Environment

EcoPledge.com, a coalition of environmental organizations that uses boycotts to put pressure on environment-abusing companies, has joined Earth Day Resources in putting out a report titled "Don't Be Fooled: The Top 10 Misleading Environmental Claims of the Year." The report calls attention to the companies that have made the most misleading claims about the environmental benefits of their products and industr

"Florida's environmental bureaucrats are in the process of removing 600 bodies of water from the state's 'impaired' list by changing the rules. They redefined impaired," Palm Beach Post editorial writer Sally Swartz reports. When a lake or river is classified "impaired," explains Swartz, the state is required to set a limit on how much pollution can be dumped into the water. If a body of water isn't on the "impaired" list, there are no limits. Large developers, corporate farms, and other industry would benefit from the redefinition.

Curtis Moore looks at corporate-funded think tanks like the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy whose anti-environmental messages permeate the news. "Fashioning themselves after the very university research centers they deplore (or old-style "think tanks" that are only a step removed from universities), these groups have neither the neutrality nor the expertise of their academic counterparts," Moore writes.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is calling for bioethics institutions and journals to disclose their financial relationships with the biotech industry. So far, the request has mostly fallen on deaf ears. "The industry's increasing recruitment of bioethicists has been widely debated, as has the scope of the contributions," notes Hal Cohen. "Most bioethics institutions don't publish such statistics, leaving the public to draw its own conclusions about conflicts of interest.