News Roundup
Photo by Stephen Mallon/Getty Images
N.J./Lisa Jackson rocks: “State leading fight on mercury suit.”
New Jersey and 15 other states are reviving a lawsuit to force the Bush administration to adopt tougher rules against mercury pollution.
The state announced Thursday that it would lead the legal challenge, a day after the federal Environmental Protection Agency rejected a request to tighten its limits on power plant emissions.
“New Jersey has adopted tough rules to reduce in-state mercury emissions, but we are faced once again with a failure of leadership at the federal level,” said state Environmental Protection Commissioner Lisa Jackson.
More N.J. rockage: “Vinyl chloride emissions cut in 3 states.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday a reduction in the emissions of vinyl chloride carcinogens in Texas, Kentucky and New Jersey.
The EPA said the reduction came under an agreement between Oxy Vinyls LP and the United States, the Louisville Metropolitan Air Pollution Control District and the State of New Jersey.
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, Exxon blows chunks: “Exxon declines talks on global warming.”
Also, global warming’s deleterious impact on biodiversity is bad news all round: “Lose biodiversity and gain diseases.”
Plus, gems go fair trade: “For gem merchants, a new focus on purity.”
Tracing the path of a colored stone through the vast and largely unpoliced gem trade is a complicated affair, even for the experts. Unlike diamonds, most of which are marketed by a handful of mining juggernauts through a supply chain that is under increasing scrutiny, gems follow a haphazard and opaque route to market that lends itself to smuggling.
That has not discouraged a growing number of gem cutters, dealers, jewelry manufacturers and retailers from demanding to know that the gems they buy and sell have been handled with social and environmental integrity.
“We’re selling something nobody needs,” said Earl Allen, co- owner of 1700 Ocean, a jewelry store in Santa Monica, California, that recently started a line using Fair Trade Gems. “If you’re going to buy stones that finance terrorism or send 9-year-olds into holes, I don’t want to be a part of that.”
