Articles by Grist staff

What’s Methane, Chopped Liver?

Conservative think tank launches climate-skeptic TV ads “Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution; we call it life.” Nope, not a story in The Onion. That’s the punch line of two TV ads that the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute began airing in 14 U.S. cities yesterday, timed to correspond with the big-screen debut of Al Gore’s […]

Cork Screwed

Drop in cork demand could endanger Mediterranean forests What wine goes best with endangered forest? Perhaps a nice pinot gris? Mediterranean cork-oak forests provide 15 billion cork stoppers a year to the wine industry — a sustainable enterprise, as cork is harvested from live trees rather than dead ones — but plastic and screw-top closures […]

It’s a Mall World, After All

Green mega-mall gets green light to build in Syracuse, N.Y. Destiny USA — the purportedly uber-green mega-mall planned for Syracuse, N.Y. — is finally ready to move into the construction phase, after developers and local officials ended years of bickering and reached a 30-year tax deal this week. According to lead developer Robert Congel, it […]

The Wrong Side of the BedZed

Problems in one green community won’t keep U.K. from building more Four years ago, a housing complex called BedZed opened in south London with the ambitious goal of running entirely on renewable energy. Well, things haven’t gone quite as planned. BedZed’s biomass-fueled electric system was unreliable, forcing it to go on the national energy grid. […]