Latest Articles

Umbra on cruise control

Dear Umbra, To cruise or not to cruise? That is the question. Is it more fuel efficient to use cruise control when driving, or does it use more gas to use the cruise? Carrie Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Dearest Carrie, Whether ’tis nobler to travel at constant speed — that is indeed a question. And Edmunds.com, […]

Judge tosses federal plan to allow more snowmobiles into Yellowstone

A National Park Service plan to allow 540 snowmobiles a day into Yellowstone National Park has been tossed out by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled Monday that allowing that many ‘mobiles would increase air and noise pollution and be disturbing to wildlife — conclusions drawn, he noted, by NPS’s own data. […]

McCain/Palin energy lie about Alaska the latest to come in for media scrutiny

In her Friday interview with Charlie Gibson, Sarah Palin said that Alaska "produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." McCain has said the same thing — in an interview with Univision that aired Friday, he said, "Alaska supplies 20 percent of America’s energy." It’s clearly an established campaign talking point. Thing […]

Making environmental sense of the financial storm now raging

Interpreting reports currently coming out of Wall Street is like tracking a vast hurricane as it rages its way through the Gulf and toward a population center: Conditions are way too chaotic to make confident predictions, but preparing for the worst probably isn’t a bad idea. As recently as a year ago, no one could […]

Everglades restoration deal could still benefit Big Sugar

When Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced in June that the state would buy 187,000 acres of land from U.S. Sugar Corp. to “jump start” an Everglades restoration effort, environmentalists cheered visions of flowing, fresh water and pristine, untouched habitat. But that may not turn out to be exactly the case. Crist initially said he would […]

Castens and Recycled Energy Development featured in Forbes magazine

Don’t miss this profile of Tom Casten and his company, Recycled Energy Development, in the latest issue of Forbes. (Of course Tom spawn and Gristmill contributor Sean gets off some zingers, but they’re about ethanol, so don’t read them! I know how you people get.) Recycled energy — otherwise known as cogeneration, or combined heat […]

The GMO industry has been scraping by on bad science

In 2002, a most unlikely book came out: an oversized, lushly produced, coffee-table tome on the ills of mass-scale, chemical-intensive agriculture. Grandly titled Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, the book contained stark photos of highly mechanized, monocrop farming, along with pungent, probing essays by Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and other seminal thinkers of […]

Marla Cone to lead expanded news operation

Award-winning environment reporter Marla Cone is leaving the Los Angeles Times to join the ranks of nonprofit journalism, becoming the top editor of Environmental Health News starting today. Cone, whose work at the L.A. Times includes a series of articles highlighting the environmental threat posed by brominated flame retardants and investigations into the health of […]

Hurricane Ike messes with Texas, other states as it hits U.S.

Before hitting land in the United States on Saturday, Hurricane Ike killed some 70 people in Haiti and four in Cuba last week as it made its way north from the Caribbean, but so far in the U.S. the death toll estimate remains a relatively modest 13. Hurricane Ike nailed Texas as well as Louisiana […]

Giuliani parses McCain on ‘Meet the Press’

Rudy Giuliani was on “Meet the Press” today. Tom Brokaw asked him to respond to McCain’s assertion that Sarah Palin is the most knowledgeable person in the country on energy: MR. BROKAW: "More about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America." More about solar, more about wind, more about geothermal than […]