Articles by Grist staff

Executive Carte Blanche

Chalk one up for Big Energy and its boosters in the White House. On Friday, the General Accounting Office abandoned its efforts to force Vice President Dick Cheney to turn over information about which people he met with while heading up the administration’s secretive energy task force. The GAO, Congress’s investigative arm, had been fighting […]

Smart Attack

Smart-growth policies, designed to put a damper on runaway development and preserve local character, have recently come under attack in a handful of U.S. communities. In Loudon County, Va., on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., nearly 200 lawsuits were filed last week against the county’s growth-control policies. Also last week, the mayor of Erie, Colo., […]

When You Dish Upon a Star

Minnesota would become the first state in the U.S. to effectively ban phosphorus in automatic-dishwashing detergent if a bill working its way through the state legislature gets the eventual thumbs-up. Phosphorus, which helps to remove those oh-so-unsightly spots from glasses and dishware, ultimately gets flushed out of homes and into lakes and streams, where it […]

Af-gone

Afghanistan’s most significant wetland area is now almost as dry as a bone, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Satellite imagery shows that 99 percent of the Sistan wetlands, which stretch into Iran, have dried out since 1998. The main source of water to the wetlands, the Helmand River, has been flowing at far […]