Articles by Grist staff

A Swiftly Heating Planet

Spacecraft heads to Venus to get clues about global warming Venus coulda been a contenda. It’s just a little closer to the sun than Earth, just a little smaller, and once had plentiful water. But instead of evolving life in a tropical paradise, the oceans started heating up and evaporating, trapping the planet in an […]

Life’s a Bleach and Then You Die

Caribbean coral reefs hammered by bleaching, disease It hasn’t been a good year for coral. Last summer, reefs from Panama to the Virgin Islands suffered bleaching; now coral in the Caribbean, some of it centuries old, is being attacked by deadly diseases. The whole grim sequence can be traced back to unusually high Caribbean ocean […]

RGGI or Not, Here They Come

Maryland senator chats with Grist about joining regional climate pact Last week, Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R) signed into law the Healthy Air Act, which restricts emissions of common air pollutants and signs Maryland on to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), joining seven other Northeast states in committing to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Quite […]

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Quit

Canada won’t make Kyoto emissions targets; blames targets Canada is nearly 30 percent above its greenhouse-gas emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol, so it’s redoubling efforts to … abandon the targets. New Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, of the less-than-ambitious Conservative Party that took power in February, concludes “it is impossible, impossible for Canada to reach […]