By Barbara Kessler
While Americans nestle in their homes this holiday break, environmentalists will be watching and waiting for a thumbs up or down on the status of the polar bear, whose predicted foreshortened future holds little to celebrate.
The Bush Administration, under court order to make a decision after the National Resources Defense Council and [...]

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By Shermakaye Bass
As the holiday count-down begins, and hordes of already wiped out, over-worked parents lurch into their annual late-night mall marathons, many are haunted by concerns over toy safety. With more than 23 million recalled this year, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the questions are obvious:
What’s safe, what’s not? [...]

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By Harriet Blake
Nobel prize winner and former presidential candidate Al Gore came under fire earlier this year when a think tank accused him of having a home in Nashville that used 20 times as much electricity as the average household nationwide.
Drew Johnson, president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, said at the time, [...]

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By Barbara Kessler
The United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off in Bali this week, where bloggers report that the tropical heat is keeping everyone viscerally aware of the topic at hand. The conference brings together representatives from more than 180 countries and hundreds of journalists and environmental activists. The plan is to hammer [...]

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By Barbara Kessler
While others dither about how to make coal-burning electricity plants cleaner and inch toward green electricity, replacing coal with cleaner (but still problematic) energy sources such as hydro-electric and nuclear power, the world’s largest Internet company wants to hop skip ahead to find really clean, safe, sustainable energy.
Yes, your friendly neighborhood search [...]

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By Barbara Kessler
Environmentalists have long been nudging consumers to think about the real cost of the paper products that they use, to understand that toilet paper and paper towels exact a price in the loss of the trees required to make them.
This green price tag is highest when manufacturers of household paper goods use [...]

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By Barbara Kessler
News of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize on Friday sped around the world faster than a melting iceberg, setting off critics who carped that the former vice president is undeserving, but energizing fans, who buzzed about Gore’s improved chances should he enter the 2008 presidential race (considered not likely) and his new [...]

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By Barbara Kessler
Farm subsidies are one of the most complex topics to plow in Washington. Well, there’s health care….Still, the debate over farm aid is right up there, deep, difficult and with seriously entrenched sides.
The debate even echoes aspects of the argument over the Iraq war. Some say that pulling back on farm subsidies [...]

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Some of the biggest names in skincare are jumping into the organic market, which until recently was a niche product for specialty stores. Estée Lauder, for instance, has nine products in its new Origins Organics line. The Origins products use safflower and olive oils for moisturizing and rapeseed oil for anti-oxidant protection. A hair conditioner [...]

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An air of compromise broke through the simmering dispute over greenhouse gas limitations at the G8 Conference on Thursday.
Just as it seemed there would be little agreement between Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President George Bush, the leaders, and their G8 counterparts, emerged with a plan in which cutting back greenhouse emissions by 2050 [...]

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By Barbara Kessler
President Bush proposed today that the world’s top polluting nations should gather for a series of meetings on the fall to set global targets for greenhouse gas emissions by the end of 2007.
The president’s proposal comes as other G-8 nation leaders plan to discuss global warming limits at their meeting next week [...]

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Here’s a piece of good news, the G8 Conference of industrialized nations could pass a strong resolution on climate change, calling on the world to rollback its greenhouse emissions when the G8 leaders meet in Germany in June.
But wait! According to a Washington Post story and other wire reports, the United States officials working on [...]

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