News Forum Archives: December 2003
COAL: U.S. Promotes While Canada and Europe Move Beyond
Lester R. Brown
Earth Policy Institute
December 3, 2003
On Monday, November 24, the U.S. Congress abandoned all hope for this year of passing an energy bill laden with subsidies for fossil fuels, including coal. While the White House strongly supports heavy subsidies to expand coal burning, other industrial countries are turning away from this climate-disruptive fuel, including our northern neighbor, Canada.
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West Texans Sizzle Over a Plan to Sell Their Water
By Ralph Blumenthal
New York Times
December 11, 2003
ALPINE, Tex. ? Angry West Texans and some state officials are demanding a halt to a deal that allows a group of politically well-connected Midland oilmen to tap the desert and sell billions of gallons of water from the state’s public reserves.
The venture was advancing without announcement or competitive bidding by the powerful Texas General Land Office, which controls 20 million acres of public lands and the liquids and minerals beneath them.
The agency has never licensed private sale of its water. The eight-man water partnership, Rio Nuevo Ltd., seeks to be the first, pumping out and selling some 16 billion gallons a year to municipalities and ranchers in drought-parched far west Texas, where many people fear that their own wells could go dry as a result.
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2003 climate havoc ‘cost $60bn’
BBC News
A UN conference on climate change has been warned about the growing impact of global warming on mankind.
Senior UN official Klaus Toepfer said climate change was a reality that would increasingly lead to human suffering and economic hardship.
Natural disasters, mostly caused by extreme weather, cost more than $60bn this year alone, the international conference in Italy was told.
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Conservationists Put Earth on Their Wish List
Peter Kaminsky
New York Times
As the year’s end approaches, it is fitting to ask some conservation organizations for a New Year’s wish that they hope will improve the outdoors experience for America’s sportsmen and sportswomen. From the many groups that could have been included, here are three representing a cross section of states and terrains.
“There are no other Everglades in the world,” the naturalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas wrote in 1947 of the unique wetlands between Lake Okeechobee and Florida Bay. Unfortunately, in 2003, “Nine acres of the Everglades die every day,” Mary Barley, chairwoman of the Everglades Foundation, said.
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