Getting Hot Up North: An environmental group is putting legal heat on Canada in an attempt to compel the nation to live up to the pollution reduction promises it made when it signed on to the international Kyoto treaty on global warming in 2002.

 

Bloomberg.com reports that Friends of the Earth has filed a lawsuit against Prime Minister Stephen Harper´s administration charging that it has failed to meet its country´s Kyoto obligations.

 

Also, read Waste News' story about the lawsuit here.

 

When Canada ratified the treaty five years ago, it agreed to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases by the year 2012 to a level 6% lower than the amount it emitted in 1990. Canada´s greenhouse gas emissions have since risen 35%, according to Bloomberg.com.

 

Our Teeming Border´s Wretched Refuse: A side issue in the U.S. immigration debate that has been getting scant attention is the border crossers´ garbage disposal habits. Los inmigrantes are leaving behind huge amounts of trash as they slip into the United States.

 

Estimates range as high as 25 million pounds of stuff strewn along the Arizona-Mexico border. Bottles, clothes, food, medicine, rope, batteries, cellphones, you name it, scattered in piles stretching as far as the eye can see.

 

And according to this story from AZCentral.com, the U.S. government and local groups have tried several times to make a dent in this strange new geologic formation, and failed dismally.

 

It looks like Mexico´s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free also yearn to start their new lives with as light a load as they can manage. And that makes sense. It would be awfully hard to skulk around unobtrusively in a foreign land with 40 pounds of provisions strapped on your back.

 

Pete Fehrenbach is managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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