming is no longer a matter for scientific debate, but an observable fact.
While it's undoubtedly important to know who J.Lo's dating since Ben, and everyone wants to know about the latest fabulous party attended by the Hilton sisters, you'd think the news media could spare at least a few column inches for information on a recently uncovered Pentagon report predicting widespread nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine, rioting and a plunging of Great Britain's temperatures into something resembling Siberia. Why? Because global warming is real.
The University of Queensland's Centre for Marine Studies is predicting that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef will lose 95 percent or more of its living coral by mid-century as a result of global warming.
