Environment

EPA Seeks to Protect Its Own Image

"The Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking outside public relations consultants, to be paid up to $5 million over five years, to polish its Web site, organize focus groups on how to buff the office's image and ghostwrite articles 'for publication in scholarly journals and magazines,'" the New York Times reports.

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Judge Says Loggers SLAPP Suit "Embarrassing"

Australian forestry giant Gunns has suffered a major setback in its $A6.3 million SLAPP suit against 20 environmentalists and environmental groups. Last December Gunns filed a 216-page statement of claim against the environmentalists and then, earlier this month, submitted a redrafted 360-page version.

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...Then the Lobbying Group Will Go to the Mountain

The Yucca Mountain Task Force, "a national lobbying group that formed this spring" to advocate for long-term nuclear waste storage at the Nevada site, is traveling to the Yucca Mountain region, "to begin building ties" there.

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Greasing the Wheels of Government

"Consultants paid by the oil and gas industry have been volunteering to work for the Bureau of Land Management's Vernal [Utah] office for the past five months, expediting environmental studies to keep pace with a glut of drilling requests in the region," reports the Salt Lake Tribune.

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Unions' And Bosses' Lawyers Unite

Australian Financial Review legal editor Marcus Priest notes that in "what some unionists are calling an unholy alliance," the giant Australian forestry company Gunns is "using industrial tort avenues employers have traditionally used against workers engaged in industrial action" against 20 environmentalists and environmental groups.

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Jeepers, Creepers, What'd You Do to NEPA?

The 35 year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which allows public input on environmental reviews of federal actions, "is facing strong challenges from the Bush administration, Congress and business interests who say the law has been holding up progress." The energy bill passed by the U.S.

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Ethics Adviser Dumps On Shell

Following the execution of Nigerian environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and its attempt to dump the Brent Spar oil platform in the ocean, Shell appointed a dozen people to oversee its image overhaul. A decade later, Simon Longstaff, one of Shell's twelve and the director of Sydney's St. James Ethical Centre, lashed out at Shell. "The process we went through was thorough and exhaustive, but what concerned me was seeing the marketing arm of the company turn it into a PR exercise as soon as we had finished," he said.

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