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Colleges forgo cafeteria trays to save water and energy

Colleges around the country are ditching cafeteria trays to lower water and energy use and to prevent wasted food. “If a college is looking to go ‘green,’ they need to start looking in the dining facility,” said Sodexo spokeswoman Monica Zimmer; the food-service company expects 230 of the 600 colleges it serves to stop using […]

A new Olympic record for retraction of a mistaken analysis of NSIDC data

The gold medal goes to Steven Goddard of The Register. On Friday, Aug. 15, he published a scathing article, “Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered: There’s something rotten north of Denmark” attacking the National Snow and Ice Data Center plot of Arctic Sea Ice Extent (below) that I and pretty much everyone else on […]

Crunch time for 10 health-food-store potato-chip brands

Chip shot. Photo: Maria Falgoust As a cook, I gravitate toward fresh, whole ingredients. I prefer whole foods as an eater, too — unless there’s an open bag of potato chips nearby. My usual strategy is to avoid proximity to open bags of chips. But because of my lamentable chip-love, I couldn’t resist this assignment: […]

Grist talks to Freedom From Oil author David Sandalow

I caught up with David Sandalow yesterday, an expert on energy policy and climate change at the Brookings Institution. He was the assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs from 1999 to 2001, and he served as a senior director on the National Security Council staff. He’s author of the […]

Obama would make cap-and-trade program a top economic priority

Photo: barackobama.com Setting up a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse-gas emissions would be one of Barack Obama’s top economic priorities if he were elected president, right up there with a new health-care system, The Wall Street Journal reports. As part of an effort to cut emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, Obama would auction […]

States sue EPA over greenhouse-gas emissions from refineries

Twelve states, the city of New York, and the District of Columbia are suing the U.S. EPA for not regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from oil refineries. The suit accuses the agency of violating the Clean Air Act by refusing to issue standards for controlling carbon dioxide emissions from new or updated refinery equipment. In essence, the […]

Long live ‘do-nothing farming’

I was aiming at a pleasant, natural way of farming which results in making the work easier instead of harder. "How about not doing this?" "How about not doing that?" — that was my way of thinking. I ultimately reached the conclusion that there was no need to plow, no need to apply fertilizer, no […]

Daryl Hannah promotes eco-values at the Democratic convention

Actress and eco-activist Daryl Hannah is in Denver this week, where she’s promoting environmental awareness among delegates and other attendees. I ran into her accidentally while parking my bike, and was able to grab a few minutes to talk about why she’s in town and what she wants from our political leaders:

Can sustainable farming provide a sustainable living?

In “Dispatches from the Fields,” Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America’s agro-industrial landscape. —– Should small-scale farmers who grow organically and sell locally or regionally be able to make a middle-class living […]

A choice of primary energies: renewable electrons win the gold

As you might expect from an analyst who has written a series about the (renewable) electron economy, I believe that the mainstay of our future energy system will be electric generators powered by renewable energy. However, I hope to show here that this choice has a basis largely in economic, scientific, and technological reality rather […]