The cost of oil peaked above $140 a barrel this summer, nearly double the price a year earlier and 40% higher than worst-case scenarios discussed just months earlier. Gas prices followed suit, peaking well above $4 a gallon during peak driving season and sending drivers, carmakers and politicians all into fits. Heating oil prices started climbing to record levels months before heating season.
It wasn't the variable of available sunshine in their suburban Chicago neighborhood that inhibited Sarah and Kiril Lozanov from going solar. Rather, it was the challenge of cost - and of earning homeowner's association approval for the new construction solar would warrant on their condominium rooftop.
A report by the group ForestEthics estimates that destroying forests to make paper for junk mail releases as much greenhouse gas pollution as 9 million cars.
Another way to look at it: Junk mail produces as much pollution as seven U.S. states combined, or as much as heating 13 million homes each winter.
While the estimates may or may not be accurate, the point is indisputable: Junk mail is a waste. (To most people, it's an annoying part of the trip to the mailbox, anyway.)
In a ruling believed to be unprecedented, a Georgia judge halted the construction of Dynegy's Longleaf coal-fired power plant because it had not made provisions for reducing its emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most widely implicated in man-made global warming.
Editor's note: This was Sen. Barbara Boxer's opening statement Sept. 24 during a hearing on President Bush's environmental legacy. The Administration did not send representatives to the hearing.
The purpose of this hearing is to examine the Bush Administration's record on important public health and environmental matters. Unfortunately, instead of reviewing accomplishments-we look back on years filled with environmental rollbacks that serve special interests, and do not serve the American people.