Latest Articles
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Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park brings nature to a city setting
Alexander Calder’s Eagle against an Olympic mountain backdrop. Photo: iotae via flickr I’ve never seen the Pacific Northwest. I mean, I live in Seattle, and I look around, but I’ve never really seen it. I came to this realization while walking the zig-zagged trail at Seattle’s new Olympic Sculpture Park with Grist mascot Chip Giller […]
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Silly reader, books are for kids!
Remember when you were a kid and the best part of the day was when you were just starting to get sleepy and you’d snuggle up in bed with your mom/dad/sibling/nanny/manny/Uncle Leroy to read a bedtime story? And the best bedtime stories were the ones with big illustrations of imaginary creatures like “Mr. Ferebee” and […]
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Multimedia series honored in ‘explanatory reporting’ category
The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for “explanatory reporting” today for its impressive Altered Oceans series, with its rich online multimedia features as well as hard-hitting reporting and images that went into the print edition. Getting depressed about the appalling state of our oceans has never been so much fun! (See Grist’s mini-summary […]
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Robert Redford chats about the new green programming on the Sundance Channel
Robert Redford. With his legendary Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford brought sex appeal to the business of independent filmmaking. Now, with his Sundance cable channel, he’s aiming to do the same thing for another underappreciated art form — eco-themed television programming. Tonight, the channel launches “The Green,” a block of environmental programming that will air […]
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Grist podcast
This week’s podcast is particularly good. You’ve subscribed, right?
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Parody is so pre-9/11
I can’t do much to improve on the humor of the two lead paragraphs in this AP piece: The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday the growth of greenhouse gases by less than 1 percent in 2005 shows the administration’s program to address global warming “is delivering real results.” The pronouncement by EPA […]
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A reintroduction
I'm restarting my series on solutions to global warming, both on how to phase out fossil fuels and the best means to sequester carbon, because I consider the topic a critical one.
The carbon lobby has mostly (not entirely) given up disputing that global warming is occurring. They know that they won't be able to confuse the public on its human-caused nature much longer.
But a final stalling tactic is open to deniers -- to pretend that nothing can be done, or at least nothing that most people are willing to live with. There is an old engineering saying: "no solution, no problem."
Converging with this, there is a small but unfortunately influential primitivist movement. In their belief that technology itself is totalitarian, they also contribute to the idea that the only solution to global warming is a drastic reduction in the technical level of civilization -- perhaps down to the hunter-gatherer level. Many well-meaning, intelligent people promote a less extreme version of this trope -- the conviction that we need to impoverish working people in rich nations to solve our environmental crisis and deal justly with the poorer countries.
The primary purpose of this series is to ensure that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies become known as inexpensive fossil fuel substitutes available today, rather than a high-priced vision of tomorrow. The U.S. needs to understand that continued use of fossil fuel is a political decision rather than a technical one.
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Bill Bradlee and David Kroodsma, climate-fightin’ bike riders, answer questions
Bill Bradlee and David Kroodsma. What work do you do? How does it relate to the environment? David: Over the past 17 months, I bicycled from California to the southern tip of Argentina to raise awareness of the international consequences of global warming. I gave talks, visited schools, got in the media, and posted information […]
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Really
The 33rd meeting of the G8 is happening in early June, in Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel — perhaps in retaliation for the infamous backrub — is determined to put climate change high on the agenda. Not surprisingly, the U.S. and Canada are working to water down the draft communique Merkel has put together. Somewhat […]
