Toni Vernelli was one of two women recently featured in a London Daily Mail story about environmentalists who take their carbon footprint very, very seriously.

So seriously, in fact, that Vernelli aborted a pregnancy and, by age 27, had herself sterilized. Baby-making, she says, is “selfish” and “all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet.”

Because Toni and her husband, Ed, are childless and vegan, they say they can justify one long-haul airplane trip per year and still remain carbon neutral.

Sarah Irving is another like-minded nature-nurturer. She and fiance Mark Hudson decided on him having a vasectomy to prevent the possibility of an inconvenient life interfering with their carbon-perfect ones.

Bush, on Sept. 27, announced that his administration was looking at ways to reduce air traffic congestion. The president urged Congress to look at legislation to modernize the FAA, and instructed Peters to report back to him quickly about ways to ensure that air passengers are treated appropriately and progress is made to ease congestion.

Peters said at the time she was asking airlines to meet to formulate a plan to improve scheduling at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, one of the nation’s busiest. If no solution is found, she said, the department is prepared to issue a scheduling reduction order.

“Look into your own soul, and see the damage you have done to an innocent human being and his family,” Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), the panel’s chairman, told them at the hearing’s close. “It will make no difference to the committee what you do, but it will make you better human beings, if you recognize your own responsibility for the enormous damage your policies have created.”

In the end, politicians displayed virtually no sympathy for Yahoo’s plight. Lantos called on Yahoo to account for what he called “spineless and irresponsible actions” in its Chinese operations.

Mrs. Showalter compared prices in 13 states and Washington, all of which have adopted market pricing for industrial users, with the rest of the nation. The 13 states are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Texas. Montana is returning to regulated pricing.

Under the rules of these markets, every electric power generator whose bid is accepted gets the highest price paid to supply power, called a clearance price or single-price market. In most auctions, each supplier gets the price at which they offered to sell, known as an as-bid market.

One result of clearance pricing is that nuclear power plants, which must run at a steady rate even when demand for power is minimal, have at times collected $990 per kilowatt-hour for power they had offered to give away during low-demand hours.