Latest Articles

Where is the left?

Glenn Greenwald notes the rapid, bipartisan erosion of basic civil liberties, which didn’t even hit a speed bump with the transition to the Obama administration: A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations.  Barack Obama claims the right to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and […]

Now is a very good time to impose a severance tax on oil production in California

California is in the midst of a historic budget crisis threatening public services from Calexico to Yreka. California, alone amongst major oil-producing states, charges no severance tax on oil production. This is fair why?  Discuss.

Obama to establish presidential commission to investigate Gulf oil spill

As hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil continue to gush from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico four weeks after the tragic BP disaster, AP reports that: President Barack Obama will establish the commission by executive order. It will be similar to panels created to investigate the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the […]

NASA: Easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — in temperature record

It was the hottest April on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of the hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record. The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” […]

Hardcore hip-hop for vegans

Dis’ hip-hop duo thinks it’s ridonkulous not to ditch dairy and meat ‘cuz they be eatin’ “only ripe vegetables, fresh fruit, and whole wheat.” Whole foods, fo’ realz. Apparently, the all-natural life prescribed in this song precludes drinking tap water but not smoking weed. —————————————————————————————————————————————————– Like what you see? Sign up to receive The Grist […]

Scientists link ADHD in kids to routine pesticide exposure [UPDATED]

  Writing in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan detailed how, following World War II, nerve-gas factories were converted en masse into synthetic pesticide factories. These weapons reborn as pesticides are organophosphates, as are both Sarin and VX gases. For farmers, they work by, as Wikipedia tastefully puts it, “irreversibly inactivating” an essential neurotransmitter within insects […]

Nestle to save orangutans, tropical forests, and our climate

Photo courtesy Frank Peters via FlickrFinally … some good news! Today, Nestle, the world’s biggest food and drinks company, announced that it will cease using products that drive the tropical rainforest destruction. This is great news for our environment in what has otherwise been a bleak few weeks. President Obama continues to dig in (or […]

The real trouble from the oil spill is brewing deep under the sea

It’s been almost a month since the Deepwater Horizon exploded and began spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  But it’s not your typical oil spill; because of its depth and distance from shore, it has so far brought no images of fouled beaches or blackened, dead sea birds. Whatever damage is being done by […]

MMS goes under the spotlight

Last week, execs from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton took their Capitol Hill beatdown.  This week, federal regulators will be led into the ring.  With Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar at the front of the line, they’ll appear before three Senate committees tomorrow and then a House committee on Wednesday, at which members of Congress […]

Oil now threatening Gulf’s cradles of biodiversity, its reefs

As corals are particularly susceptible to oil detergents and dispersed oil, the results of these assays rules out the use of any oil dispersant in coral reefs and in their vicinity.–From a 2007 paper by Israeli researchers, published in The Journal of Environmental Science (USGS photo)After reading those words a few days ago, I became […]