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This afternoon, on Day 72 of the Gulf spill, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the results of its first round of toxicity testing on the chemical dispersants being applied to the crude. Let’s break it down good news/bad news, because that seems kind of bloggy. Good news: the EPA’s initial tests found that the [...]
The media is not in a good way right now. Advertising has fallen off a cliff, taking revenue with it, and even if the economy recovers, it’s far from clear that those funds will ever flow to mainstream news organizations at the level they once did as the media landscape grows more crowded. Magazines and [...]
Environmental NGOs in China and the U.S. are trying to redirect the world’s fixation on the new iPhone 4 to the environmental records of the factories where it and other mobile phones and computers are built in China. In particular, the groups have been revving up pressure on Apple to answer questions about pollution regulation [...]
God knows this blog—and just about everyone else with a keyboard and Internet access—has been hammering BP and the government for failing to do enough to respond to the Gulf oil spill. But what if the best thing to do when oil leaks is…nothing? That was the tentative conclusion of several British experts at a [...]
Other than maybe Jason in Friday the 13th, nothing has supposedly died and come back to life more often than climate legislation and carbon cap-and-trade. A year ago, thanks in part to fierce opposition from business interests led by the Chamber of Commerce, the cap-and-trade bill cosponsored by Henry Waxman and Edward Markey just barely [...]
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—gingerly, gingerly—took a step on Monday towards addressing one of the most fundamental but unknown threats to public health: the overuse of antibiotics in animal food and water. The FDA said in a new policy document that the uses of antibiotics for agriculture should be limited to treated sick animals, [...]
London may be known for its rainy climate, but the city’s annual rainfall is actually around half that of Sydney, and less than Dallas’ or Istanbul’s yearly precipitation. Indeed, the British Environment Agency designates the capital as “seriously water-stressed” and at risk of summer water shortages. But now Thames Water, which provides drinking water to [...]
I’m not by nature an optimistic person. If there’s a dark side of the moon, or anything else, I’ll usually find it, and my glasses only come half empty. Getting excited—not something you’ll witness me doing very often. Maybe it’s growing up a Philadelphia sports fan (the Eagles alone being enough to pummel the optimism [...]
It’s always about this time of year—when the first air-sucking, clothes-wilting, soul-smothering heat wave hits a big swath of the country—that people who rarely think about climate change start to worry. Never mind that a single sweltering summer can never be traced directly to global warming. Hot weather causes even some of the noisiest climate-change [...]
