Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Sir David King, the British government's chief scientific adviser, has been "aggressively targeted by American lobbyists trying to discredit his view that man-made pollution is behind global warming." King said, "You have a group of lobbyists, some of whom are chasing me around the planet. ...
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Project Evergreen, a "trade association formed by pesticide makers, applicators, garden centers and mower manufacturers," will launch a "national public-relations campaign this spring touting the health and lifestyle benefits of thick, green lawns." The campaign is partly in response to pesticide restrictions passed by 70 cities and one province in Canada. One Project Evergreen ad reads, "Legislation and regulations have been throwing the green industry some rough punches. ...
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
A National Academy of Sciences report says up to 20 parts per billion (ppb) of the rocket fuel chemical perchlorate in drinking water could be considered "safe." Perchlorate affects thyroid function, with children believed to be especially vulnerable. The Environmental Protection Agency previously set 1 ppb as the "safe" perchlorate level; the Defense Department suggested 200 ppb.
Craig Gordon of the website Now Age Press recently interviewed me. He was interested in the current situation with mad cow disease in the US, a subject Sheldon Rampton and I addressed in our prescient 1997 book Mad Cow USA. Craig also was curious about the origins of the Center for Media and Democracy and how issues as seemingly disparate as Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH), Mad Cow Disease and Bush's war on Iraq all fall under our investigative lens.
Steven Milloy, the self-proclaimed critic of junk science at Fox News, rarely misses an opportunity to bash environmentalists. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, he falsely claimed that the collapse of the World Trade Towers could have been delayed if only the builders had used more asbestos. He also has a habit of distorting other people's words when it serves his agenda. (A recent example of this was featured on RealClimate.org, a weblog for climate scientists.)
Milloy's response to the Asian tsunami is similar. In a column for Fox News, Milloy accuses environmentalists of exploiting the disaster by trying to blame it on global warming. In order to make this seem plausible, however, he has to misquote the environmentalists he is attacking.
For a while, it looked as though one lone cow might succeed.
Government officials promised to implement food safety measures long championed by consumer, family farm, health, environmental, and public interest organizations. Industry groups -- and their former lobbyists now working for regulatory agencies -- were on the defensive.
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
"While the forestry industry in [the Australian state of] Tasmania is notoriously defensive, Gunns appears to be setting new standards," reports the Independent.
An alarming, but not surprising, investigation in today's Vancouver Sun illustrates why the mad cow feed rules in both Canada and the US are completely inadequate.
The paper reports that "secret tests on cattle feed conducted by a federal agency earlier this year found more than half contained animal parts not listed in the ingredients, according to internal documents obtained by the Vancouver Sun. The test results raise questions about whether rules banning the feeding of cattle remains to other cattle -- the primary way in which mad cow disease is spread -- are being routinely violated. ... Controlled experiments have shown an animal needs to consume as little as one milligram -- about the size of a grain of sand -- of material contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) to develop the brain-wasting disease."
Submitted by Laura Miller on
Dr. Ignacio Chapela, whose research revealed contamination of native Mexican corn with genetically engineered DNA, taught his last class at University of California, Berkeley. Chapela was denied tenure at Berkeley, despite "overwhelming support from his own department and from his academic peers," GM Watch founder Jonathan Matthews writes. Chapela had also been a critic of a $25 million research deal between UC Berkeley and the Swiss biotechnology company Novartis (now Syngenta).
Submitted by Laura Miller on
The nuclear industry is painting itself green. Proclaiming nuclear power as a clean-air solution to coal and gas fueled power plants, industry lobbyists are trying to win credits for not polluting the air. ''We have all this generation and it produces zero emissions," Brent Dorsey, director of corporate environmental programs for Entergy, which owns Vermont Yankee and the Pilgrim plant, told the Boston Globe.
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