Latest Articles

Let’s Feed Them Some Oil Execs

Hungry polar bears eating each other We can’t think of anything funny to say about this: polar bears, deprived of their natural food by longer seasons without ice, may be turning to cannibalism. In the journal Polar Biology, American and Canadian scientists reviewed three cases of polar bear cannibalism in early 2004 in the Beaufort […]

Could a wind-energy art exhibit shape public opinion?

As an artist, Mark Beesley is drawn to subjects that others might find repellant. Beesley lives only a few miles from the Sizewell nuclear power station in Britain, and has occasionally made the plant the subject of his work. Despite his opposition to nuclear power, Beesley admits to a fascination with the plant’s design. “When […]

Eviction happening at South Central farm

Word has it that people are being evicted from the South Central Community Farm as we speak. Darryl Hannah is still up in her tree, but they're talking about bringing bulldozers in.

All you L.A. readers get down there. If you can't make it in, I'm told there's a sit-in in the mayor's office.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow (and the Next Day)

Daily Grist takes a two-day break There will be no Daily Grist on Wednesday or Thursday this week. We Gristian editors are retreating to our top-secret mountaintop redoubt to plot, scheme, conspire, and lay the groundwork for our inevitable world domination (and our impending office move; more — actually, much more — on that soon […]

AZM Grace

EPA will phase out highly toxic pesticide If you’ve been avoiding Brussels sprouts because of pesticide contamination — as opposed to the grossness — you’re in luck: by next year, the U.S. EPA plans to phase out organophosphate azinphos-methyl (AZM) on the odiferous buds, as well as on nuts and nursery stocks. By 2010, AZM […]

Lightning in a Bottle

Bottled-water companies spur fights over water rights in Eastern states Water-rights battles, long the domain of Western states, are now being fought in the Eastern U.S., thanks to the bottled-water industry. In 1980, Americans drank less than three gallons of bottled water per capita annually; today, the number tops 26 gallons. Activists worry that large-scale […]

The Electric Tide

Tidal-energy project could come to Nantucket Sound Nantucket Sound and Cape Cod in Massachusetts are awash in alt-energy proposals: in addition to two offshore wind projects (with which loyal Grist readers are all too familiar), a third developer is now considering a tidal-energy project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Seven other sites across the […]

Touched by an Angelo

Bush admin weakens water-pollution rules after oil exec intervenes When Clinton administration regulators announced they were working on a rule that would require special EPA permits for oil and gas drilling sites, to prevent water pollution, the oil and gas industry lumbered into action, lobbying furiously to thwart the rule. Then the Bush administration came […]

My problems with “energy security”

I have to say I'm uneasy at the fact that the most prominent voices in favour of plug-in hybrids have been men like Tom Friedman and James Woolsey. For men like these, "energy security" is part of the wider war on terror. As Friedman is wont to say, we're at war, and lessening our dependency on oil is a necessary part of that war.

We'd like to believe that progressive causes can be made universal causes by trying to appropriate the language of national security. It would be great if we could sell the Republicans on the environment or clean energy by using their own language. But the history of this isn't great. As just one relevant example, the liberal red meat of humanitarian intervention went throught the meat grinder that is the Bush Administration, and came out Iraqi hamburger on the other end.

Inconvenient science

This is a pretty amazing story. A graduate student at Oregon State University does a little study and gets it published in Science. Good for him, right?

Well, no, because his results are inconvenient for the thuggish cabal running Congress.

You see, Daniel Donato's study showed that post-fire logging hurt forest regrowth, and Congress was busy considering legislation that would allow timber companies to salvage log after fires on federal land. This was always a sop to timber companies, but it was sold with a veneer of science: that salvage logging aided regrowth. So Donato's timing was unfortunate.

Oregon State Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser, who supported the bill, started getting grumpy emails from his extraction buddies in industry and politics: