Latest Articles

All Is Not Well in La-La Land

Top Schwarzenegger air-quality officials depart under protest If Arnold Schwarzenegger were a cobbler, his children would have no shoes. Or something like that. While the Governator has been busy spreading the climate gospel around the world, his air-quality agency is coming apart at the seams. Last week, Schwarzenegger fired Robert Sawyer, chair of the California […]

Music to Our Ears

Music festivals across the country aim to lessen their footprint Last year’s Bonnaroo music festival produced more than 1 million pounds of waste (and quite a population of wasted fans), but recycling, composting, and reuse efforts kept more than half of it from reaching a landfill. It’s part of an ongoing effort to address the […]

Black Coffeyville

Oil spill adds agitation to tri-state flooding A 42,000-gallon oil spill in Kansas is complicating state and federal response to flooding that has walloped that state, Oklahoma, and Texas. Weeks of rain have forced evacuations and caused at least 11 deaths. On Sunday, workers at a Coffeyville, Kan., oil refinery began evacuation procedures, but a […]

Depends how you define green

On 7/7/07, climate change awareness will officially rock, as a series of concerts kick off at venues as far afield as Shanghai, Sydney, and the South Pole. Chatter about the Live Earth concerts has been rampant for months as bits of gossip trickled in here and there. Though organizers still promise a few surprises, much […]

Talking carbon tax in N.H.

Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd talks energy policy at a house party in New Hampshire last week:

Bald eagle soars off the threatened-species list, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: John Ashcroft, Where Are You? We Always Thought It Was Industrial Strength Barrier Methods Sure to Hit Fox News Soon Spit on Polish Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Postcard From the New Atlantis No (Hot) Dogs Allowed Ka-Boom 15 Green […]

Natalie names a baby gorilla

Adorable actress and Grist–darling Natalie Portman visited a Rwandan wildlife park Saturday to name one of 23 baby mountain gorillas. Naming her gorilla “Ahazaza,” meaning “future,” Portman and others hoped to draw attention to conservation efforts for the highly endangered primates. I’ve yet to find any images from the event, but I’m sure Cute Overload […]

A good reason we shouldn’t love trees, at least not in this case

Everybody loves trees. They are so popular as offsets they even make Wikipedia's definition:

When one is unable or unwilling to reduce one's own emissions, Carbon offset is the act of reducing ("offsetting") greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere. A well-known example is the planting of trees to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions from personal air travel.

But does planting trees reduce global warming? Not in most places on the earth. The Carnegie Institution's Ken Caldeira summarized the result of a major 2005 study (PDF) this way: "To plant forests to mitigate climate change outside of the tropics is a waste of time."

Why? Because forest canopies are relatively dark, compared to what they replace outside the tropics -- grass, croplands, or snowfields -- and so they absorb more of the sun's heating rays that fall on them. That negates the "carbon sink" benefit trees have soaking up carbon dioxide. Worse, the study found that planting a large number of trees in high latitudes would "probably have a net warming effect on the Earth's climate." Ouch!

Parsing 15 years of electric data

Environmental pressures have forced us to generate more of our power from natural gas, and this focus on gas has caused power prices to increase ... right?

Wrong, conventional wisdom notwithstanding. And the lessons from the last 15 years indicate the importance of considering how markets will respond when mandating new technologies and fuels.

Umbra on fireworks

Dear Umbra, Our family has always lit a fair amount of fireworks for our 4th of July celebration. I would like to encourage my family and friends to find other ways to celebrate due to the CO2 emissions that will result. However, I don’t really know how much carbon is emitted. I already have to […]