Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Is Natural Gas Just as Polluting as Coal?

May 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Natural gas facility

The recent boom in U.S. natural gas production has been hailed as the cure to all America’s ills. Gas, its boosters say, can reduce household heating expenses, enhance energy security, create jobs, and lower greenhouse gas emissions. That last part is crucial to winning over environmentalists. “Over its full cycle of production, distribution, and use, natural gas emits just over half as many greenhouse gas emissions as coal for equivalent energy output,” the green group Worldwatch Institute reported last August. But all of that may amount to a lot of hot air if researchers from ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Do You Know Where Your Medicine Came From?

January 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Foreign, Inspection-Free Drugs in Your Medicine Cabinet

Headaches. Insomnia. Anxiety. American medicine cabinets are packed with remedies for these common maladies. And up to 40 percent of them are manufactured overseas (along with 80 percent of active ingredients for pharmaceuticals). But a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that in fiscal year 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration visited just 11 percent of the 3,765 foreign factories it is responsible for inspecting — compared to 40 percent of domestic factories. In 2008, the GAO found that the FDA took two to five years to follow up with foreign plants ... Read More

More like this: Graphic Art, Health, January-February 2012
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David Onek — Law Enforcement Facilitator

March 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
David Onek

Improving the juvenile justice system has been the focus of David Onek's professional life for some 20 years. He uses an innovative approach that might seem obvious but has been underutilized: He gets everyone in the field talking to each other. Onek's experience in influential policy, governmental and academic positions in the San Francisco Bay Area has led him to believe that because of sharp disagreements dividing them, law enforcement officers, members of community groups, prisoners and corrections officers are unable to bridge much smaller gaps on many issues — or even to realize how ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, March-April 2011, Views Reviews and Interviews
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California’s Delta Water Blues

January 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

"Complaints are everywhere heard that the public good is disregarded in the conflict of rival parties." — James Madison, The Federalist, No. 10 Gilbert Cosio stands with his feet spread, one foot higher than the other, astride a sloping, 100-year-old levee surrounding Bouldin Island, 40 miles due south of Sacramento, Calif. We're here to take a look at improvements that Cosio, a civil engineer, has made to this levee, part of a serpentine network of flood control infrastructure that was imposed piecemeal over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries on the largest estuary on the West ... Read More

More like this: Environment, January-February 2011, Magazine Feature Story, Science & Environment
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The U.N.’s Death Squad Watchdog

June 3, 2010 • By • 5 Comments
Philip Alston

In a troubled African nation one morning not long ago, Philip Alston was driven in a convoy of three white SUVs, with armed escorts front and rear, to a town south of the capital. Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, was going to meet with eyewitnesses to, and victims of, a violent crackdown by local police on political opponents of the government. An Australian native who now lives in New York, Alston has spent more than three decades working in human rights and international law. He was in the country (which Alston asked not be ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, May-June 2010, Profile
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