Environment and Health
Rebuilding the American Dream, One Insurance Policy at a Time
The Republicans give lots of reasons for their opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Only two really matter. One is politics. The other is money. More precisely, big-business money. Like Social Security and Medicare, the expansion of health insurance coverage is...
Messing with Our Beer Supply
OK, climate change deniers. This has gone too far. You've gone from just being annoying know-nothings to now posing a serious threat to an essential good that embodies humankind's finest collaboration with nature: beer. It's one thing for the science denial cult to...
Saving Our Blue Future
Have you heard? The world is running out of accessible clean water. Humanity is polluting, mismanaging, and displacing our finite freshwater sources at an alarming rate. Since 1990, half the rivers in China have disappeared. The Ogallala Aquifer that supplies the U.S....
Corporate America Needs to Change Our Diapers
As you probably know, disposable diapers sit in a landfill, undecayed, for generations. They're convenient for parents and caregivers but deadly for Mother Earth. Maybe you didn't know about another big problem. There's evidence that most popular brands of disposable...
A Cleaner Plague
Have you had your daily minimum requirement of triclosan today? How about your dose of triclocarban? Chances are you have, but don't know. These two antimicrobial chemicals disrupt the human body's normal regulatory processes. Animal testing shows that these chemicals...
The Fracking War on Coal
When the EPA opened a new comment period on Jan. 8 for the public to weigh in on proposed greenhouse gas limits for new coal-fired power plants, it didn't take long for the overblown rhetoric denouncing President Barack Obama's so-called "War on Coal" to begin. The...
Keeping Sludge Away from Your Seedlings Is Harder than You Think
Spring is so close we can almost taste it. If you're a gardener, you've already counted how many weeks until the last frost, ordered your seeds, and perhaps even began starting your seedlings indoors. And if you're like some gardeners, once it's warm enough, you'll...
The Cold Truth Atlanta’s Epic Traffic Jam Exposed
Communities around the country can learn a sobering lesson from the day Atlanta literally froze up. How Congress handles one of its biggest spending decisions will indicate whether our leaders got the message. Atlanta found itself scrambling in mid-February to avoid a...
The Best Way to Keep Our Water Safe
2014 has been a bad year for drinking water. First, a coal industry chemical spill left West Virginia residents in nine counties with water so polluted they could only use it to flush their toilets. And now 82,000 tons of coal ash have found their way into a river...
It’s Health Care, Not Software
So the Affordable Care Act didn't exactly deliver the greatest website. What did we get after all those years of haggling? Only health insurance for 9 million people (and counting) who didn't have it before. Only an end to pre-existing medical conditions keeping you...
