Accused by U.S. officials of misrepresenting its pollution-control capability, the InterGen power company has shut down one of two turbines it built at its new Mexicali, Mexico power station to generate electricity for export to the United States. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) says it had allowed InterGen to erect cross-border transmission lines on the understanding that both turbines producing U.S.-bound power at the La Rosita plant in Mexicali would be outfitted with selective-catalytic-reduction (SCR) technology. Yet only one of those turbines was, in fact, equipped with SCR scrubbers, the agency complains. (The 1,060-megawatt power station has four turbines; two produce electricity for the U.S. market, and two supply energy to northern Mexico.) InterGen, a joint venture of...
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Environmentalists this month braced for the imminent fumigation of drug crops in Colombia’s national parks as the government adamantly denied it had any plans to spray in nature reserves this year. “We have no plans to fumigate within national parks in 2004,” said Col. Álvaro Velandia, deputy director of the Anti-Narcotics Police. “We should have to wait for approval from the Ministry of Environment, Housing and Territorial Development. And besides, we have plenty of other places to spray this year.” The aerial fumigation of coca crops is among Colombia’s most contentious issues, pitting the executive branch against environmentalists, peasant colonizers and Indian communities. Critics of fumigation argue the spraying of anti-narcotic herbicides over agricultural lands has endangered the health of local inhabitants and...
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The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Foundation (UNF) said this month they will provide US$3 million over three years for a broad-based effort to protect the 625-mile (1,000-km) Mesoamerican Barrier Reef. Representatives of public agencies, non-governmental groups and businesses will address a range of problems blamed for damaging the Caribbean reef system. The goal will be to work in Belize and Guatemala to develop a means of monitoring, conserving and managing the reef, the U.S. embassy in Belize says. The Mesoamerican Reef is the largest barrier coral reef system in the western hemisphere and the second largest in the world. Unesco has designated portions of it as world heritage sites. Among the many problems...
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Talks are being held in Ecuador to find a way for the Swiss company Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS) to resume forestry-oversight services in the country. Last June, SGS began carrying out forestry-control duties such as issuing and reviewing logging permits. It did so as part of a novel outsourcing of forestry- oversight that has won praise from environmentalists and others for helping to check corruption and illegal logging. But last October, Ecuador’s Constitutional Tribunal struck down key aspects of the outsourcing program, and in November the Environment Ministry took over the supervisory duties contracted to SGS. With SGS poised to sue the government and international aid agencies upset by the short-circuiting of the outsourcing program, President Lucio Gutiérrez in late December...
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