Latest Articles

We’ll Give You the Shirt Off Our Back

Grist fundraiser wraps up, still needs your help It’s almost time to hang up our summer fundraising efforts — and we’re so clothes to our goal we can practically taste it. That’s why we’re asking for your help one more time, and why we’re offering a colorful Grist T-shirt to the first 50 people who […]

Yeah, Right, and Pluto’s Not a Planet

Research team says Amazon River is longer than the Nile Every so often, a news story comes along that is so astonishing, so monumental, that it shakes the foundations of everything you hold dear, leading you to question fundamental truths. This … is not one of those stories, but it’s interesting nonetheless. A team of […]

Prospects May Have Shifted During Flight

Booming airline industry gives nod to climate change The world’s biggest air show opens in France today, and the commercial airline industry is all hepped up on salted peanuts: after two years in the red, it’s expected to reap $5 billion in profits this year. Both Boeing and Airbus announced billions of dollars of aircraft […]

Dorgan Grinder

As oil prices dip, industry faces questions about summer supplies Oil prices dipped from a nearly nine-month high today, and everyone’s atwitter over what the summer will hold. The industry is beset by turmoil, with hostage-takings in Nigeria and turf battles in Gaza the latest contributors to price and supply instabilities. In addition, the U.S. […]

Understatement of the week

A federal judge tells the Bush administration that, yes, there is a difference between wild fish and farmed fish.

"A healthy hatchery population is not necessarily an indication of a healthy natural population," [Judge Coughenour] said.

Insert your insult here ...

At a press-only Bonnaroo show

Caught a press-only acoustic performance yesterday with the Cold War Kids, Elvis Perkins, and Alec Ounsworth (dreamy!) from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The show was amazing; the guys played several songs from each band, ending with "Doomsday" by Elvis Perkins, which has amazing (and somewhat relevant) lyrics that I can’t seem to find online. […]

And comments on the green efforts

There’s a lot of press here at Bonnaroo, so I don’t know why I was so surprised to find out that Jon Pareles of The New York Times is here blogging the festival. I guess I just can’t imagine the Gray Lady all sweaty and covered in dirt, hanging out with the hippies. Anyway, Friday […]

With the right rules in place, it could work

Working Assets is my long-distance phone company. I love it dearly for its combination of business efficiency, social responsibility and progressive politics.

Each month, my phone bill carries alerts that urge me to take action on a specific issue or two. Recent Citizen Actions suggest the gravity of the issues chosen: "Save Our Constitution," "Impeach Dick Cheney," "Close Guantanamo."

This month Working Assets urged me to "Say No to Ethanol."

How did the use of ethanol end up alongside tyranny and torture as an evil to be conquered?

A couple of years ago, I was waiting my turn to speak to a well-attended California conference on alternative fuels. For this gathering, alternative fuels included natural gas, clean diesel, fossil fueled derived hydrogen, coal-fired electricity, as well as wind energy and biofuels. The leadoff speaker, from the California Energy Commission, spoke warmly about all the alternative fuels under discussion. Except one. When it came to ethanol, he visualized his perspective with the metaphor of a giant hypodermic needle from Midwest corn farmers to California drivers. For him and, I suspect, most of California's state government, ethanol belongs in the same category as heroin.

In the late 1990s, the nation discovered that MTBE, a widely used gasoline additive made of natural gas and petroleum-derived isobutylene was polluting ground water. The environmental community largely defended its continued use and vigorously opposed substituting ethanol. One well-respected New England environmental coalition raised the possibility that ethanol blends could cause fetal alcohol syndrome. Fill up your gas tank with 10 percent ethanol and your baby could be alcoholic, their report warned.

In the last few years, the environmental position has shifted from an attack on ethanol from any source to an attack on corn and corn-derived ethanol. The assault on corn comes from so many directions that sometimes the arguments are wildly contradictory. In an article published in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year Michael Pollan, an excellent and insightful writer, argues that cheap corn is the key to the epidemic of obesity. The same month, Foreign Affairs published an article by two distinguished university professors who argued that the use of ethanol has led to a runup in corn prices that threatens to sentence millions more to starvation.

Ethanol is not a perfect fuel. Corn is far from a perfect fuel crop. We should debate their imperfections. But we should also keep in mind the first law of ecology. "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Tapping into any energy source involves tradeoffs.

Yet when it comes to ethanol, and corn, we accept no tradeoffs. In 30 years in the business of alternative energy, I've never encountered the level of animosity generated by ethanol, not even in the debate about nuclear power. When it comes to ethanol, we seem to apply a different standard than we do when we evaluate other fuels.

Disagreement over threat to national security

Cape Wind claims to have cleared another hurdle today. From their press release:

Today's Department of Defense (DOD) report is good news for Cape Wind. The report clearly finds Cape Wind to be outside of the wind-turbine offset zone being proposed for PAVE PAWS radar systems.

Now the DOD has reached the same determination as the U.S. Air Force -- that Cape Wind will not negatively impact the Air Force PAVE PAWS radar system. This report puts to rest in a final form any reasonable concern about this issue.

The reality is that projects like Cape Wind strengthen national security by making America more energy independent and less reliant on foreign sources of energy.

That's not how the Alliance for Nantucket Sound sees it, unsurprisingly, claiming that this report is final proof that the turbines would threaten missile defense systems and therefore, national security.

These two just can't agree on anything.

Even USDA researchers are a bit creeped out by corporate control of food

Food production and retailing have gotten so squarely under the heel of a few corporations that even the USDA is raising an eyebrow. At the top, the agency teems with PR flacks for the agribusiness giants. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t competent researchers among the rank and file. One of them, Steven W. Martinez, […]