Latest Articles

It’s a mistake to view the economy as an abstraction

From a Seattle P-I story comes this gem of a quote about declining housing affordability: "It's going to affect people more so than the economy."

Uh, what's that again? The economic outlook is still rosy -- it's just, y'know, people who are in trouble.

Cutting edge investment philanthropy from the search engine’s .org arm

Joel Makower brings news of an interesting and innovative initiative (an III, if you will) from Google.org, the search company’s non-nonprofit philanthropy arm. They’re sending out an open call asking inventors and entrepreneurs to pitch them on products and services that would speed the commercialization of plug-in hybrids. There’s $10 million in investment capital waiting […]

Children of the corn armed with movie cameras

This is a guest post by Nicole de Beaufort, a long-time advocate for local, sustainable, and accessible food systems. She is principal of Fourth Sector Consulting in North Oaks, Minn., which employs strategic communications to work with food system advocates and funders to mobilize the growing food movement. The film King Corn is set to […]

Tell us what to call our new news section

Our sharp-eyed readers will have noticed changes in Grist’s news section. Used to be, we had the Daily Grist: five (or so) news blurbs, sent out via email and published in the eponymous section of the site. Only five blurbs? you ask incredulously. Published once a day? That’s not very internety! We know. Thus the […]

Nearly 200 species added to World Conservation Union’s Red List

The World Conservation Union has added 188 animals and plants to its Red List, a tally of the flora and fauna most threatened with extinction. The additions bring the depressing total up to 16,306 species — and that’s a low estimate. Ten Galapagos Island coral species joined their endangered brethren on the list for the […]

Debating Bjorn Lomborg on global warming

I taped a debate with Lomborg today on a Denver radio station. I'll post a link when it will be broadcast on the Internet. I'll be interested to hear your reactions.

I have long thought it is pretty much impossible to win a one-on-one debate on climate change with anybody who knows what they're doing -- who knows the literature and is willing to make statements that are not really true but can't be quickly disproved. After all, the audience is not in a position to adjudicate scientific and technological issues, so it just comes down to who sounds more persuasive. And Lomborg is quite good at sounding reasonable -- he doesn't deny the reality of climate change, only its seriousness.

Lomborg is more of what I term a delayer -- the clever person's denier. Lomborg is especially persuasive because he is so clearly concerned about reducing suffering and death in the Third World.

Religious leaders convene for a floating climate-change symposium

Religious leaders from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Shiite, Shinto, and Sunni traditions are in the midst of a six-day climate-change symposium coordinated by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. Traveling on a ship down the coast of rapidly melting Greenland, the leaders are floating ideas on cooperating to close the perceived gap between religious and environmental interests. […]

Creative use of wind saves cargo vessels fuel

While sailing ships are unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon for oceanic shipping, adding sails to fossil-powered cargo vessels is definitely "on the horizon." This not-new idea is now compatible with the needs of shipping companies, and the savings make both climatic and economic sense:

Lenders offering mortgages that reward energy efficiency

Shocking news: an element of everyday American life is going green! Yes, now you too can pay off your house with a green mortgage. While many lenders have long had offers of bigger loans and discounts to buyers whose homes meet energy-efficiency standards, such plans are now being marketed more aggressively, and many homebuyers are […]

‘Carbon-friendly’ utilities may not necessarily be in the public interest

Following the discussion under David's latest post about Edwards' position on carbon capture at coal plants, I thought it appropriate to point out a few things about the electric business that are critical to this debate -- but not widely appreciated.

An electric utility is a weird amalgam of lots of historic political philosophies -- most of which are in direct contradiction to modern ideas, but are difficult to repeal.

According to the modern pro-market ideal, businesses should have profit incentives in competitive markets, so that Adam Smith's invisible hand will create consumer value. But to an early 20th-century regulator (who wrote the rules under which most modern electric utilities were formed), certain public goods were so important as to mandate government intervention. (One of the best examples is Einstein, who thought that Karl Marx had some really good ideas, in large part because he saw the problems of the world so clearly that he couldn't conceive of an unregulated market rising to address them. See here.)

This is indicative of an era in which socialism was a live concept rather than historical record, when regulators and academics could debate the pros and cons of central planning without any evidence of the excesses such systems could create. It was also an era when the excesses of the mercantilist Gilded Age were becoming evident, and smart, well-intentioned folks were looking for a better way.