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President Bush’s designation of 195,000 square miles of marine monuments last week drew praise from a wide constituency—including many environmentalists, who have so often been at odds with the Bush Administration over the past eight years.  Without a doubt, President Bush’s use of the Antiquities Act to preserve the Marianas, Pacific Remote Islands and Rose […]

After years of study and analysis on the public health implications of regulating perchlorate in drinking water, EPA has come to the conclusion that … it needs to do more study and analysis.   In fact, that is the conclusion of two different EPA offices. Within a two-week span, EPA’s Office of Water and its […]

Environmentalists are not usually accustomed to having industry allies in their efforts to address climate change.  However, behind the scenes large private insurance companies have long advocated for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and ultimately threaten these companies’ bottom line.   Recently, reinsurance giant Munich Re attributed significant human and […]

Last week, the New York Times ran two stories that present a fascinating dichotomy in people’s response to rising home-heating costs.   On Friday, Elisabeth Rosenthal reported from the central German town of Darmstadt about “passive houses” that employ high-tech designs to provide warm air and hot water using incredibly small amounts of energy – […]

Chairmen Henry Waxman and James Oberstar have been busy sharpening water protection tools on the Congressional whetstone. In a memorandum to President-elect Obama, Waxman, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Oberstar, chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, detail serious deterioration of Clean Water Act (CWA) enforcement. The investigation […]

The Environmental Working Group is out with a new guide to Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs), and they warn that not all CFLs are environmentally equal.   CFLs offer huge energy-consumption and length-of-use advantages over traditional incandescent bulbs, but they introduce one noteworthy environmental problem: each CFL has a tiny amount of mercury inside the […]

David Fahrenthold had a powerful article in Saturday’s Washington Post on the failures of Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts. The lede: Government administrators in charge of an almost $6 billion cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay tried to conceal for years that their effort was failing — even issuing reports overstating their progress — to preserve the […]

It breaks no new ground to observe that the Bush Administration’s record on respecting science and scientists is dismal. Three examples tell the tale: The President’s 2001 decision to severely restrict federal support for stem cell research; The President’s embrace of Intelligent Design – the latest ruse for insinuating the religious doctrine of Creationism into […]

From a developmental standpoint, the 280 or so days between conception and birth are among the most important in a person’s entire life. During this period, pregnant women are cautioned to avoid a wide variety of exposures that can inhibit fetal organ development and growth. However, a recent report highlights the risk posed by one […]