Thursday, 06 May 2004

Super-un-funded

Superfund Could Be Weakened in Wake of New Government Report

The Bush administration's contributions to the health of the Superfund program can be counted without any fingers or toes at all, say critics. Still, some folks were hopeful when the administration convened a subcommittee under the U.S. EPA to assess the troubled program and make recommendations for repairing it. That hope may have been misplaced: The subcommittee meetings were marked by heated controversy between industry representatives (some two-thirds of the members) and everybody else. When a report with recommendations was released last month, five of the 32 subcommittee members refused to endorse it, with some saying it could be used as political cover to further weaken the program. Get the behind-the-scenes dirt in Muckraker -- today on the Grist Magazine website.

Earth Still Round, Still Warming

New Study Fills in Missing Piece of Global-Warming Science

A new study published in the journal Nature has filled in a crucial missing piece in the science of global warming -- one that has served as a talking point for climate-change skeptics. At issue is a seeming discrepancy: The lower portion of the earth's atmosphere, the troposphere, has not been warming as fast as models would predict based on the much faster warming of the earth's surface. A team of researchers at the University of Washington and a federal lab in Maryland discovered that if they factored out the cooling effects of the atmosphere's outer layer, the stratosphere, the models fell into line. While the skeptics were not mollified, many scientists hailed the study as an elegant answer to one of the remaining questions about climate change. They didn't, however, hold out much hope that the study would affect policy.

Return on Investment

Energy Industry Cozy with Bush Administration, Says Report

Most of the dirtiest power plants in the country are owned by 30 companies that, along with their trade association, have collectively raised some $6.6 million for President Bush and the Republican National Committee since 1999, says a new report. The companies' intent, says Frank Clemente of Public Citizen, a consumer-advocacy group that coauthored the report, was to "help elect an industry-friendly president, fill federal regulatory posts with former utility executives and lobbyists, and hire a small army of lobbyists and lawyers connected to the new president to engineer regulatory changes." Their investment has paid off handsomely, says Eric Schaeffer of the Environmental Integrity Project, which cowrote the report: "It is no coincidence that a wholesale assault on the Clean Air Act is taking place today." An RNC spokesperson called the charges "partisan politics," pointing as evidence to the $450 that Public Citizen's president has donated to John Kerry.

Buoys in the Hood

Hood Canal One of Growing Number of Dead Zones

Hood Canal is dying in slow motion, victim of a growing oxygen-deprived "dead zone," and there is little political will or means to save it. The misleadingly named body of water -- it's actually a fjord, closed on one end -- is the deep-water arm of Puget Sound, separating Washington state's pristine Olympic Peninsula from the urban sprawl around Seattle. It is not only home to a broad variety of sea life, but the hub of a large ecosystem of forests, salmon-rich streams, and wildlife. The "dead zone," like those found in Los Angeles harbor, Chesapeake Bay, and coastal areas around the world, results from algae blooming on the surface, dying, and decomposing on the floor, sucking up oxygen. No one knows the particular source of the pollution in Hood Canal, but many blame population growth. The surrounding area is fast filling up with bedroom communities dependent on old, leaky septic systems. But replacing the septic systems would cost money, which would mean raising taxes, an idea with little public support.

Saving Some Green

Green-Building Techniques Come to Low-Income Housing

Eco-friendly building materials and techniques, once the exclusive province of upper-class enviros, are moving slowly but steadily down the income scale. In cities across the U.S., governments are offering a range of subsidies and tax breaks to developers of low-income housing, encouraging them to use energy-efficient boilers and appliances, fluorescent lights, geothermal heating and cooling wells, air-filtration systems, and other green-building staples. Such features can make a big difference for residents, says Matt Petersen of enviro group Global Green USA: "Energy bills are the second-highest bills that a family faces after rent or mortgage." In most cases, the subsidies do not cover the price differential between green and standard building, and the cost savings primarily go to residents, not developers, so for now there remains an element of altruism in constructing green low-income housing.