Environment

The US government says that a 22 year old British woman living in Florida is apparently dying of British mad cow disease. Over one hundred Brits have now died of the disease and the death toll is doubling every three years. The Associated Press quotes US officials assuring the public that "all evidence indicates her illness poses no threat to anyone else or the agriculture industry." However, the US government is failing to adequately address the British mad cow threat as well as the threat of other mad cow-type diseases in the US.

While formulating its national energy policy, the Bush administration's Energy Department met with 109 representatives of the energy industry and its trade associations from late January to May 17, 2001, but gave environmental groups less than 48 hours to review and comment on the policies.

In Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, we wrote about efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency and sewage treatment plants to enhance the image of sewage sludge by renaming it as "biosolids" so that it can be "beneficially used" as fertilizer. Now the EPA's own Office of Inspector General (OIG) has officially released a report on EPA's sewage sludge rule.

The proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is keeping lobbyists and PR firms busy on both sides of the issue. New York Times reporter Evelyn Nieves writes: "In an effort to counter the nuclear industry's own deep-pocketed Washington lobbyists -- John Sununu, chief of staff for the first President Bush, and Geraldine Ferraro, the onetime vice-presidential candidate, have been enlisted in the pro-Yucca fight -- Nevada is planning a multimillion-dollar advertising and publicity campaign intended to stoke opposition to the plan beyond Nevada's borders.