in the news, 2.25

 

some news from around the world for today, 2.25.09

E.P.A. Is Told to Reconsider Its Standards on Pollutants, via the New York Times

Bush administration standards for pollutants like soot are “contrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decisionmaking,” a federal appeals court said Tuesday.

The court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its standards for the pollutants, fine particulates, which are linked to premature death from lung cancer and heart disease and to other health problems including asthma.

Michael Pollan Fixes Dinner, via Mother Jones

MJ: The food activism community is criticized as being elitist, blind to the issues of cost. How do we democratize better quality?

MP: It is the important question. One of the problems is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don’t have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.

West blamed for rapid increase in China’s CO2, via the Guardian

The full extent of the west’s responsibility for Chinese emissions of greenhouse gases has been revealed by a new study. The report shows that half of the recent rise in China‘s carbon dioxide pollution is caused by the manufacturing of goods for other countries – particularly developed nations such as the UK.

Last year, China officially overtook the US as the world’s biggest CO2 emitter. But the new research shows that about a third of all Chinese carbon emissions are the result of producing goods for export.