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The French government has decided to suspend an unpopular environmental tax on heavy goods vehicles following a weekend of protests in Brittany. The move is expected to cost the France hundreds of millions of euros in lost revenue. … The unpopular “ecotax”, aimed at encouraging environmentally-friendly commercial transport, was designed to impose new levies on French and foreign vehicles transporting commercial goods weighing over 3.5 tonnes (3.86 tons). Critics in Brittany said the tax would seriously damage the region’s precarious farming and food sectors by increasing transportation costs, driving companies out of business and leading to major job losses. …

Eight states, including California and New York, pledged Thursday to work together to dramatically multiply the number of zero-emission cars on the nation’s roads by speeding the construction of charging stations and other infrastructure. The goal is to put 3.3 million battery-powered cars, plug-in hybrids and other clean-burning vehicles on the roads in those states by 2025. That’s more than 15 times as many zero-emission vehicles projected to be in use in the entire U.S. by 2015. Auto dealers say networks of charging stations and other conveniences are crucial to winning over drivers who are accustomed to pulling up to...

“The water you drink today has likely been around in one form or another since dinosaurs roamed and Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago.” – National Geographic Water is life and it is recyclable, covering 70 percent of our planet; 2.5 percent is fresh water and “only 1 percent is easily accessible, the rest is trapped in glaciers and snowfields.” National Geographic tries to make the case that freshwater is in a crisis since its levels have remained the same over millennia but the human population has exploded to seven billion. No mention is made of animals that also...

The president is committed to the idea of anthropogenic global warming. Man-made carbon emissions, he believes (or pretends to believe), cause global temperatures to rise, and this temperature increase is destructive. By reducing man-made carbon emissions, temperatures can be made to fall. Every part of this logic is flawed, if not utterly false. Do carbon emissions cause global warming? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is largely composed of climate researchers with what would seem a strong vested interest in promoting the global warming agenda. Yet even the IPCC has a 5% doubt that human activities affect the climate.

Greenpeace, the world’s biggest and most battle-hardened environmental campaigning organisation, is in a state of shock. Last week, Russian investigators said that they had found ‘narcotic substances’ on board Arctic Sunrise, the Greenpeace vessel they seized after its crew had used it in an attempt to storm an oil rig of the state-controlled firm Gazprom. They added that the drugs included poppy straw, an ingredient for opiates. You would think that Greenpeace might be proud to have been identified as scrupulously organic in its drug use; but its spokesman denounced the Russians’ claim as a ‘smear, pure and simple’. Of...

He is a passionate campaigner on green issues, and now Jeremy Irons has backed a campaign to ban lorries from the quaint Oxfordshire town where he lives. The Oscar–winning actor has thrown his weight behind an action group to prevent HGVs using the narrow streets of Watlington as a rat-run between the M40 and M4. The market town—reputedly the smallest in the country—is regularly snarled up with lorries whose drivers, looking for a shortcut between Oxford and Reading, are directed there by their satnavs. …

The Earth Justice website paints a bleak picture of strip mining which has “devastated Appalachia,” claiming that “in the past few decades, over 2,000 miles of streams and headwaters that provide drinking water to millions of Americans have been permanently buried and destroyed. An area the size of Delaware has been flattened. Local coal communities routinely face devastating floods and adverse health effects.” If so many miles of streams that provide drinking water to millions had been buried, how do these millions get their drinking water? I also wonder if the cancer rate and lung-related illnesses are higher in these...

Germany is living up to its environmentally-friendly image by spending millions of euros on building bridges just for animals. Humans caught crossing them face a €35 fine. More than a hundred wildlife bridges are to be built in the next decade. Gerhard Klesen, a forester employed by the Ruhr Regional Association, spent a decade campaigning for an animal-only bridge to be built over a motorway in the town of Schermbeck in North Rhine-Westphalia. Man-made barriers such as roads and canals restrict animals’ natural movement, he said. That limits genetic diversity, which in turn leads to an increase in disease and...

House Republicans Monday proposed slashing cuts to environmental programs and funding for the Smithsonian Institution and the arts as they unveiled the latest legislation to implement the second year of budget cuts required under so-called sequestration. The $24 billion spending measure would gut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency with a one-third cut and cuts the National Endowments for the Arts by almost half. Overall, the measure funding the Interior Department, EPA, national parks and federal firefighting efforts is cut by 19 percent below funding approved in March. It takes a more modest approach to the national parks with...

Some large oil and gas companies include the development of “alternative” energy (solar, wind, and biofuels) as part of their corporate goals. Shell’s division — Shell WindEnergy — is involved with operating eleven wind farms, including eight joint ventures in the United States. Chevron’s Chevron Energy Solutions has an environmental focus on solar energy and other “renewable” forms of energy. Chevron’s “We Agree” campaign comprises about ten slogans stating what oil and gas companies should do differently, as if they are not doing enough already. It urges them to promote “renewable” energy, care for the planet, etc. The Chevron campaign...

On June 19-21, 2013, there will be dueling Seven50 Summits at the Palm Beach Conference Center, West Palm Beach, Florida. The Seven50 plan is an effort by the Southeast Florida Regional Partnership, funded by a grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), with the mission to “[C]reate and implement the Seven50: SE Florida Prosperity Plan, a blueprint for a vibrant and resilient economy; socially inclusive, sustainable, and affordable communities; and environmental sustainability.” … The City of Vero Beach, FL has pulled out of the plan. Mayor Craig Fletcher attended a briefing given by proponents of Seven50...

Blue Dog Democrats are asking President Obama to quit stalling and approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Members of the fiscally conservative coalition sent a letter to Obama on Wednesday saying “the time to approve the Keystone XL project has come.” “Construction of the Keystone XL pipeline will provide a positive impact to a broad spectrum of the American economy,” wrote coalition co-chair Reps. John Barrow (D-Ga.) and Kurt Schraeder (D-Ore.). “An estimated 13,000 direct jobs will be created, with an additional 7,000 direct jobs needed to keep it operational. If the recent jobs report shows us anything, it’s that Americans...

Exciting news about polar bears in eastern Canada: a new the peer-reviewed paper concludes that despite sea ice having declined since the 1970s, polar bear numbers in Davis Strait have not only increased to a greater density than other seasonal-ice subpopulations, but it may now have reached its ‘carrying capacity.’ This is great news. But where is the shouting from the roof-tops? This peer-reviewed paper was published February 19, 2013. No press release was issued that I could find and consequently, there was no news coverage. Funny, that.—Susan Crockford, Polar Bear Science, 10 June 2013

A California bill that would have required manufacturers to figure out how to keep the most common plastic junk out of state waterways died in the state Assembly without a vote Friday. Assembly Bill 521 was before the chamber’s Appropriations Committee, and the panel failed to act on it, effectively killing the legislation for the session. It had previously passed the Assembly Natural Resource Committee. State Assemblyman Mark Stone, D-Monterey Bay, one of the proposal’s sponsors, was disappointed by the outcome. … AB521 would have required manufacturers to figure out how to reduce 95 percent of plastic pollution along the...

A noted climatologist and recently-retired NASA research chief has entered the EU’s energy policy debate, with a warning that any re-industrialization strategy that increases fossil fuels use can only be short-term, irrational and economically wasteful. In a wide-ranging interview with EurActiv, James Hansen branded the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) “ineffectual” and flawed, and accused energy firms of preferring government bribes over investments in clean technology. Hansen, whose Congressional testimony on climate change in 1988 first popularized the issue in the United States, also said that approving the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to bring tar sands fuel from Canada to...

Monday was the 43rd celebration of Earth Day, an event hailed as an effort to promote responsible stewardship of the environment. Fittingly, it is also the birthdate of Communist Party creator Vladimir Lenin, a reality that the radical environmentalists responsible for the creation of Earth Day dismiss as a mere coincidence. Yet there is little question that under the guise of “saving the planet,” the earth-firster crowd would be more than willing to impose the same kind of totalitarian control over the masses envisioned by Lenin.

Leilani Munter, a race car driver, environmental activist and self-described “eco-athlete” was featured on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Earth Day website in a video promoting bike riding, using public transportation and veganism. “I’m aware of the carbon footprint of my race car and my lifestyle,” Munter said in the video. “For every race I’m in, I adopt an acre of rainforest to offset my effect on the environment.” …

MILWAUKEE - Gaylord Nelson, the former governor and U.S. senator from Wisconsin who founded Earth Day and helped spawn the modern environmental movement, died Sunday. He was 89. Nelson died of cardiovascular failure at his home in Kensington, Md., a Washington suburb, said Bill Christofferson, Nelson's biographer and a family spokesman. "He died peacefully. His wife was with him," Christofferson said. Thirty-five years after the first Earth Day, April 22 is still a day on which many people plant trees, clean up trash and lobby for a clean environment. A conservationist years before it became fashionable, Nelson was recognized as...

Monday, April 22, is Earth Day. Begun in 1970, it led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. It is the global platform for the Big Lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) is causing the Earth to warm and the basis of the environmental movement’s ceaseless efforts to reduce the use of energy for any reason.

A corporate responsibility advisory committee at Brown University reportedly is recommending that the Ivy League school withdraw its investments in 15 of America’s largest coal companies. The divestment campaign began last October, when a student group, called the Brown Divest Coal Campaign, asked the university to stop investing in coal. “We believe that our university should not be profiting from an industry as dangerous and outdated as coal, which devastates human health and the environment at each step in its life cycle,” the group says on its website. …