The first major hurricane of the Atlantic season, Hurricane Bill, developed into a dangerous Category 4 storm and served as a stark reminder that many of our coastal areas remain deeply vulnerable to severe damage from hurricanes.
A coalition of advocacy groups this morning called on the federal
government to double its efforts to restore the wetlands, marshes and
barrier islands that help protect the Gulf Coast from hurricanes.
At noon tomorrow thousands of activists will swoop on London for this summer's
Climate Camp.
From the moment of its inception, in December 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was caught in a trap. It could not honestly protect “human health and the environment” from the perpetual onslaught of toxins and outright pollution of the industrial behemoth of the United States.
The federal government organizations that tried to protect human health and the environment before 1970 were the giant Departments of Agriculture; Interior; and Health, Education and Welfare. They had failed miserably, which was the real reason for the establishment of EPA.
The government is busy stemming the flow of immigration from Mexico,
but it's welcoming a different kind of flood from the north. The State
Department just approved a project to pipe some of the world's dirtiest
oil from Canada into America's fuel-hungry economy.
Last fall, Tom Zeller at the
New York Times Green Inc. blog wrote an eye-opening piece on a possible Indian government and corporate venture in Appalachia's coal mines.
And as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope pointed out, an even bigger coal story took place this week in India. Members of parliament from various political parties in the eastern part of the state of Maharashtra put aside their differences and called on the Prime Minister to stop a coal mine in a forest reserve.
Dear GeorgeOn the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy's gross domestic product.
This might be a first in the country: The failed West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is emerging as such an embarrassingly pro-coal anti-mountain public relations nightmare for Gov. Joe Manchin that even retired coal miners have taken to the streets against the state's environmental regulators, calling on the federal EPA and Office of Surface Mining to take over the key duties of the dysfunctional state agency.
They may have torn relations and be at constant loggerheads, they may have wildly contrasting political cultures and leaders, but Colombia and Ecuador do have at least one thing in common: they both appear destined to become major mining countries.
They also have both been slow developers on the mining front, lagging behind countries like Peru and Chile. In 2008, while mining accounted for 7.3 percent of Peru’s GDP and 6.7 percent of Chile’s, the figure for Colombia was just 1.5 percent, and even lower for Ecuador. Both countries, though, have significant mining potential.
The Tennessee Valley Authority had been warned for years that toxic coal ash could spill out of its retention ponds and into nearby waterways, but managers ignored those warnings, the agency's inspector general said in a report issued last week.
In December, 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash at the TVA's Kingston Fossil Plant spilled out from a retaining pond. The ash polluted Tennessee's Emory River and swamped nearby homes.
