TIP-TOP INFOLINE

Further to the closure of its Office of Prevention, Polution and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) library in November, the US Environmental Protection Agency is also reported to have begun purging records from its websites, according to PEER. This action is apparently taking place despite demands from four incoming Democratic committee chair persons, They insisted that EPA administrator Stephen Johnson confirmed that any disposals had ceased and that all records are now being maintained.

"WellPoint is honored to receive this recognition from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency," said Leonard D. Schaeffer, chairman and chief executive officer of WellPoint. "A key component of WellPoint's social responsibility program is to provide resources that positively impact our environment. As a Southern California-headquartered company, WellPoint is acutely aware of the importance of traffic and air pollution reduction. We therefore provide a host of resources to encourage our more than 7,000 Southern California associates to walk, bicycle, carpool, vanpool or take mass transit," Schaeffer added.Said Mike Leavitt, EPA's administrator, "Gridlock produces more than $63 billion in congestion costs per year. Companies that offer commuter benefits help curb these costs and make a significant contribution to the health and welfare of their employees."WellPoint Health Networks Inc. serves the health care needs of 15.5 million medical members and 46.2 million specialty members nationwide through Blue Cross of California, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Missouri, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Wisconsin, HealthLink and UniCare. Visit WellPoint on the web at Blue Cross of California, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Missouri and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Wisconsin are independent licensees of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. -- The Southern California operations of WellPoint (NYSE:WLP), the nation's second largest health plan, has been named one of the best workplaces for commuters by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. WellPoint ranked #18 and is the only health insurer to qualify listed.According to the EPA, the list "recognizes those FORTUNE 500 companies that provide the highest level of commuting options for their employees. Employers are recognized for their leadership in easing the pollution and stress caused by so many vehicles on our nation's roads."WellPoint offers a Guaranteed Ride Home program, tax-free vanpool subsidies, rewards for carpooling, walking or biking to work and subsidized transit passes.

CAUSE:

Carl Jones needs to take my high school environmental studies class. Global warming is caused by humans and is taught and proved at every high school.Jones states that the sun affects our climate the most. This is true, but can someone explain how the sun, composed of only hydrogen and helium, adds 200 billion tons of carbon dioxide to our planet?Jones says that plants use carbon dioxide to grow, which again is true. But when the rain forest loses 1.5 acres every second due to deforestation, there is little comfort in that small fact.Lastly, Jones states that water vapor, not CO2, is the largest greenhouse gas. This is completely false.The real test of a model is its ability to make accurate and measurable predictions -- particularly daring and unexpected predictions. Einstein predicted that light would bend when it passed a large gravitational field, and during a subsequent eclipse it was shown that he was right.

Have the global-warming models made any such risky predictions, and if so, when and how were they independently validated? They claim to be able to predict weather 90 years from now, but can they predict the weather in North America for the next 24 months, on a month-by-month basis, with precision and accuracy? What will be the average monthly temperature by region in each of the next 24 months? The average rainfall? And are these any different from the natural fluctuations that have been recorded for the best 100 years?If this is asking too much, then what can they predict?Come on, guys, show us what you can do! The better your predictions, the more credibility your model will have. Otherwise, why should we believe these models give us anything worth believing? If they can prove their credibility by making accurate predictions, then maybe we will have some reason to believe in them. Otherwise, these models are nothing better than GIGO -- garbage in, garbage out.

SUGGESTION:

They want to give preferential treatment for building permits for "green" buildings. They are advocating social engineering and "re- educating" the public. This should scare every single American.One guest was almost an hour late. He took public transportation. What does that cost in lost productivity, lost family time, etc.? In Seattle the City Council is considering banning beach bonfires, and Minneapolis says you can't idle your car for more than three minutes.For what? A hoax! Man-made global warming. Just look at what politicians (they are experts, after all) are proposing to combat this hoax. Every one of them is expensive, dictate to us what we can drive, how much energy we can use, what we can do for recreation, etc. It is about taking down our economy and capitalism. It is about control and growing government. Our freedom is at stake for a hoax.Our young politicians have jumped on the environmentalist global- warming bandwagon. They are too young to remember the global- cooling mania of the 1970s. Those in their 80s and 90s need to be patient and realize that the enviros' global-warming mania will fade away, just as the fear of an ice age -- spread by the enviros of the 1970s -- faded away.spot activity and global temperature have been almost identical for as long as such records havebeen produced.

According to the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, forests at home and abroad are being destroyed to make toilet paper, facial tissues, paper towels and other disposable paper products.Giant paper producers such as Kimberly-Clark (Scott, Cottonelle, Kleenex and Viva) and Procter & Gamble (Puffs, Charmin and Bounty) are, in the words of NRDC, "forcing the destruction of our continent's most vibrant forests, and devastating the habitat for countless wildlife species in the process."

Much of the virgin pulp used by these large manufacturers comes from Canada's boreal forest. Some 500,000 acres of boreal forest in Ontario and Alberta alone -- key habitat for caribou, lynx, wolves and scores of birds -- are felled each year to provide pulp for disposable paper.Beyond wildlife concerns, Canada's boreal forest, which stretches from coast to coast, comprises perhaps the world's largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon dioxide, so it is critical to keep it intact to help mitigate global warming.Kimberly-Clark uses some 1.1 million cubic meters of trees from Canada's boreal forests each year to produce 465,000 metric tons of pulp. Only 19 percent of the pulp it uses to make home-use disposable paper products comes from recycled sources.Some of its brands, including Kleenex and Scott, contain no recycled content whatsoever. Nor do Procter and Gamble's Bounty, Charmin or Puffs, says NRDC.Another issue with tissue -- and paper overall -- is the use of chlorine for whitening.

Chlorine used in many bleaching processes contributes to the formation of dioxins and furans, chemicals that end up in our air and water and can cause cancer.Safer processes use oxygen compounds and result in paper that is "totally chlorine free"; "process chlorine free" (chlorine free except for recycled fibers that were previously chlorine-bleached); or "elemental chlorine free," which substitutes safer chlorine dioxide for chlorine.NRDC and other groups are pressuring the tissue products industry to change its ways, and are working to educate consumers about their options when buying tissue paper products.NRDC's online "Shopper's Guide to Home Tissue Products" offers reams of free advice on what brands to look for -- and ones to avoid.Marcal is the only household name that NRDC rates high on paper sourcing (100 percent recycled and 40 percent to 60 percent post- consumer content) and chlorine use (process chlorine-free). Brands ranking highest (up to 80 percent post-consumer content and process- chlorine free) include 365 (the Whole Foods brand), Seventh Generation, Earth First and Planet, among others. No brands are totally chlorine free.

In general, consumers should seek out brands that specifically tout use of 100 percent recycled materials with a high percentage (40 percent or more) of post-consumer waste, and not just keywords such as "green" or "eco" on their labels, which may be misleading.Also, before you purchase that next roll of disposable paper think about how you can reduce the amount you use in the first place. Paper tissues, towels and napkins, for example, have reusable options in handkerchiefs and cotton towels and napkins.

The powers that be at Radio Four will have none of that and, no doubt believing that all true nature-lovers must be of the cheerful, up-at-dawn variety, insist on scheduling one of my favourite programmes, Living World, first thing on Sunday. So it was kettles at dawn in my foxy south-west suburb as the lemony-pink light of a February morning crept across the back garden.There's something wonderful about wildlife programmes on radio, which the camera just cannot capture. It's just so much more inspiring to follow in your imagination the voice of a presenter like Lionel Kelleway as he ventures out on location with an expert wildlife-watcher rather than to sit back and be stunned by a series of devastatingly beautiful TV pictures in hyper-realistic technicolour. Even the amazing David Attenborough is guilty of micromanaging his wildlife escapades so that everything looks a bit like a Hollywood movie. I don't know about you but I'm always left by such programmes feeling a twinge of discontent, knowing that realistically I'll never in my life climb up into the Himalayas to see for myself a snow leopard stalking a mountain goat. Wildlife radio does not have to look for camera shots and unbeatable locations; it can linger in bad weather and look for interest in the muddiest marsh and most boring hinterland. I would much rather know what's out there in my backyard, and to see, to really see, the flawed beauty that can be found in even the most ordinary of landscapes.

This week we were looking for dippers on the banks of a fast-flowing river in the heart of Wales in the company of Kelleway and his sidekick Steve Ormerod, of the Cardiff School of Biosciences. Dippers, I discovered, are birds of craggy canyons and flashing, rushing water. You can recognise them from their white breasts and their dipping, bobbing flight as they swoop on to the rocks and shingle in the river looking for blackfly larvae. It's really a songbird related to starlings and has the dumpy shape of a wren, a beautiful chocolate-brown colour with a pure-white breast, but it has adapted to its lifestyle on the river by having more feathers to insulate itself against the ice-cold water and a closeable nostril to prevent water going up its nose. 'Oh, look! You little beauty, ' murmurs Kelleway, so as not to frighten it away.What I should have been writing about, of course, is the BBC Natural History Unit's big venture for 2008, World on the Move. But I'm in a sulk because it's been scheduled at such an awkward time, 11 o'clock on Tuesday mornings, and I know that I'll probably end up missing most of them. (I know, I know, I can always Listen Again, but who really has the time to catch up with missed programmes of an evening, or wants to wrestle with their laptop to do so? ) Why, I wonder, can't they cut short the Today programme by half an hour and give us instead 30 minutes of truly fascinating news every day?

After all, an incredible amount of planning has gone into the series to set up links with experts and observatories around the world so that we can follow the seasonal migratory movements of animals as they happen throughout the year and around the globe, in the hope of finding out more about the awe-inspiring journeys of eels, albatrosses, godwits, toads . . .Last week, for instance, we followed the flight of the willow warbler; a tiny summer migrant to the UK, just 10 cm in size, which each year in spring travels up from the dusty scrublands of the Gambia to nest within the leafy woods of Britain. Brett Westwood travelled south to the Gambia to find them in their natural habitat and to meet Solomon Jallow, one of that country's best birders. Westwood found it strange looking for these little brown birds, olive-green and thin-billed to catch insects, among the acacia bushes of the sub-Sahara rather than hunting for grubs in the bluebell woods of Worcestershire. But as Jallow reminded him, 'You cannot say that they are yours.They are ours!' The warblers come from Africa, not the other way around. It was a lesson in humility, in understanding the bigger picture, in realising that there are things way beyond human imagination and capacity to control.