Articles by Grist staff

Diesel Mania

Move over disco music: Another ’70s trend is making a comeback — diesel fuel. During the oil embargo of 1973, the U.S. enjoyed a brief love affair with diesel because it gets better mileage than gasoline. However, its dirty emissions soon put a damper on the romance. Now, though, a cleaner-burning form of diesel is […]

Hit the Bottle

Ever the leader on environmental issues, California is moving ahead with a bill that would give it the nation’s most stringent bottled-water quality standards. Under the terms of the bill, bottled-water companies would have to include greater detail about contaminants on bottle labels, issue water-quality reports much like those produced by public water agencies, and, […]

Pampas and Circumstances

The massive economic crisis in Argentina has had an unexpected silver lining for the environment: It has led to a surge in the use of compressed natural gas (CNG) in cars, a cleaner fuel than either diesel or gasoline. Argentina is home to the third-largest natural-gas reserves in Latin America and the world’s largest fleet […]

Gold Diggers

The California gold rush of 1849 sent would-be miners rushing to the hills and streams of the Sierra Nevada. But some of them never made it that far, stopping instead to mine gold from Death Valley. Now, a proposal by the Colorado-based Canyon Resources to expand its operations by opening a second open-pit gold mine […]