Articles by Grist staff

Been Caught Steeling

In an effort to rustle up enough votes to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, outspoken drilling advocate Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) tried to sweeten the deal by offering to add a bailout for steelworkers to the energy bill. But the move appears to have backfired, with Rust-Belt Democrats supporting steelworkers but […]

True Grit

For the third year in a row, massive dust storms from China have blown into South Korea, closing schools, canceling flights, and creating a run on facemasks and respiratory medication. The storms are the result of severe desertification in China, where the Gobi Desert grew by 20,000 square miles from 1994 to 1999; the desertification […]

Parking Is Expensive

Today is tax day in the U.S. (need we remind you?), but not many of your tax dollars will go to support the national park system — and certainly not enough, conservationists say. The system is suffering from a $4.9 billion backlog in maintenance and improvement projects, a 40 percent shortfall for interpretive and educational […]

Eight Bawl

Environment ministers from the Group of Eight — the world’s industrialized powers — met over the weekend for a round of talks in preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held later this year in Johannesburg, South Africa. Although the issue of climate change was not on the agenda (much to the […]