Ugh. Hong Kong’s English daily South China Morning Post has a distinctly unsavory dispatch from the Chinese media this morning: Government scientists have released research that millions of acres of Chinese agricultural land and over 12 million tons of Chinese grain are contaminated by toxic metal pollution, according to this …
Regulation
The Beginning of an End to Whaling in Japan?
The annual kerfuffle between Japanese whaling ships and the anti-whaling activists who chase them around Antarctic waters every winter is once again getting its seasonal share of ink and airtime. But this year the familiar scenes from the southerly tug-of-war might have a new victor – for now.
For the last several winters, the Sea …
Climate: The EPA Gears Up to Regulate Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Over on the Time.com homepage, I have a piece on the coming war over the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from industrial and power sources—the first of which began on January 2. Regulation will be the story for climate politics in the U.S. this year—check out the piece here.
A Happier Year in Store for America’s Sharks?
Sharks caught a break yesterday after the Senate passed a piece of important legislation aimed at reducing the number of sharks finned in U.S. waters. The Shark Conservation Act of 2009 passed the Senate on Monday, strengthening existing legislation by closing a few gaping loopholes in the law, and is now due to move to the House.
The …
China’s Other Jailed Dissident: Food Safety Fighter Zhao Lianhai
The Hong Kong Journalists Association is on the defensive this week after several reporters from the SAR were assaulted in a Beijing suburb on Friday, the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in Oslo to jailed human rights activist Liu Xiaobao. The Hong Kong reporters were waiting outside the housing complex of another detained …
Happy 40th Birthday, Environmental Protection Agency!
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this before leaving the office tonight (it’s Thursday Night Football!): forty years ago today, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), capping a year of tremendous green progress. (It was kind of like 2010, only opposite.) Obviously Nixon was, to put it politely, no …
China’s Textile Industry: How Dirty Are Your Jeans?
If you’re a bit of a slob like me, you are wearing jeans to work today, and if, like me, you’re a bit of a slob who doesn’t manage hedge funds, your jeans are fairly run of the mill. My H&M specials today were made in Pakistan. But most of my other jeans are made across Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor in southern China, and may very …
Bad News for Bluefin Tuna Keeps on Coming
The beleaguered bluefin was dealt another blow this week when the European Union, under pressure from France, Spain, Italy and Malta, all of which have a stake in the lucrative tuna fishery, backed down from lobbying for slashing quotas of the eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna at talks this week in Paris.
The EU fisheries commissioner …
Tuna on Trial: The Dark Side of the Bluefin Tuna Market
All along the northern coast of Sicily there is evidence of organized crime: empty tonnaros, or tuna canneries, that went out of business last century when the massive blue fin tunas they hauled from the Mediterranean for generations finally disappeared. Sicily’s ghostly tonnaros may not have much to do with the Corleones or the
…
Fissile Material Smuggling and the Nuclear Renaissance
There was a very scary story out of Georgia today after two Armenian men pleaded guilty during a secret trial to smuggling highly enriched uranium into the former Soviet state and trying to sell it to an undercover agent posing as a representative of Islamic radicals.