Climate Cities
All Stories
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Going Whole Hog for Conservation
In welcome news for environmentalists, the U.S. Senate approved a farm bill yesterday that would double spending for conservation programs to $22 billion over the next decade. If it becomes law, the farm bill — which also includes provisions to clean up urban drinking water, protect forests from urban sprawl, and conserve wildlife habitat — […]
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Sting Operation
Okay, everyone knows you can’t take so much as a nail clipper on an airplane these days — but how about a scorpion? Last month, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors in Miami impounded a shipment of 600 of the critters, plus 2,000 reptiles and other invertebrates. That’s a lot of crawly things, but the […]
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City City Ban Ban
And in related news from the Big Apple: The city’s post-Sep. 11 restrictions on single-occupant vehicles entering Manhattan has led to 190,000 fewer people coming into the city by car every day, according to a study commissioned by business and labor leaders opposed to the ban. The study claims the restrictions could cost the city […]
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If It Weren’t for Those Medal-ing Kids
The 2002 Winter Olympics open tomorrow in Salt Lake City, and not everybody’s thrilled about it. Environmentalists say developers took advantage of the games to permanently damage the pristine Rocky Mountain environment, even though protecting the natural world is now the third precept — after sports and culture — of the Olympics. The Salt Lake […]
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Weeping and Railing
Convinced that “potentially significant” environmental problems could be avoided, federal regulators yesterday approved the largest railroad construction project in recent history. The project, a $1.4 billion, 900-mile line linking Wyoming coal fields to the Mississippi River, was okayed after the Surface Transportation Board, a branch of the Department of Transportation, imposed 147 conditions to protect […]
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Danube Blues
The Danube River in Europe may be blue, but it’s not very green — and its environmental problems are slated to get even worse, the World Wildlife Fund warns in a report being released today. More than 80 percent of the river’s wetlands and flood plains have already been destroyed in the name of flood […]
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Italian Nice
The president of northern Italy’s Lombardy region, Roberto Formigoni, proposed on Sunday that only eco-friendly vehicles be sold in the region by as early as 2005. He hopes gas-electric hybrid vehicles and, later, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles can help eliminate the region’s pollution woes. Smog levels in Lombardy have recently surged to five times the legally […]
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Shanty Shanty Shanty
Despite its terrible environmental rap, Mexico City remains one of the greenest cities in the world, with more than half the city’s acreage designated as open space and fully 25 percent blanketed with forest. Unfortunately, all that is being threatened by the city’s uncontrolled urban sprawl, most of it in the form of creeping shantytowns […]
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Long Live King County
How far would you go to stop urban sprawl? That’s the question of the hour in King County, Wash., where a private anti-sprawl proposal is pushing the conservation envelope on several fronts. At issue is a proposed $185 million purchase of second-and third-growth forest just east of Seattle. The land purchase by the Evergreen Forest […]
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Deep Sea Diving
As if all the political strife weren’t enough, here’s more grim news from the Middle East: The Dead Sea, the lowest spot on Earth, is getting even lower. In the last decade, the sea, which already lies more than 1,300 feet below sea level, has fallen an additional 20 feet. Scientists attribute the change to […]
