Articles by Grist staff

Don’t Call It a Comeback

The nuclear industry is swinging into comeback mode. A bill expected to pass the U.S. Senate in the next few weeks would provide federal loan guarantees for as much as 50 percent of the cost of constructing up to six new nuclear power plants. Sponsored by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), the legislation also would earmark […]

We Don’t Cotton to This Idea

Farmers in India are harvesting the nation’s first approved biotech cotton crop, a development that has environmentalists and some nationalists nervous. About 55,000 growers, an estimated 2 percent of India’s cotton farmers, have planted Monsanto’s Bollgard cotton seed, genetically engineered with the Bt bacterium to be resistant to the bollworm, a troublesome cotton pest. The […]

Snake Oil

Federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest have been spilling oil directly into the waterways on which they sit, in amounts ranging from a trickle to, in one case, 1,000 gallons. Oregon and Washington state authorities have been trying to get a handle on the problem, but the U.S. Army Corps […]

Con-servancy?

The Nature Conservancy, based in Arlington, Va., has become the world’s wealthiest environmental group, with assets of $3 billion, but according to an extensive investigative series by the Washington Post, that money is not all going to the environmental good. The conservancy is known for purchasing and protecting ecologically valuable land, using donations from both […]