U.S. Falls on Environmental Index

Pick up your sox or we will write you a nasty letter - and then apply for the grant.
In the new Environmental Performance Index, put together every two years by researchers at Yale and Columbia University, the United States dropped from 39th to 61st. "Countries that take seriously the environment as a policy challenge do improve, and those that don't deteriorate," Daniel C. Esty, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, told the New York Times. "Both the U.S. and China are suffering because they're industrial and haven't been paying much attention to environmental policy." (China dropped from 105th to 121st.) Each country is given a score based on performance in areas including preservation of habitat, environmental health and reductions in greenhouse gases, air pollution and waste. (View the index at epi.yale.edu.) Iceland, which gets all of its power from renewable resources, placed first on this year's list. The complete rankings will be released tomorrow at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—another country that ranked in the top tier. Read more.