Energy, Mining & Utilities

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is investigating whether products made from vermiculite could expose consumers to asbestos. Preliminary test results on common household products indicate that a particularly lethal form of asbestos fibers contaminates some attic insulation, but researchers do not yet know whether normal use of these products could endanger consumers. Read More

Today, the 11th of February 2000 at 8:15 a.m., a group of mixed army and police forces arrived by air to Canoas, situated approximately 4 km from Gibraltar (North Santander), place where four hundred and fifty (450) indigenous people of our U'wa community including women, elders and children were situated. Read More

The effects of global warming are cruelly ironic: the impact of fossil-fuel consumption will be most severe in regions where the least fuel has been consumed. Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming drier: in East Africa droughts of the kind that used to strike every 40 years are arriving every four or five. Read More

An oil company headquartered in Alberta, Canada, is the target of a divestment campaign aimed at forcing the company to stop its partnership with the Sudanese government in the exploitation of oil fields in the war-torn southern region of Sudan. Read More

A national coalition of 42 religious and environmental groups today called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to conduct a review of the environmental impacts of merging the Exxon and Mobil oil companies. Read More

Thornton is a research fellow at Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation. His forthcoming book, Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health and a New Environmental Strategy (March 2000, MIT Press), argues that chlorine and the organochlorine chemicals made from it pose a global health and environmental threat. Read More

Seeking to protect San Francisco Bay and people who fish it for food from toxic pollution, Communities for a Better Environment and San Francisco BayKeeper filed suit in federal court in San Francisco today alleging severe, ongoing dioxin pollution violations by the Tosco refinery near Martinez. Read More

This report documents how the companies not only contribute to global warming but also use their enormous power to DENY the problem, DELAY solutions, DIVIDE their opposition, DUMP their problems in the developing world, and DUPE the public into believing the problem is solved. Read More

The competition was intense for this season's special Greenhouse Greenwash Award. The TRAC Greenwash Committee received nominations for five of the largest corporate climate culprits on earth: Chevron, Exxon, Mobil and Shell. But BP Amoco, the British company made up of British Petroleum and Amoco combined, one-upped its fellow oil giants to grab the Summer award for Greenhouse Greenwash. Read More

In the mile-high mountains of the Sonora desert, just 25 miles south of the border between Arizona and Mexico, over two thousand miners have been locked in a bitter industrial war since mid-November. Here Grupo Mexico operates North America's oldest, and one of the world's largest copper mines -- Cananea -- in a town which has been a symbol of anti-government insurrection for almost 100 years. Read More