Latest Articles

Dirty South: Youth farms keep New Orleans teens in school gardens

The effort solves an important riddle: how to keep students engaged with food after eighth grade.

Truthy consequences: A world without Grist

It’s a cruel world out there, but at Grist we work hard to keep it habitable — or at least to keep you chuckling as it goes to hell in a carbon-colored handbasket. Yes, you could blow your cash on other things (Shake Weights!) instead of donating to Grist. But imagine a future without Grist […]

As Economic Growth Fails How Do We Live? Part I: The Four Horsemen of the Economic Apocalypse

As recently as a year ago it was considered heresy to suggest economic growth would not soon resume. Now, however, as The Big Engine That Couldn’t has faltered for several years, it is becoming increasingly clear the economy is running off the tracks.  Both investors and the public are beginning to realize the long-revered goal of endless economic growth […]

21st Century Activism: Why big business doesn’t always have to be the bad guy

Today is a great day for the future of the IT sector.   Over the past few years, we’ve campaigned hard against Facebook to get them to commit to clean energy – specifically, we wanted them to change their siting policy-the decisions that they make about how to power their massive football-stadium-sized data centers. When […]

Zen and the art of urban transportation

This is excerpted from a longer story in GRID Chicago. To read the original, which includes a (somewhat hair-raising) ride to work with the commissioner, click here. When forward-thinking Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) Commissioner Gabe Klein reported for work on May 16 as part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new administration, it marked a sea […]

Finally: New air toxics rules for power plants

Cross-posted from the World Resources Institute. The post was written by Nicholas Bianco, senior associate for WRI’s climate and energy program. As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prepares to release new mercury and air toxics standards, some people may be wondering about the history and timeline for these standards. One senator recently claimed that […]

Infographic: Fracking violations in Pennsylvania

The orange dots here are natural gas extraction operations with one or more environmental violations. But, you know, deer and rainbows! Click through to NPR's interactive graphic to find out more about each operation and how many laws they're flouting. (You can also get more detailed maps and information by county.)

Solar power can fit on existing land use

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. While large-scale solar creates contention between environmental advocates and renewable energy proponents, the truth is that there are thousands of acres in already developed land where solar can easily fit.  This infographic explains a few of […]

Congress passes the wrong pipeline bill

It turns out Republicans and Democrats truly can work together to craft a bipartisan pipeline safety bill that satisfies both parties! And then they can accidentally pass the old version instead. The bill, which laid out new penalties for pipeline safety violations following a deadly explosion last year, was laboriously hashed out in a bipartisan […]

Police seize computers in connection with Climategate hacking

When the University of East Anglia's servers were hacked and emails stolen, the victims — the climate scientists whose largely innocuous messages got misrepresented all over the blogosphere — were subjected to multiple independent investigations (and cleared). The hackers? Not so much. Nobody really knew who did it or apparently cared. But evidently they're cracking […]