these are just a few exerpts from the tons of articles published daily describing different features of our crumbling and choking planet…

White House staff and the Energy Department, working closely with lobbyists for the same companies we had sued, directed EPA to expand loopholes that allow 40- or 50-year-old power plants to continue pumping out 12 million tons of sulfur dioxide a year, without implementing modern pollution controls.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0207.schaeffer.html

The Bush administration has been gutting key sections of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, laws that have traditionally had bipartisan support and have done more to protect the health of Americans than any other environmental legislation. It has crippled the Superfund program, which is charged with cleaning up millions of pounds of toxic industrial wastes such as arsenic, lead, mercury, and vinyl chloride in more than 1,000 neighborhoods in 48 states.

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It has opened millions of acres of wilderness-including some of the nation’s most environmentally sensitive public lands-to logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. Under one plan, loggers could take 10 percent of the trees in California’s Giant Sequoia National Monument; many of the Monument’s old-growth sequoias, 200 years old and more, could be felled to make roof shingles.

Take the case of mountaintop-removal coal mining. As the name implies, this method-the predominant form of strip mining in much of Appalachia-involves blasting away entire mountaintops to get at coal seams below and dumping the resulting rubble, called “spoil,” into adjacent valleys. In some cases, valleys two miles long have been completely filled with spoil. Opponents had hoped that a court-ordered Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) would crack down on the practice, which has buried at least 1,000 miles of Appalachian streams and destroyed tens of thousands of acres of woodland that the EPA describes as “unique in the world” for their biological diversity. But when the Bush administration released the EIS this spring, it not only gave mountaintop removal a clean bill of health; it also relaxed what few meaningful environmental protections existed and focused on how to help mining companies obtain permits more easily.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/09/ma_494_01.html

Higher UK temperatures are causing soils to “exhale” large quantities of carbon dioxide, probably accelerating global warming, scientists report.

The team says its findings, if extended to the whole of the UK, suggest some 13 million tonnes of carbon are being lost from British soils each year.

“Our findings suggest the soil part of the equation is scarier than we had thought,” Professor Guy Kirk, of Cranfield University, told journalists at the British Association’s Festival of Science in Dublin, Ireland.

“The consequence is that there is more urgency about doing something – global warming will accelerate.”

Indeed, as an illustration of how big a problem this is, it is likely the carbon lost from British soils since 1990 will have completely wiped out any reductions the country might have made through technological gains over the same period. “

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4224272.stm