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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Ask Umbra on Annie Leonard and The Story of Stuff

Do you ever think about all the resources, the man hours, the stuff that went into making your iPod? Your cell phone? Your computer? The clothes you’re wearing? Annie Leonard did. And then she started talking to other people about it. You may have seen her animated 20-minute viral video, released in 2007, The Story […]

Business + Stealth Greening = Fail

If a business goes green in the forest and no one is around…did it happen? That’s what a climate action plan sounds like if you don’t market it, according to George Washington University business professor, Mark Starik. Failure in Washington to pass cap and trade legislation and failure in Copenhagen to come to an international […]