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A recent article on Forbes.com, “China: Where Poisoning People Is Almost Free,” gave great examples of just how cheap it often is to pollute in China. And it pointed to potential consequences: While companies can get away with pollution atrocities for years, the Chinese government, in the long run, may have to pay a high […]

If you haven’t caught it yet, Mother Jones magazine’s cover article on Fiji Water, by Anna Lenzer, is an impressive, provocative bit of reporting (“How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?”). Fiji responded, and Lenzer responds to that.

At Netroots Nation, the annual liberal blogger conference, organizations, candidates, and of course bloggers get together to talk. It’s informal. North Carolina’s Rep. Brad Miller, among several electeds at the conference, was sporting jeans by Friday. The focus among the environmental folks, not surprisingly, is climate change. The enviros here have qualms with the Waxman-Markey […]

CPR Member Scholar Thomas McGarity testified this afternoon at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on the issue of medical device safety (written testimony, press release). Currently, individuals injured by a faulty medical device generally cannot sue the device manufacturer in state courts if that device was fully approved […]

More New Yorkers are fishing off area piers in this economy, and, in many cases, eating unsafe amounts of fish contaminated with PCBs and mercury. That was the thrust of a NY Daily News report earlier this month. They also reported that there were extremely few signs alerting the public to any kind of danger. […]

It was, as Greenwire put it, a rough term for environmental interests; in five separate cases the Supreme Court overturned rulings that environmentalists had favored. CPR Member Scholar Amy Sinden told the NYTimes of one of the themes: “It’s become a cliché to say the Roberts court is about the expansion of executive power … […]

A string of recent developments have brought the issue of contaminated drywall back into the headlines (we last wrote about the issue here). Last week EPA released the results of tests it did on two Chinese drywall samples taken from a Florida home. They found sulfur, as well as two organic compounds associated with acrylic […]

The drywall debacle continues. Inez Tenenbaum, President Obama’s nominee for head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, got a number of drywall questions from senators at her nomination hearing earlier this month.  They said the government response seemed too slow. Tenenbaum pledged she’d work on the problem, and was subsequently confirmed by a voice vote […]

Waxman-Markey passed the House.  Was it the right thing to do?  What’s the outlook from here?  Here are a few views from around the web. Dan Farber: The concerns about measuring and enforcing offsets are genuine (and increased because of Waxman-Markey’s reliance on USDA to do the job.)  But those problems aren’t insurmountable either.  Instead […]