toxic waste

The Easy-Bake Oven is falling victim to the fight against global warming. The incandescent light bulbs that heat the toy ovens are being phased out in 2012 in favor of energy-efficient compact fluorescents. But precisely because they are energy efficient, they don't get hot enough to bake a cookie.

The U.S. Air Force and Navy both rank among the top 100 polluters in America, and many of their now-abandoned bases have been declared Superfund sites by the EPA. Here's how two of these bases tackled the toxic stews left behind.

Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown and Root violated their contracts to safely dispose of waste in combat zones, and the toxins their burn pits released allegedly caused serious illnesses in U.S. soldiers. But will extenuating circumstances allow the military contractors to avoid punishment?

Please pardon my poor punning, and let me explain: "Fraccing" (rhymes with "cracking") is the oil and natural gas industry's an informal contraction for the technology called hydraulic fracturing, in which water (and in some cases, a chemical mixture) is pumped deep underground to fracture shale...

Remember that monstrous old television that sat in your living room and was almost as thick as it was tall and wide? Those old-school TVs were bad for the brain -- and not just due to the programming. No, the big TVs of yesteryear were also huge containers of toxic lead. Their cathode ray tubes...

On Monday, the Green Electronics Council announced that the highly acclaimed EPEAT rating system would be covering computer equipment sold around the world, as reported by CNET. That's a big expansion and an impressive step forward. An EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) rating...

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal makes it clear that securitization -- the packaging of thousands of loans into securities -- has all the features of a successful terrorist attack. How so? It entered the financial system without attracting any negative notice at all, found its way into...

The idea of buying toxic waste from banks has already failed once -- and now it looks poised to die a second death. The lesson here is that a bad idea is bad regardless of whether Hank Paulson or Tim Geithner pushes it. Why is it so hard for leaders to learn the difference between a bad idea and a...

Just when I think I have heard it all, they come up with something even more eye-poppingly incredible. Step right up, folks! First they sucked you into the dot-com boom, before wiping out your tech stocks. Next they urged you to buy houses with money you couldn't pay back, so you could watch those...

Have we reached the bottom yet? That's a question that people ask me from time to time. I haven't got an answer yet, but today I have some numbers that may give us an idea. And the preliminary verdict is: No! Why? Because the commercial banking industry in the U.S. is likely to be bankrupt -- by...