In this episode of Slow Ride Stories, Erik and Albert head to Hunter Mountain Ski Resort in the Catskill Mountains. They talk to CEO Russ Colton about the impact of shorter ski seasons on his business, and former lift engineer Scott Berwick about the devastation wrought by Hurricane Irene in his nearby town of Hensonville. Along the way, Erik does some serious stunt narrating and answers the burning question: Why are we talking about the weather?

If every car in America had properly inflated tires, we'd cut back on 3-4 percent of our oil consumption. Unsure of how to check your air levels? Umbra never tires of helping out.

Note: Grist's Screw Earth Day campaign may be long over, but we stand behind the sentiment.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of our Ask Umbra advice column, and to celebrate, we’re pulling a favorite gem of eco-advice out of the archives each week.

You may remember chicken farmer Carole Morison from the documentary Food, Inc. or from an article we ran a few months ago about her new, humane farm. Well, we thought we'd share this video of Morison from FixFood, a new advocacy site by Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner.

The footage shows Morison in an open-plan chicken house where she and her husband now own the birds themselves (as opposed to working as contract growers for poultry giant Perdue). And the change in Morison's appearance is almost as striking as the change in the farm. In the documentary she looks frazzled and frustrated as she feeds the birds antibiotics and stoops to remove several chicken carcasses a day from the barn. Here she is clear-eyed and proud -- ready to share her new farm with the world.

In this episode of Slow Ride Stories, Erik and Albert visit Cranberry Hill Farm in Ashford, Conn., where proprietor Art Talmadge talks about his business growing heirloom veggies and heritage breed chickens for sale at local farmers markets. Talmadge says he and his fellow farmers deal with climate change every day, but they don’t often talk about it.

Ugh. Who even invited Brandon?

Ah, age-old rivalries: Crunchy vs. smooth peanut butter. Betty vs. Veronica. Cats or lots of cats? Beer or wine? We aren't about to tell anyone how to eat their peanut butter, but could comparing the environmental impacts of beer and wine settle that battle once and for all? (Hint: No.) From a reader in Norway:

"Due to, among other things, (organic) beer, I ended up in a rather heated discussion on the environment the other day. I’m wondering if you could help clear up a couple of these more or less classic micro-level questions. Which is more environmentally friendly: lighting a cigarette with a match or a lighter? ... Wine or beer?"

Read on for Umbra's answer. She mulls over the numbers and suggests not shying away from beer growlers and wine of the boxed variety.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of our Ask Umbra advice column, and to celebrate, we’re pulling a favorite gem of eco-advice out of the archives each week.

The Hidden Cost of Hamburgers, the latest animated short from the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) -- the folks who brought you last summer’s The Price of Gas -- takes a big-picture look at the web of problems associated with industrial beef production. The video hits all the most important points, but what's most noteworthy is the actual number the reporters arrived at when calculating the hidden -- or externalized -- costs of the average burger: $1.51 (or $72 billion for the 48 billion burgers Americans eat every year).

On the CIR website the video’s co-reporter Sarah Terry-Cobo explains how she and co-reporter/producer Carrie Ching arrived at this number with an environmental consulting firm called Route2 Sustainability. The annotation reads:

We looked at a range of ways beef is produced and came up with an average that is close to how a cow would be raised in Fresno, Calif.: about 1 pound of greenhouse gases per ounce of beef, or about 6½ pounds of greenhouse gases per quarter-pounder. We looked at studies that showed the health costs of treating overweight people and associated illnesses, such as high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes -- that’s about 75 cents per burger. Then we looked at how much water it takes to produce a pound of beef -- that’s about 50 cents per burger. We also looked at the price of a ton of carbon -- that’s remarkably small for the U.S., less than one-hundredth of a penny. But in the European Union, because it has a functioning carbon market, the price would be about a nickel per burger. Daniel Lopez Dias, the lead economist on the calculations, notes that these figures are conservative and don’t include effects from air and water pollution, effects of low wages that slaughterhouse workers receive and the high risk of injury they face, or general effects of urban sprawl.

In this episode of Slow Ride Stories, we join our heroes as they talk climate change with a hot dog salesman named Lenny, who reports that the weather has been “screwy” in his hometown of Otis, Mass. Erik tells us a little about his motorcycle, a sky blue Royal Enfield -- and to get even more of an education, the fellas stop by a Royal Enfield dealership on Enfield St. in Enfield, Conn., where they get the salesman talking about -- you guessed it, the weather.

In this episode of Slow Ride Stories, Erik and Albert visit the Tuthilltown Distillery in Gardiner, N.Y., the first distillery to set up shop in the state since Prohibition. They sample some of Tuthilltown’s fine spirits and talk to Tourmaster Cordell Stahl about how climate change is affecting the Hudson Valley. "Everyone I run across is concerned about it,” he says, “and every, one to a man or woman, feels hopeless."

It may be a drought out there, but it should never be dry down there. Umbra's here to make sure things go smoothly with advice on safe lube and a recipe for making your own out of flax-seed oil. (Bonus tip for There's Something About Mary fans: The concoction can also be used for hair gel.)

This year marks the 10th anniversary of our Ask Umbra advice column, and to celebrate, we’re pulling a favorite gem of eco-advice out of the archives each week.

All Americans (and Canadians!) can talk about these days is the weather, which has been, across the board, off-the-charts weird. Last week, we asked you, Grist readers, to share photos and stories of what you're experiencing, and your responses confirmed what we've been seeing in the news: Practically every region has dealt with some kind of extreme weather, be it heat waves, drought, wildfires, floods, or powerful thunderstorms. Here's a selection of what you shared with us: