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Massachusetts Governor Releases Emissions Plan

By Beth Daley, September 15, 2006 Almost a year after he pulled out of a landmark regional agreement to limit emissions of a greenhouse gas from the state’s power plants, Governor Mitt Romney yesterday released the final version of his controversial substitute plan. The rule, which takes effect Oct. 6, will allow the state’s six dirtiest power plants to buy credits, possibly from around the world, to compensate for their carbon dioxide emissions. For example, a coal-burning power plant could pay to plant a forest in Brazil if those trees absorb the amount of carbon dioxide the plant must reduce from its smokestacks. “This regulation provides real and vital environmental benefits, with a flexibility that is essential in this new and volatile energy market,” Romney said. Businesses praised the plan yesterday, but environmentalists said it was full of loopholes designed to allow power plants to avoid meaningful reductions. “We’re talking aggressive reductions…but it protects us from unknown price impacts,” said Robert Rio, VP of government affairs for Associated Industries of Massachusetts, which represents Massachusetts businesses. “It’s a good balance.” Critics of the plan say the state will not be able to police projects in far-off countries. “It’s a shameful legacy […]

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On India's Farms, a Plague of Suicide

By Somini Sengupta, September 19, 2006 BHADUMARI, India – Here in the center of India, on a gray Wednesday morning, a cotton farmer swallowed a bottle of pesticide and fell dead at the threshold of his small mud house. The farmer, Anil Kondba Shende, 31, left behind a wife and two small sons, debts that his family knew about only vaguely and a soggy, ruined 3.5-acre patch of cotton plants that had been his only source of income. Whether it was debt, shame or some other privation that drove Mr. Shende to kill himself rests with him alone. But his death was by no means an isolated one, and in it lay an alarming reminder of the crisis facing the Indian farmer. Across the country in desperate pockets like this one, 17,107 farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that the high rates are continuing. Though the crisis has been building for years, it presents an increasingly thorny political challenge for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. High suicide rates and rural despair helped topple the previous government two years ago and put Mr. Singh in power. Changes brought on by […]

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Summer Was Warmest Since 1930s

By Margot Habiby, September 15, 2006 The continental United States endured the hottest summer since the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, and the second-warmest since recordkeeping began more than a century ago, US forecasters said yesterday. A July heat wave that set more than 2,300 daily high-temperature records across the nation and 50 new overall records contributed to an average temperature between June and August of 74.5 degrees. That’s just shy of the 1936 record of 74.7 degrees and well above the 20th-century average of 72.1 degrees. The warm summer helped make the first nine months of the year the warmest January-to-August period since recordkeeping began in 1895, surpassing a record set in 1934, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration said. Eight of the past 10 US summers have had above-average temperatures, NOAA said. Globally, the Northern Hemisphere, including land and ocean-surface temperatures, had its third-warmest summer since recordkeeping began in 1880, forecasters said. The warmest Northern Hemisphere summer was in 1998, they said.

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