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New York Times blows the Dust Bowl story

County Commissioner: “There’s no economic growth whatsoever. It’s going to have to be wind energy or we’ll die.” Actual NY Times caption:  “A church made an apt request.” Media miscoverage of climate change comes in many forms.  We still have false balance between climate science and denial, contrary to the myth of flawed analyses.  And […]

Breaking: The earth is breaking … but how about that Royal Wedding?

One commenter pointed out that the (HuffPost) icon I used for the post on Bin Laden was actually a good symbol for the “Breaking Earth.” Obviously, large parts of the Earth are breaking up at an unprecedented rate — with dire implications for humanity: JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on […]

Tornadoes, extreme weather, and climate change

UPDATE:  It is unfortunate that NYT blogger Andy Revkin has chosen to inappropriately shorten and then take out of context the nuanced statements of a number of actual scientific experts, like Trenberth (cited bel0w).  Ironically, Revkin supports a too-little, too-late energy technology development strategy can’t possibly avert catastrophic global warming — nor can it generate […]

Discovery of Fukushima contamination in areas identified by Greenpeace

TEPCO, the owners of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, just announced that they found contamination levels 100 to 1,000 times higher than normal in sediment from the Fukushima coast. TEPCO did the sediment testing late last week — in areas Greenpeace identified for testing in our research plan — after we were […]

Ontario's 'buy local' energy program growing rapidly

In January, we released a report – Maximizing Jobs From Clean Energy: Ontario’s ‘Buy Local’ Policy – highlighting the impressive job forecast (43,000 jobs) from Ontario’s CLEAN Contract (a.k.a. feed-in tariff) program.  News from the province suggests that the program is overcoming hurdles and continuing to grow. Forecasts for 2011 indicate that Ontario could become […]

Grist Hackathon Hangover Report

We just completed our first news hackathon afternoon.  The purpose of the event was to give everyone at Grist the opportunity to try out new tools and ways of working together.  The specific challenge of the day:  given 4 hours, tell a relevant story with data.  That’s it!  No more guidance was given (well OK […]

Leaf or MiEV?

According to <a href=”http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/reservation/index”>this website</a>, Nissan is about to start taking reservations again. <blockquote>Beginning May 1, Nissan will reopen reservations to selected US customers who were registered before April 20, 2011 in states currently selling the Nissan LEAF™ (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington). Following this early-reservation period, reservations then will open to […]

China may have bankrupted itself building high-speed rail

We're all about high-speed rail, but not if it's going to bankrupt the world's second largest economy. Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University and a longtime critic of high-speed rail, said he worries that the cost of [the country's high speed rail] project might have created a hidden debt bomb that threatens China’s […]

Solar PV gets grid parity for 78 million Americans with 'balance of system' best practices

Cutting non-module solar photovoltaic (PV) costs with best design practices could make solar PV cost less than grid electricity for more than 25 percent of Americans. Half of the installed cost of a solar PV array is the solar module, but the other half (the “balance of system”) involves labor, assembly, and other components. With […]

Obama Has His First Opponent To Campaign Against: Extremism

In 2008, Americans were fed up. Wars, a terrible economy, dishonesty, a drift from our core beliefs. That November, Barack Obama said, “Change,” which may basically have meant, “Not that.” Not that direction for America. Not that economic policy. And it worked. America didn’t want that. America wanted something different. Now, reasonable people can debate […]