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Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)

Dick Durbin In this letter to Grist reader and Illinois constituent Kevin Wolz, Sen. Dick Durbin signals strong support for the Kerry-Boxer climate bill: Dear Mr. Wolz, Thank you for contacting me regarding the creation of a national “cap-and-trade” program to address global warming. I appreciate hearing from you. Global warming is one of the most […]

Copenhagen news & views: follow all the latest

There were plenty of hints over the past month that world leaders would down-shift expectations for drafting a new, international climate treaty in Copenhagen next month. Still, when news broke over the weekend that key nations, including the United States, were planning to push a final treaty into 2010, it came as shock to climate […]

Why the USDA has no business overseeing conditions on factory farms, and more

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. —— USDA chief Tom Vilsack, with special friends: Will this guy ever get serious about the swine flu/swine farm link? Why isn’t the federal government seriously investigating the possible CAFO-swine flu link? I’ve posed that question several times recently, most […]

NASA reports hottest June to October on record

Fast on the heels of the hottest June to September on record*, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that last month was tied for the second hottest September on record (after 2005). Unlike NOAA, which announced its October global analysis with a major “State of the Climate” monthly update, NASA just quietly updates its […]

Best. Review. Ever.

Freakonomics got super freaky. And super wrong. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are to blame for the global financial crisis. See, back in 2005, they wrote “Freakonomics,” a wildly successful book brimming with interesting stories about why incentives matter and how actions have unintended consequences. Indeed, incentives do matter, and actions (or publications) […]

World leaders say Copenhagen to be a stepping stone

Some very good news on the international front, as the UK Guardian reports today: During a hastily convened breakfast meeting in Singapore, the US president supported a Danish plan to salvage something from the moribund negotiations by aiming for a broad political agreement and postponing contentious decisions on emissions targets, financing and technology transfer…. The […]

The environMENTALIST contest

One of my guilty pleasures is the CBS crime show, The Mentalist.  One-time fake psychic Patrick Jane uses his powers of observation and deduction to figure out the answer to the mystery before everyone else. So here’s the contest for all you would-be environ-Mentalists.  Use your amazing powers of observation and deduction to figure out […]

SuperFreakonomics coauthor replies to “scathing review”

On Monday, The New Yorker published Elizabeth Kolbert’s lengthy review of SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.  In her 2400-word review, titled “Hosed:  Is there a quick fix for the climate?” she writes: Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what […]

Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb. This graphic shows the […]

One doctor’s quest to sound the alarm on ‘wind turbine syndrome’

By the time the pediatrician Nina Pierpont settled in upstate New York, she had already built a rather diverse and full career. As the Connecticut native tells it, she studied birds in the Amazon jungle on her way to earning a Ph.D. in behavioral ecology, then enrolled in medical school, completing a degree and practicing […]