Latest Articles
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Soda lobbyists say the funniest things
iStockphotoFor sheer shark-jumping, fridge-nuking outrageousness, you just can’t beat the American Beverage Association. In a must-read/listen NPR report, the ABA’s senior vice president for science policy, Maureen Storey, made the claim that soda should play a crucial role in children’s hydration needs: …Children who have been exercising may not drink enough water to get back […]
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NYT’s superweeds coverage is welcome but myopic
iStockphoto It’s a happy day when the New York Times treads some of Grist’s well-worn paths. This time, it’s about how overuse of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide has given rise to “superweeds” and an exhausting chemical treadmill: Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of […]
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ComEd offers Illinois $500M in exchange for guaranteed profits
The gaul of this is hard to put to words. Commonwealth Edison, one of Illinois’ regulated utilities is seeking to take advantage of the state’s budget crisis by offering the state $500 million in exchange for a guarantee of the utility’s future profits. If there’s a better case to be made that a regulated utility […]
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Colbert and Letterman mock BP for wrecking the Gulf
Personally, I think it’s a time to be sober and try to comfort our beleaguered oil companies. But here are two other approaches. Stephen Colbert’s oil cleanup plan goes awry: And Letterman provides the Top Ten BP Excuses (listed out below the video): TOP TEN BP EXCUSES 10. The Gulf of Mexico was overdue […]
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Pundits speak: Oil spill makes climate bill less likely
Satellite image: GeoEyeThe political fallout from the BP oil leak is proving just as difficult to measure as the ecological and economic damage. But three political bloggers who’ve been paying attention to the fight for clean-energy legislation say the odds of a bill passing the Senate are lower than ever. Bradford Plumer asks “Could The […]
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The choices we'll have to make to save the world
I was in the rec center pool on a snowy May afternoon recently talking to my friend Dave as my kids sloshed around in what struck me as a massive inoculation tank. As usual, nerds that we are, we talked about energy efficiency in our houses. Dave recently had an energy an audit, and like […]
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Any drilling moratorium must be accompanied by a commitment to conserve
New America Foundation’s Lisa Margonelli makes a crucial point about the Gulf disaster in an elegant New York Times op-ed: Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to […]
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Green cars do not make green cities
Cross-posted from PubliCola. In response to last week’s post about how cars cause significant greenhouse gas emissions in addition to what comes out of the tailpipe, some commenters contended that even so, car-dependency is not a problem because cars can be as energy-efficient per passenger-mile as buses and trains. But that perspective is classic “can’t […]
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Ecosystem conservation vs. renewable-energy development: Let’s hike on it
Adam Bradley, hiking for an important cause.Sometimes the push for clean energy runs up against the push to preserve unspoiled wild areas (see: Cape Wind). Big wind farms and solar-power systems are being sited in remote and undeveloped spots, and long transmission lines are being planned to carry their output to population centers, where the […]
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Rock the house [VIDEO]
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, so does that mean that people who live in stone houses shouldn’t throw glass? Guess we should ask Antón García-Abril and Ensamble Studio, who, according to Treehugger, have built La Trufa, or truffle, a small holiday house that looks like a big rock on the north […]
