Latest Articles

Hotter summers will pose public health challenges

In the dog days of August, you can be forgiven for not wanting to think about how it could get hotter, much hotter, in summers to come. Nevertheless, Climate Central, a nonprofit focused on communicating climate science, released a study today forecasting what summers might look like in 21 American cities in 2050. Climate Central’s […]

Global warming set to intensify August heat, Climate Central study finds

Climate Central’s analysis found that New York City will see a three-fold increase in the number of 90-degree-plus days in August by midcentury.Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist By some measures, the Chicago and New York of tomorrow are likely to be hotter than the Atlanta of today — at least in August. Climate […]

NRDC Action Fund goes on offense against opponents of climate action

The Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund is bashing representatives who voted against the House climate bill as “villains” and lauding reps who voted for it as “heroes” in a new campaign. With TV and newspaper ads and a website, the campaign is aimed at states whose senators are on the fence about passing a […]

Seattle voters toss disposable bag fee

Image: Tom Twigg/GristIn the end, elections always come down to numbers. In the case of Seattle’s Aug. 18 primary — a vote that would decide whether the city would adopt a 20-cent fee for paper and plastic bags at local stores — the most important number turned out to be not the 20 cents nor […]

Houston’s “Energy Citizen” rally was just a glorified company picnic

Sarah McDonald at the scene.Yesterday the Public Citizen Texas team drove down to Houston to crash the American Petroleum Institute’s “Energy Citizen” event. Billed as a “grassroots” rally against the cap-and-trade bill currently before Congress, this event was nothing more than a company picnic. About 2,500 energy employees were brought by charter bus to the […]

Neighborhood stores: An overlooked strategy for fighting global warming

Our new neighborhood fresh food market.What I find most striking about my mother-in-law’s memories of the neighborhood where I live, and where she spent her childhood in the 1940s, is how many businesses our little residential section of town once boasted. Back then, there was a grocery store, hardware store, barber shop, two drugstores, a […]

Coal coloring book teaches kids all about dirty energy

Update below The coal-industry group Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy, which doesn’t actually allow families to join, has a wonderfully crappy coloring book for children. Let’s have a look! Plot, character development, and drawings that kids would actually want to color don’t seem to be priorities for “Eyes for Frosty.” At least it […]

Families not allowed in ‘families for coal’ group

The word “family” serves as code so often in political discourse that it can be tough to know what it really means. In the case of a Pennsylvania coal-industry group, it seems to mean, quite clearly, “not families.” Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy (FORCE, naturally) does not allow families to join, according to […]

GM: Innovators or crackheads?

Some assembly required.GM.comAt one of our news meetings last week, I mentioned a story I had seen. “GM says the Chevy Volt will get 230 miles per gallon,” I told my fellow editors. The number struck me funny because it was ludicrously far beyond any current mpg rating, and because GM acknowledged that the Volt, […]

‘The Cove’ pulls no punches in documenting Japanese dolphin hunt

The Cove documents a the hunting of dolphins in one Japanese fishing village.Early on in The Cove, director Louie Psihoyos describes how he assembled an “Ocean’s Eleven”-like team of specialists to infiltrate and expose a secret, brutal, for-profit dolphin-killing operation in Japan. The description fits the film, which is structured more like an action thriller […]