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Friday music blogging: Band of Horses again

The most hotly anticipated album of the year, for me anyway, is officially dropping next week: Infinite Arms is the looong-awaited follow-up to Band of Horses’ 2007 Cease to Begin, one of the best albums of the last decade. I’m happy to report that it is positively transcendent. Much has changed since the last album. […]

Feds push solar solution to coal addiction

Infinia’s PowerDishPhoto: PowerPlay SolarThe Obama administration last week gave a $62 million boost to efforts to make solar power truly competitive with coal. “The projects announced today will seek to improve component and system designs to extend operation [of concentrated solar power projects] to an average of about 18 hours per day, a level of […]

Wasteful bandit gets wiped out by police

One area is proving to be fairly immune to the green wave: convenience store robberies. (The Mob, on the other hand, finds green to be a breeze.) Flush with excrement excitement at the prospect of loads o’ moolah, 29 year-old Josh Nelson of Lincoln, Neb., left his reusable ski mask at home and improvised with […]

Obama’s unconvincing ‘anger’ at BP and lax regulators

Obama giving his “angry” speechPresident Obama has so far declined to give voice to the connection between the massive, stomach-churning fossil-fuel disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the massive, stomach-turning damage that fossil fuels wreak every day. He hasn’t used his bully pulpit to highlight the opportunities to use energy more intelligently and gather […]

Agribiz giant ADM gets taste of Hugo Chavez’s wrath

Longtime Grist readers might recall reading here about a Mexico-based transnational company called Gruma. I’ve written two articles (in 2006 and 2007) about how, after Mexico’s privatization bonanza in the early ’90s, this well-connected company managed to industrialize one of the world’s greatest foodstuffs, the tortilla, strip it of its flavor and much of its […]

10 reasons not to own a car in the city [PHOTOS]

The woes of owning a car run the gamut from pricey maintenance to sitting in traffic, parking tickets to CO2 emissions. And even if you’re not an auto owner, you’ve probably dealt with the hassle of an errant car alarm going off at 2 a.m. or some putz taking up three spaces in your lot […]

Living Buildings, Living Cities, and $125,000 up for grabs

$125,000 to play SimCity? Sort of. A new contest from the Cascadia Region Green Building Council is offering serious cash for the best visual renderings of an existing city transformed into a place that’s sustainable. Like, really sustainable. The Living City Design Competition is calling for: Photo-realistic three-dimensional modeling and renderings (a napkin sketch won’t […]

Top 10 countries ruining the planet — and more news from around the world

We’re #2! We’re #2! Sure enough, here’s a new study out of the University of Adelaide in Australia, naming the Top 10 Countries Ruining the Planet, and the U.S. isn’t even the leader.  It ranks second behind Brazil, followed by China, Indonesia, and Japan.  The research focused solely on environmental impact, using seven indicators of […]

Solid at the core: the integrity of the emission limits in the American Power Act

David Doniger posted an overview based on NRDC’s “first read” of the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act discussion draft. Here I will delve more deeply into the environmental integrity of the core emission limits in the bill. There is good news here. While the reductions fall well short of what the latest science suggests is needed, […]

BP chief says catastrophic oil spill really not all that big

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” — Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum, attempts to put the now-underestimated Deepwater Horizon oil spill into perspective with that big, blue ocean thing