North Carolina lawmakers are rushing to protect the state's car dealers from Tesla's subversive direct-to-consumer business model.

Silicon Valley-based Tesla sells its all-electric roadsters and sedans online and over the phone. It seems to be doing a pretty good job of it so far. It doesn't sell its cars on the concrete lots or in the sterile showrooms of car salesmen, who take commissions that hike prices. The company considers dealerships unnecessary.

And that rubs the powerful North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association the wrong way.

The association wants a piece of the Tesla pie, and it's accustomed to getting its way. State law already bars anybody other than a licensed dealer from selling more than four motor vehicles in a year.

The association has backed Senate Bill 327, sponsored by state Sen. Tom Apodaca (R), which would broaden the scope of that protectionist law to also cover internet and telephone sales.

Thames Water, which provides drinking water to London, wants to start providing Londoners with recycled wastewater. And 63 percent of people who took a totally unscientific Guardian poll said they would be fine with this.

This is a self-selected sample of people, but it is at least a little bit surprising that more people did not kick and scream and yell, "No, I will not drink other people's filtered pee -- even if I can't tell the difference!"

The Guardian explains the plan:

Essentially, instead of allowing wastewater that has been treated in sewage works to go back into the river and flow into the sea, the company proposes to put that water upstream, where it would mix with river water and go into a drinking-water treatment works.

Although some treated wastewater, dumped into the Thames upstream, already makes it way into London's drinking water, this plan would increase the concentration to as much as 50 percent.

You may have read about some hardworking, smart, and civic-minded students who, back in 2011 and 2012, fought to keep their local river park open. Fought and won, actually. Well, students from that same school, Grass Valley Charter in Grass Valley, Calif., are now on to another battle -- with the help of students from other area schools, they want to push Nevada County to put a ban on single-use plastic bags and start charging for paper bags. These kids are unstoppable.

They are starting their campaign in the county seat, Nevada City, and made their desires known at a Nevada City Council meeting on May 8 when several of them presented some rather sobering research they have done on the subject of single-use plastic bags. One kid talked about the Pacific gyres, massive globs of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean, and the effect this was having on the health of the oceans in general and most acutely, on sea life. Another pointed out that Californians use 400 plastic bags every second. Another read a list of the 75 California communities that have already made similar proposed laws around single-use plastic bags and urged Nevada County to join them. Another posed the question, "Do you really want me to grow up in a world without sea turtles?" Who could say yes to that?

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

Let’s say I win the lottery, and want to use my $50 million winnings to save the planet. For example, I could fund enviro groups. I could fund political campaigns to defeat Big Oil’s congressmen. Or I could provide subsidies to buyers of electric cars. But where would I find the biggest bang for my big bucks?

Hypothetically yours,
Mark M.
Athens, Ohio

A. Dearest Mark,

I would suggest you donate it to Grist. As it happens, we’re in the middle of a fundraising campaign, and $50 million would go a long way. (So would $5, come to think of it.) Imagine all the cruelty-free peppermint tea I could buy with that kind of cashola!

Your question is an intriguing one, and I will gladly use it as a break from discussions of dish soap and lightbulbs, not that I don’t love those too. Let’s indulge in a bit of good old-fashioned fantasizing.

When a reader asked Grist advice maven Umbra Fisk how she would spend a $50 million lottery windfall on the planet, she indulged in some quick-pick fantasizing, rounding up ideas from a few leaders in the field. Here are their full responses:

Erika Allen, Chicago and national projects director, Growing Power:

My son, who just turned 5 in March, and I discussed this. He would buy buildings in the town and make sure everyone has a nice place to live and lots of strawberries to eat. (There is a longer story here about how he connects homelessness and food.) Along the same vein, [I would put it into] working to create community food systems that are closed loop ... food, energy, housing, education, holistic health in a manner that constantly recirculates wealth and monetizes everyone’s contributions and inputs.

David Roberts, senior staff writer, Grist:

You're probably not clueless enough to think real life hippos are cute and cuddly, but did you know hippos are Africa's deadliest animal? Paul Templer, a river guide showing tourists the sights near Victoria Falls, near the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia back in 1996, found this out the hard way when he almost lost his life inside a hippo's mouth.

Yes, sure, fine, it is possible to get a somewhat healthy sandwich at Subway. It will have watery, shredded lettuce on it, and peppers, and maybe avocado. It will taste like nothing. And let's be real: That is not what people are ordering at Subway. They are ordering the foot-long Italian sub, with its layers of (relatively) delicious, fatty meat. Or they are ordering the Big Philly Cheesesteak.

The result of these choices is that, despite Subway's enormously successful advertising campaign pitching it as a healthy fast-food alternative, the chain is feeding just as much crappy food to people as McDonald's is. Or, as the New York Daily News reports:

"We found that there was no statistically significant difference between the two restaurants, and that participants ate too many calories at both," public health scholar Dr. Lenard Lesser, who led the study, said in a statement.

UPDATE: Call off the snail-hunting committee! The giant snail in question is not a giant African snail but a rosy wolfsnail, which is considerably more benign and also sounds more like a Doctor Who reference.

Houston, Texas, is the latest place to find itself the unlucky host to a rather large African snail, which, sadly, does not have any plans to benefit its newly acquired habitat. A woman working in a Houston garden stumbled on a single snail, but officials fear this was only one snail among more, and possibly many.

In case you were under the misapprehension that being a giant African snail involves a minimum of nefarious activity, well, sorry. These snails are pretty evil, even if they don't mean to be.

TV isn't exactly an environmentally friendly form of entertainment. Ever-improving screens and all their associated gadgets need, according to the law of conspicuous consumption, to be replaced as soon as financially possible once a better model comes along, and they're energy-vampires.

But no matter how much energy they suck up, TVs are still more environmentally friendly than those energy-intensive creations known as children.

And, as Brad Plumer writes at the Washington Post, as a country's TV ownership grows and more women are exposed to media, the fertility rate begins to decline. He explains:

This isn’t as bizarre as it seems. A 2009 paper (pdf) by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found that the introduction of cable television “is associated with significant decreases in the reported acceptability of domestic violence towards women and son preference, as well as increases in women’s autonomy and decreases in fertility.” It’s far from certain that television alone is driving these changes, but the evidence is suggestive.

Look how this plays out in India, for instance:

A few weeks ago, Noluck Tafuruka was arrested by police in Zimbabwe for possessing a rifle without a license. But he's doing better than his partner, Solomon Manjoro. The two men allegedly snuck into Zimbabwe's Charara National Park with the intention of bagging some valuable wild animals.

But one elephant that they tried to take down had had it up to here with poachers -- and when you’re an elephant, “up to here” is pretty high. The elephant charged Manjoro and trampled him.

Treehugger points out:

In recent years, poaching of elephants and rhinos in wildlife reserves in Africa has spiked dramatically, fueled largely by demand for their prized tusks and horns.