Friday, 04 May 2001

Think Globally, Log Locally

The Bush administration said last night that it will let stand President Clinton's rule to ban road-building and logging on 58.5 millions acres of national forestland. Sort of. It seems the White House intends to give local officials (the folks who don't like the rule) the power to modify the ban on a case-by-case basis to allow logging, mining, and drilling to occur. The administration said the planned changes would address concerns raised by a federal judge in lawsuits brought by the state of Idaho and the timber giant Boise Cascade to block the ban. But environmentalists said the changes were meant to erode the rule while giving President Bush cover -- under the pretense that the lawsuits gave him no choice but to revise the policy.

Whassup? ... True, True

More than a dozen environmental groups sued the federal government yesterday, saying its plan to manage hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest fails to provide adequate protections for salmon. Todd True, an attorney with the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, said, "We have a lot of ways to meet our energy needs. These salmon only have one river forever. If we do not support them, they will go extinct." Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., ruled early this week that the federal government must pay property owners when it takes water away from them to help fish listed under the Endangered Species Act.

The 2 Percent Solution

Ford said yesterday that a team of top executives would begin looking at ways to reduce the company's greenhouse gas emissions. Ford's second-annual corporate citizenship report estimated that its vehicles and factories contribute about 2 percent of all such emissions caused by people. Still, Ford said it did not support the Kyoto treaty on climate change or tougher fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles. In other thrilling corporate news, Entergy Corp. yesterday became the first private power generator to agree voluntarily to cap its carbon-dioxide emissions, according to Environmental Defense. The company says it will keep emissions at current levels while increasing power production from its plants by 25 percent over the next four years.

Birdland?

Some of the most popular songbirds in the U.K. are being sighted much less frequently, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said yesterday. A survey carried out by the group's members found that the numbers of starlings and house sparrows have halved in the last 10 years. The group blamed the problem on the advance of big-time farms. Mike Everett, a RSPB spokesperson, said pesticides were reducing the birds' food supply and farming was also destroying wild spaces and the birds' hedgerow habitat.

Prez and the New Power Generation

President Bush launched a two-week campaign yesterday to prepare the country for the recommendations of the secretive White House energy task force. Bush said, "What people need to hear loud and clear is that we're running out of energy in America." Building on a comment made by Vice President Cheney earlier this week that conservation is little more than a "personal virtue," Bush said, "[W]e can't conserve our way to energy independence, nor can we conserve our way to having enough energy available. So we've got to do both." Got it? The Natural Resources Defense Council began an ad campaign yesterday that describes Bush's energy plans as the "more pollution solution."