Latest Articles

A new list will tell you

Mine are only fair -- Duke got a B and Maryland a C. The Rockefeller-funded Sustainable Endowments Institute just released its College Sustainability Report Card 2007 (PDF).

They rate the schools in the categories of administration, food & recycling, green building, climate change & energy, shareholder engagement, investment priorities, and endowment transparency.

Tell us what you think of us.

Now really, folks -- judging by the comments you leave and the letters we get, y'all have a lot to say. So get yourself on over here and sign up for a Grist phone survey. It's quick and easy! Here's your chance to tell us what Grist means to you, and where you think we should go from here. C'mon -- we can take it.

The LNG Kiss Goodnight

Controversial natural-gas terminal in Long Beach, Calif., gets the boot Friends, we are gathered here today to wo0t the death of a planned liquefied-natural-gas terminal in Long Beach, Calif. Citing a city attorney’s conclusion that the environmental review of the project “is and in all likelihood will remain legally inadequate,” Long Beach officials yesterday unanimously […]

Davos and Goliath

This year, World Economic Forum can’t avoid climate change Every year, some 2,000 business and political leaders descend on snowy Davos, Switzerland, for an unrivaled meeting of minds and money. As the five-day World Economic Forum kicks off today, attendees will tackle an issue of great concern: how to get Bono’s autograph. Also, some of […]

Thermal Under Where?

Report encourages investment in safe, clean geothermal energy If the U.S. is going to insist on looking for energy underground, there’s a better option than drilling for oil, researchers say: generating steamy geothermal electricity by circulating water down into hot rocks below the earth’s surface and back up into power plants. An MIT study commissioned […]

Leader Hosin’

Bush State of the Union address offers tepid energy initiatives Today we have the high privilege and distinct honor of blurbing the State of the Union address. It was largely a muted, desultory affair, reflecting the fact that President Bush is trapped in a foreign quagmire, his Republican congressional bootlickers are abandoning him, and the […]

You’ve got to see this to believe it

I kept expecting one of the kids to look into the camera and kick this spoof into high gear. I finally realized ... it's real. Too bad, just a few modifications to the script and this film would have been hilarious:

Huge in Boise

Deep in the red state of Idaho, Al Gore was scheduled to speak in at Boise State University, offering the keynote address to a conference on climate change. The school gave away all 1,000 tickets to the venue in ten minutes, leaving almost 1,000 more people waiting in line. Oops! OK, so they moved the […]

A bleg re: trucks idling their engines

Verizon trucks sometimes come and idle their engines all day long in front of my house (sometimes several trucks for several days), and I am told that because they use their engines to power their equipment, they are exempt from EPA guidelines for idling engines.

Is there any energy source I could ask them to use instead of running their engines all day? Also, I have asked them to tell me when they are going to be coming so I can plan to work elsewhere that day, but they refuse to do so. Does anyone know if there are any precedents for requiring some kind of notice about work that is obviously scheduled maintenance and not emergency repair work?

An alternate history

Terry Bisson's underappreciated alternate reality masterwork Fire on the Mountain posits an alternative Civil War, where Harriet Tubman was well enough to join John Brown in his ill-fated raid against Harper's Ferry. In Bisson's book, her tactical common sense leads to the raid's success, and rather than the Civil War beginning with a Southern Rebellion, it begins with a slave revolt.

I'm going to post a bit of speculative fiction myself, on the same premise. But rather than leading to an egalitarian utopia, as it does in Bisson's novel, I'm going to assume it leads a world rather like our own, except that the technology evolves based on biofuels and renewable energy rather than on coal, then oil. The point of this is not to compete with Bisson's literary genius, but to riff off it to explore some of the oversimplifications made about the relation between oil and war. [Attention conserving notice: this post is a bit of a shaggy dog story.]