Environment and Health
Welcoming Overdue Mercury Standards
As a mother with a toddler, I’m always trying to protect my daughter. From choking hazards to toxic household chemicals, from busy streets to steep stairs, there are a lot of dangers that keep us parents on our toes. Unfortunately, there are some toxins our children get exposed to before they are even born.
Tax Wall Street to Heal America
National Nurses United, America’s largest union of RNs, is sounding an alarm.
We’ve organized rallies in New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, as well as in Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Florida, and other states and cities. We’ve held demonstrations at 60 congressional field offices. And we’ve joined the Occupy Together movement as first aid volunteers in more than a dozen sites, including on Wall Street, where it all started.
Obama: Reject the Tar Sands Pipeline
The seven members of Congress who signed a strongly worded letter to an Obama cabinet official on October 5 raised serious concerns about the administration’s cozy relationship with a high-profile energy company.
The GOP Loves the Federal Spending it Hates
In 2009, even as the Kentucky senator was loudly deriding Obama’s original stimulus program, he was quietly urging Obama’s energy secretary to give a quarter-billion-dollar loan guarantee to Zap Motors for a clean-energy plant it wanted to build in McConnell’s state.
Tar Sands
Big Oil: $135 Million — School Children: 0
When is it not enough to have too much? Apparently, when you’re a giant oil corporation.
Big Oil’s avaricious honchos are always searching for another dime they can slip into their corporate pockets, no matter whom it hurts. A crude example of their ceaseless money grab is presently unfolding in Texas.
Solyndra’s Implosion Burned Taxpayers
You may have heard about Solyndra, the solar start-up that went belly up in August.
The Environment Could Use Some Rich Friends
It seems likely that the environment here on Earth is doomed. Sure, we all want clean air, clean water, biodiversity, pretty coral, precious neighborhoods, and the like. But there are other things we seem to cherish even more: gasoline, air conditioning, heat, cheap food, bright lights, swift highways, and meat.
Big Tobacco Targets the Young and the Poor
“Tricky Dick” left us long ago, but many in the public health game consider him reincarnated in the tobacco industry. It’s hard to conjure up a business with less redeeming social value.
Paving the Way to 60 Miles per Gallon
Americans use a lot of oil every day: nearly 20 million barrels — or, if you prefer, 840 million gallons. About 9 million of these barrels go toward feeding our cars and trucks every day. What’s more, paying for all of this oil drains as much as $1 billion from our economy to foreign oil producers.
