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Public health pitted against polluter pressure

The EPA is about to decide if national health standards for smog should be made tougher. What's at stake is the quality of the air we breathe.

The EPA's independent science advisers unanimously think the standards should be made tougher. So do the EPA's career experts. So do lung doctors and many other medical groups. But big polluters are putting on a smog squeeze. They want the White House to keep the existing standards. And they are urging the Bush administration to break the law by considering costs (code for politics) instead of science.

The EPA is under a court order to make a decision by March 12.

Spokespeople from the American Lung Association, Clean Air Watch, Environmental Defense Fund, and the National Association of Clean Air Agencies are planning a briefing Thursday, March 6, at 12:00 p.m. EST.

Call-in Information: 1-888-206-2266

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First wolverine in 30 years spotted in California

A camera array in California's Sierra Nevada mountains captured confirmed evidence of a wolverine for the first time in more than 30 years, a Forest Service official told colleagues yesterday.

The photo was taken in a relatively pristine part of Tahoe National Forest that Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Hilda Solis have proposed to protect as a Wilderness Study Area under their California Wild Heritage Act.

Lessons the United States can learn from the drought in Australia

The brutal drought has ended over large parts of Australia -- and consumers are obsessively reducing their demand for water -- and yet water "prices are set to double in the next five to 10 years," Water Services Association Australia executive officer Ross Young told a drought briefing in Canberra.

The focus on water conservation has never been higher:

Water is a dinner table topic. People are quite passionate about water and they are quite concerned about water in the context of climate change.

And the results are impressive:

Ralph Nader picks running mate, ‘doomsday’ seed vault opens in Arctic, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Mate? … Check An Eye for a Buckeye The Damages Done How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the […]

Encyclopedia of Life up, but empty

A tip from Canis sent me to the Encyclopedia of Life, which came online last week. I posted on this project about nine months ago. I was skeptical that it would amount to much back then, so I was curious to see if I had missed the mark (as usual). I typed in a bunch of species and found nothing but placeholders for them. The site is still an empty shell, about 99.999 percent short of its goal. They have the categories in place, ready for armies of professional, hand-selected curators with nothing better to do than volunteer their free time to fill in the information.

Yes, I'm still skeptical. The whole idea behind Wikipedia is bottom-up data acquisition. In a sense, it is analogous to a free market: iterative and imperfect, but productive and useful. If every article in Wikipedia had to pass muster from an appointed expert on each subject, there would be no Wikipedia. The EOL will never see the success of Wikipedia with its present top-down, command-and-control structure.

U.N. says: Don’t iron your jeans

Um, wow. So this is what the United Nations Environment Programme is up to these days:

Gore at TED

Bruno Giussani supplies a detailed rundown of Al Gore’s talk at this year’s TED conference. See also Kim Zetter in Wired.

Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA, on Stephen Colbert

I don’t think she says 10 words through this whole thing:

Appeals court rules against Navy in sonar case

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld many restrictions on the Navy’s use of mid-frequency sonar off the coast of Southern California, reinforcing a lower court ruling from last month. […]

Propaganda soft-pedals sonar impacts on marine mammals

The following is a guest post from a friend of mine, Michael Stocker, director of Ocean Conservation Research. —– When it comes to national security interests, I can accept a […]