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Prepare for a bunch of recaps and videos

I’m just getting myself together after an incredibly packed four days at Slow Food Nation, which wrapped up Monday in San Francisco. Grist was lucky enough to partner with big-time indy movie studio Participant (maker of Syriana, Fast Food Nation, An Inconvenient Truth, and other worthy films) to conduct a bunch of video interviews at […]

Biofuels: not cost-effective or lucrative for climate change or business

According to this article in Mongabay, a study from a British think tank is calling for an end to subsidies for biofuels based on — not biodiversity loss and high food prices — cost effectiveness. The economics is startling — if developed countries spent the same amount of money on preventing deforestation and the destruction […]

Should environmentalists jump on climate disasters?

There’s a heated debate going on about whether environmentalists should jump on breaking climate disasters like Gustav and frame them in terms of global warming and other environmental issues. Open Left’s Matt Stoller and Center for American Progress’s Joseph Romm say yes, and “anonymous environmental leader” says no (all are must-reads). In my recent book, […]

New HP laptop packaged in messenger bag instead of box

Don’t take Grandma to Wal-Mart: the big-box store’s new Hewlett-Packard laptop “will be displayed on shelves wearing only the HP Protect Messenger Bag.” Scandalous! But actually, there’s no need to avert your eyes: the HP Pavilion dv6929 is served up in a recycled, reusable messenger bag instead of a box, cutting cardboard and plastic packaging […]

Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, part 1

Hurricanes can get much, much bigger and stronger than we have so far seen in the Atlantic. The most intense Pacific storm on record was Super Typhoon Tip in 1979, which reached maximum sustained winds of 190 mph near the center. On its wide rim, gale-force winds (39 mph) extended over a diameter of an […]

New Ecuador constitution would give nature inalienable rights

Ecuador’s environment will be given inalienable rights if residents of that country vote yes Sept. 28 on a referendum to overhaul the constitution. One of the draft document’s 444 articles gives nature the right to “exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and its processes in evolution.” The controversial constitution, which would […]

How did so much water get into a New Orleans canal?

Here’s a question I’d like to know the answer to. Hurricane Gustav dealt New Orleans a glancing blow, passing it by to the west. Yet as the world saw, the city’s Industrial Canal — a large ship channel running north-south close to neighborhoods — filled nearly to the top, and there was some alarming, if […]

Actress Rachael Leigh Cook disses drilling

I stopped by the “Bank of America Goes Green” reception on Monday, where they ended up not talking too much about green issues after all, what with the hurricane as the more pressing issue of the moment. But actress Rachael Leigh Cook (of She’s All That fame) was in attendance on behalf of the Creative […]

North Pole an ‘island’ for first time in 125,000 years

The fabled Northwest and Northeast passages are now open. That makes the North Pole an island for the first time in human history, most likely for the first time “since the beginning of the last Ice Age 125,000 years ago.” In the last few days, however, Arctic ice melt has slowed, so we might not […]

U.S. EPA criticizes DOT over fuel-economy standards

Officials at the U.S. EPA have criticized their counterparts at the U.S. Transportation Department lately over the DOT’s proposed fuel-economy standards for vehicles of 31.6 miles per gallon by 2015. The EPA has said the DOT used an unreasonably low figure for future gasoline prices — $2.42 a gallon in 2016 and a high of […]