Wednesday, 04 Dec 2002

Americans' Waste Lines Expanding

One mantra of the environmental movement in the U.S. has been "reduce, reuse, recycle," but consumption patterns in the country reveal a nearly opposite trend: buy, use, discard. Disposable culture is on the rise across the country, and has been ever since single-use razors and disposable diapers hit the shelves in the 1960s. Now disposable cameras and disposable cell phones (the recently introduced "talk and toss" mobiles) have been added to the list, and disposable DVDs and video cameras are starting to seep into the market as well. Debra Lynn Dadd, founder and sustainability advisor for the sustainable-use advocacy group WorldWise, says a major problem with disposable items is the quantity of resources used to manufacture them: "When you use these products, you're not only throwing [them] out ... there's also the material that was disposed when the product was made. That's waste we never even see."

Let's Do the Time Warp Again

The first day of a three-day, Bush administration-sponsored conference on global climate change convened yesterday, attracting more than 1,200 scientists and environmentalists but yielding very few surprises. Senior administration officials attending the conference said both the causes and effects of global warming remain uncertain and the country should therefore be cautious about committing to solutions. Although Commerce Secretary Donald Evans said the conference was designed to "jump-start" a review of proposals to combat global warming, some environmentalists felt it was doing just the opposite -- delaying any real policy decisions until the indefinite future. Jennifer Morgan, a climate change expert with the World Wildlife Fund, said of the conference that it "would have been a good program if it were still 1990. ... The U.S. is working in a time warp."

Caspian's Unfriendly Ghost

The discovery of what may be one of the world's largest oil fields under the Caspian Sea near Atyrau, Kazakhstan, has western oil companies excited, but environmentalists deeply concerned. The field, estimated to contain about 40 billion barrels of oil, 10 billion of them recoverable, is being developed by a consortium including British Gas, ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalFinaElf, and Agip. Kazakh scientists say developing the field and accessing the oil could spell disaster for the northern Caspian region by increasing air pollution and related health problems, pushing wild Caspian sturgeon to the brink of extinction, and, in the worst-case scenario, by triggering devastating earthquakes if the oil and gas reserves beneath the seabed are emptied.

No Mobiles

Environmentalists took the National Park Service to court yesterday over ongoing delays in implementing a ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. In 2000, the agency approved a plan that would have limited the number of snowmobiles in the parks to under 500 by this winter and mandated that drivers be accompanied by park guides. But the agency has yet to implement the plan, saying they are developing a different one instead. The lawsuit also challenges the federal government's failure to respond to a 1999 petition by the environmental group Bluewater Network to ban snowmobiles in all national parks. The suit is not expected to have any immediate effect on snowmobile use, and at present the Park Service is planning to allow an unlimited number of the vehicles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton this winter.

Bright Lights on the Big City

Residents of New York, rejoice: Your city might be noisy, crowded, and crass, but it's also the most compact megalopolis in the U.S. That's right -- the Big Apple ranked number one on Smart Growth America's recently released list comparing urban sprawl in major metropolitan areas. Other cities that did well include, in order, Jersey City, N.J. (who knew?), Providence, R.I., San Francisco, Calif., Honolulu, Hawaii, Omaha, Neb., Boston, Mass, Portland, Ore., Miami, Fla., and New Orleans, La.; the worst offenders, by contrast, included Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point, N.C., Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and a host of other strung-out, hyphenated towns. The Smart Growth America report was the culmination of three years' work studying residential density, integration of homes, jobs, and services, strength of downtown areas, and interconnection of streets. Aside from eating up land, urban sprawl is associated with severe air pollution and related health problems, increased automobiles use, and high rates of traffic accidents.