Russ McBee

A Supreme Court decision from 2007 (PDF here) mandated that the Environmental Protection Agency was required under the Clean Air Act to determine if anthropogenic carbon dioxide represents a threat to human health. In December, the EPA sent an email to the White House outlining its findings; the White House simply refused to open the email, ...

This is hardly shocking: Members of Vice President Cheney's staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official on the health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said today. In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, ...

Today, GOP obstructionists in the Senate filibustered a bill which would have provided tax incentives to build out renewable energy sources and which would have extended tax credits for individuals to purchase plug-in hybrid automobiles. The bill would have cost $17 billion over ten years, which is roughly the same amount the Pentagon wastes on ...

In a fairly surprising move, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention have adopted a position on global warming which stands in direct contradiction to their position taken only a year ago: Signaling a significant departure from the Southern Baptist Convention’s official stance on global warming, 44 Southern Baptist leaders have decided to ...

Within the coming years, one (or both) of the following phenomena will force us to apply the brakes to our reckless production of carbon dioxide and our insane habit of burning hydrocarbons for fuel: 1) Peak oil will limit the amount of hydrocarbons we have to burn, and/or 2) Global warming will cause such dramatic shifts in human civilization ...

This is astonishing: New satellite imaging has revealed that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita produced the largest single forestry disaster on record in America -- an essentially unreported ecological catastrophe that killed or severely damaged some 320 million trees in Mississippi and Louisiana. The die-off, caused initially by wind and later by ...

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has released a landmark report (called GEO-4) on the state of the global environment. Authored by 388 scientists from around the world and peer-reviewed by another 1,000, the report details the most urgent risks and pressures on the atmosphere, water supplies, food availability, and biodiversity due to ...

The phenomenon described in this op-ed piece is also happening here in the South: Earlier this summer, the National Audubon Society released a definitive study of population trends of North American birds, a monumental effort based on decades of Christmas bird counts and breeding bird surveys. The study confirms what my grandfather feared and ...

Among other already-tangible effects, climate change has begun to have a negative impact on the coffee crop in Uganda: ''Climate change has affected coffee production already,'' said Philip Gitao, executive director of the East African Fine Coffees Association. The crop has had less time to mature because rain is falling at the wrong times, ...

One of the under-reported consequences of global warming is the inevitable spread of infectious diseases, such as malaria, schistosomiasis, dengue fever, and many others. The World Health Organization has been predicting for several years that climate change will probably cause significant spread of these and other diseases into areas where ...