Our lobby effort and that of others has had a substantial influence on the World Bank's program. We persuaded the Bank to reduce its electric power sector budget from $3.2 billion in FY 1996 to $0.4 billion today. The Bank has reduced its ecological footprint.

In view of the unanticipated speed of global warming, the prospect of chronic shortages of liquid fuels for transportation in the next decades, and continued population growth, we asked President Wolfensohn for a major change in program:

1. The Bank president needs to approach the new US President to urge him to consider measures to educate the American public about their ecological footprint - and to support energy efficiency (and fewer SUV's).
2. The Bank needs to convene a meeting of all the other development banks to ask them to reduce their ecological footprints.
3. The Bank needs to begin an aggressive program of building out energy efficiency, solar and wind renewable energy infrastructures. Delay will only produce bad results.

   The International Finance Corporation (EFC) of the Bank has recently set up the Solar Development Corporation and the Renewable Energy and Efficiency Fund. This needs to be aggressively funded.

4. And finally, the World Bank needs to purse the concept that the Amazon rainforest cannot be saved with only 20 percent of its area in trees. The Hadley Centre computer model projects the Amazon drying out, burning up and turning into a desert as early as 50 years from now, due to global warming.
   
   Copies of: Is Economic Development Still Possible Without Addressing Economic Overshoot of Carrying Capacity Around the World (Sept. 16, 2000) available for $ 10 to our address; An overlapping report on the IFC by Friends of the Earth, Dubious Development, is available on the web at www@foe.org; Sturm, Andreas et at, The Winners and Losers in Global Competition. Verlag Ruegger, Zurich: For English version: E-mail: info@ rueggerverlag.ch (chart from page I comes from the report)

Dioxins came under scrutiny after the spraying of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. The banning of the herbicide 2,4,5-T and of PCBs led to a sharp fall in dioxin in the environment and in humans. But more needs to be done.

For years, dioxins have been found in the diet of the Arctic - fish, seal and caribou meat, and in the breast milk of Inuit mothers. Yet this area is far from major sources of dioxin pollution. Coral Harbor, for example in Nunavut territory lies almost 1,400 miles north of Michigan. How does the dioxin get there? By air.

A study by a team lead by Barry Commoner of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems used an air transport model, created by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to track dioxin fallout in the northern Canadian Nunavut territory to sources in Mexico, the United States and Canada.

US Accounts For Bulk of Arctic Dioxin: Only two thousandths of the total predicted dioxin fallout came from local sources, and 2 to 20 percent from sources outside of North America.

Of the rest, the study found that emission sources in the United States contributed 78-82 percent of dioxin fallout at Coral Harbour, on the largest island at the northern part of Hudson Bay. Canadian sources contributed 11 to 17 percent and Mexican sources 5 to 7 percent of total deposition.

The three largest US point sources of dioxin are municipal and medical waste incinerators, and cement kilns burning hazardous waste. Backyard burning of trash is now believed to be another huge dioxin source.

Tracing dioxin emissions back, Commoner's group found that only 19 sources accounted for 35 percent of the total dioxin deposition at Coral Harbour, 43 sources for 50 percent, and 605 sources for 75 percent.

In 1998, we and eight other groups and experts from the United States and Canada petitioned the CEC for an investigation of the failure of the US Environmental Protection Agency to enforce laws and treaty obligations controlling incinerator emissions that are contaminating Canada and the Great Lakes. (The CEC was established by the North American Free Trade Agreement -NAFFA- to receive complaints about non- enforcement of laws by the parties.)

We asserted that the US EPA was failing to enforce pollution prevention provisions of the Clean Air Act of 1990, the Pollution Prevention Act and similar provisions of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, signed by President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, with regard to incinerators.

The CEC staff agreed with our petition on two issues, and asked the US EPA to provide more information. We expect such a report after the election. Should this effort fail to produce results, we will consider a court case against the Environmental Protection Agency.

It's been a long haul. At the Rio de Janeiro meeting of the United Nations in 1992, a proposal for a treaty to phase out "persistent organic pollutants" (or POPS) Re DDT, PCB'S, and dioxins was approved by many nations including the United States. (Land-Based Sources of Marine Pollution)

In 1995, we petitioned the Secretary General of the United Nations, joined by 70 other groups and experts, asking him to move the treaty negotiations ahead. And now eight years from Rio, we're nearly there. In the first week of December in Johannesburg, South Africa the final technical negotiations for the treaty will hammer out a POP's phase-out treaty text. The treaty is slated for final signing in early 2001. The next difficult step will be to persuade the US Senate to ratify it.

A primary obstacle to good treaty language has been the US delegation - particularly EPA staffers. Good language emphasizes elimination rather than management of POPs and pollution prevention rather than emission control - both concepts opposed by the US negotiators.

Three dozen House Democrats from the Great Lakes States, many from the California delegation and the Governor of Alaska have written Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, asking for US to back off of its opposition to good treaty language.

The effort of the US negotiations to stall on good provisions has everything to do about dioxins from PVC plastics and utility poles, (and undoubtedly has much to do about campaign money).

A report by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, "Just Say No to E-Waste" points out that only 6 percent of computers were recycled in 1998, compared to about 70 percent for major appliances Re refrigerators. Over 315 million computers will become obsolete by the year 2004, and computer junking is happening at a faster rate as computers become obsolete faster. By the year 2005, one computer will become obsolete for every new one put on the market.

All of these machines are heavily contaminated with toxics like lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, PVC plastics and brominated fire retardants.

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition website offers an opportunity to those wanting to have their say.

We continue a ten year effort, opposed stoutly by the Alzheimer's Association of Chicago, to persuade the US Environmental Protection Agency to issue a standard for aluminum in drinking water, and to persuade the National Institute on Aging to promote aluminum chelation as a therapy for Alzheimer's.

We have succeeded over these years, with the help of the Environmental Working Group and NRDC in putting this issue on the agenda of EPA. And we have met with the director of the National Institute on Aging, to learn that their opposition was based on the fact that none of the staff had read any printed medical literature on the subject. Hardly unusual here.

Another Water Study: A drinking water study from France finds a doubling of Alzheimer's Disease risk where drinking water aluminum exceeded 0.1 mg/liter. High silica levels (which binds to aluminum and prevents absorption) reduced AD rates by 26 percent. "These findings support the hypothesis that a high concentration of aluminum in drinking water may be a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease".

With this study, there are now 18 drinking water studies and one food study linking aluminum to Alzheimer's or elderly mental impairment.

Oral Chelator Shown Safe: The University of Toronto found that the injectable drug, desferrioxamine, could remove aluminum from the body and slow the progression of Alzheimer's by 50 percent on average. This is a difficult therapy for elderly people, and many have hoped that an oral drug could be developed.

In February, Cohen et al reported that the oral iron chelator deferiprone (which is also good for aluminum) proved relatively safe in a European human trial.