Environment

"Over the past few weeks of Presidential WrestleMania MMIV, the Bush campaign has fired off more than a dozen press releases about John Kerry's policies on energy, nuclear-waste storage, forest and water protections, and other environmental issues - a hodgepodge of smears, exaggerations, and obfuscations intended to besmirch Kerry's pro-environment reputation," Grist Magazine's Amanda Griscom writes. Polls indicate that swing-state voters are concerned about things like pollution and wilderness conservation, prompting the Bush campaign to "neutralize" the environment as an election issue.

"Organized by the World Bank, the International Emissions Trading Association and Koelnmesse (Cologne Trade Fair), Carbon Expo was supposed to be 'the Coming of Age of the Global Carbon Market,'" reports Chris Lang. At a journalists' workshop, World Bank Communications Advisor Sergio Jellinek said the Bank wanted to help journalists "in terms of getting the story right. You set the tone of the debate.

After years of trying to build an unpopular nuclear waste dump in South Australia, Prime Minister John Howard has reversed himself and abandoned the project, fearing a voter backlash. "As he pressed the flesh in four key marginal seats, Mr. Howard became acutely aware of the resentment in the community over a nuclear dump being forced on the state and the potential electoral fallout," report Paul Starick and Leanne Craig. "Having declared repeatedly that his government is only eight seats from oblivion, Mr. Howard needed to shake off the dump as an electoral liability. ...

It used to be that the U.S. chemical industry lobbied lawmakers in Washington. Now the White House is aggressively lobbying on the industry's behalf in Brussels, opposing new European Union regulations on chemicals. The EU's proposed Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals or REACH would require chemical makers to publicly report the potential harmfulness of their products - both for new chemicals being introduced and those already available.