San Francisco Chronicle

While the BP oil spill has been labeled the worst environmental catastrophe in recent U.S. history, a biofuel is contributing to a Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" the size of New Jersey that scientists say could be every bit as harmful to the gulf.

California is on the cutting edge of America's efforts to reverse climate change, right? And the Bay Area is on the cutting edge of California, right? By Tom Steinbach, Mike Howe

Extreme scarcity could be disastrous for U.S. economy. By Erica Etelson

Steven Bustin lives with his wife in a four-bedroom, 2,600-square-foot house in Novato. He drives a gray 2006 Audi A4. He earns more than $200,000 a year in salary and commissions from his job as head of sales for Podaddies, an Internet startup that sells online video ads. By Sam Zuckerman

The Bush administration has violated a 2004 congressional deadline for presenting the latest scientific research about global warming to lawmakers and the public and must submit its report by next spring, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. By Bob Egelko

The 40-year Palestinian tragedy. By Shlomo Ben-Ami

Emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, the main culprit in global warming, have increased three times faster in recent years than they did in the 1990s, international climate researchers reported today. By David Perlman

Bush Could Blame Democrats, but Americans See it as his War. By Edward Epstein

Iraqi psychiatrists are seeing what they call a disturbing spike in mental health disorders as the war passes its fourth anniversary -- a problem compounded by Iraq's lack of mental health workers, facilities and services. By James Palmer

With the Bush administration and Congress fighting over how to rebuild the nuclear weapons complex, one of the country's top weapons designers said he believes it is time for the United States to consider a radical shift in policy that would ultimately eliminate the nuclear arsenal.

San Franciscans and other Bay Area residents enjoy some of the nation's highest quality drinking water, with pristine Sierra snowmelt from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir as our primary source.

Nuclear missile modified for conventional attack on Iran could set off alarm in Russia. By Eric Rosenberg

Ron Miguel, a retired florist and native San Franciscan, can remember when a middle-class family could buy a home in the city without breaking the bank. But over the decades, he has watched that change. By Tyche Hendricks

Listening in? Electronic Frontier Foundation accuses AT&T of violating users' digital privacy. By Bob Egelko

White House monitors their media contacts. By Juliet Eilperin

President Bush is taking the advice of Sen. John Warner, a Republican Party elder, who urged him to get out and sell the American public on the Iraq war. By Helen Thomas

The glaciers are melting and receding. The sea rises to swallow islands and low-lying nations. Factories spew toxic chemicals into rivers and oceans, killing fish and the livelihoods of generations. By Andrew Lam

Mounting evidence has forced an end to any serious scientific debate on whether humans are causing global warming. This is an event of historical significance, but one obscured from public view by the arcane technical literature and the noise generated by perpetual partisans. By Kurt M. Cuffey

Bush aide Karen Hughes endures another round of criticism for Middle East policies. By Glenn Kessler

The White House's strategy to make John Roberts the next chief justice has been the very model of meticulous planning, by contrast to its utter clueless-ness in dealing with Katrina. By Robert B. Reich

A long caravan of white vans led by an Army humvee rolled Monday through New Orleans' Bywater district, a poor, mostly black neighborhood, northeast of the French Quarter. By Cecilia M. Vega

After attending Friday prayer services in Tehran, Sean Penn, who visited Iran in June in the days before the country's presidential election, prepares for a meeting with the son of a former president of Iran. Mehdi Rafsanjani was also a campaign director for his father. By Sean Penn

It's the week preceding presidential elections. Candidates attack one another's credibility. Activists push to boycott the vote. Traffic and pollution choke the cities. Leftists support a no-win idealist. Preachers guide their flocks toward political starboard. By Sean Penn

During a public lecture in San Francisco last month, Jared Diamond, the mega-selling author of "Guns, Germs and Steel,'' became the latest and most prominent environmental intellectual to endorse nuclear power as a necessary response to global warming. By Mark Hertsgaard

Villagers in Lawsuit Say 4 People Died - Oil Company Questions if Attacks Took Place. By David R. Baker

Group Wants Limits on Access Allowed Law Enforcement. By Edward Epstein

In early election results, Shiite cleric's alliance trouncing Washington's favorite. By Borzou Daragahi

The great election of 2004 proved what many of us have known for a long time: California is an island, tenuously connected to a country ironically named the United States. By Adam Werbach

Gasoline prices have reached their highest mark ever in the United States -- just as oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell has slashed its petroleum reserve estimates by 20 percent, after a monumental accounting scandal.

Statement by American Geophysical Union's council warns temperature change is real and human-caused