Latest Articles
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Citizens gather in Washington to end 'mountain bombing' of Appalachia
More than 200 citizen lobbyists from across the nation gathered in Washington, D.C. this week to urge Congress to pass legislation curbing mountaintop removal. This especially destructive form of coal mining involves blasting off the tops of Appalachian mountains and dumping the waste into headwater streams below, a practice known as “valley fills.” The activists […]
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500 Words for Change in America
Folks across the country know something is wrong. There’s just something about the system we’ve created over several decades that is inherently flawed. Some blame the government, others big banks, still others blame political parties, but all agree that there’s something that’s just not quite working the way it should. People are losing homes, jobs, […]
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Your street is fat
These California designers and their imaginations. Steve Price shows people what their towns might look like if they were rebuilt along Smart Growth principles. At Narrow Streets: Los Angeles, David Yoon takes comically overbuilt streets in L.A. and Photoshops them down to a human scale. Here’s his reinvention of Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park: On […]
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Tasting five organic French roasts leads to buzzkill
Photos: Jason Houston To say that I love coffee is a big, fat lie. I need coffee in a chemically dependent way. Its effect upon me is essentially the reverse of those faces-of-meth photos. There are two things that can really screw up a good coffee buzz (OK, three if you count skim milk). First […]
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A Cleveland mall turns lost retail space into farm stand
Photo: Fast CompanyShopping malls, those bastions of American consumerism, have not been immune to the recent economic downturn. In a recent piece by our own Greg Lindsay, we looked at the impending decline of the mall, which is part of the “single-use environment” category of real estate development that will slowly disappear over the next […]
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Grist’s rejected punny headlines from the week of 1 March 2010
If you’ve ever wondered how Grist’s famous (and mysterious) pun machine works, wonder a little less. We present you with a glimpse into its inner workings: a list of rejected punny headlines scooped up from the last week’s digital cutting room floor. Please, enjoy the witticisms and groan at the miss-icisms. Story: James Cameron: I’m […]
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Why pricing emissions is the least important policy
Last week, I documented that the public supports trains and auto efficiency standards and renewable requirements, along with other policies sometimes slandered as “command & control” over emissions pricing. This week: some historical perspective on why the public is right, and mainstream environmental groups are wrong. Historically U.S. infrastructure, the basis on which this nation […]
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Can EPA run a cap-and-trade program?
The Obama administration has made very clear that they want Congress, rather than EPA, to take the lead in creating a national response to climate change. Despite their oft-repeated preference for congressional action, recently, EPA head Lisa Jackson had to once again reiterate that the agency had no plans to do a carbon cap. There […]
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On rooftops worldwide, a solar water heating revolution
The harnessing of solar energy is expanding on every front as concerns about climate change and energy security escalate, as government incentives for harnessing solar energy expand, and as these costs decline while those of fossil fuels rise. One solar technology that is really beginning to take off is the use of solar thermal collectors […]
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010 Reframing Nuclear Power as an Ally of Renewable Energy
Photo courtesy of, ah, Bitchcakes via Flickr Alec Baldwin weighs in, but which is better, coal or nuclear? The official response to that question by most environmental organizations is to say “neither.” Neither? Are they are privy to a secret consensus finding of multiple, detailed, peer-reviewed, scientific studies which have demonstrated that when all negative […]
