Articles by Grist staff

Time for new thinking — and new blood? — in the White House economics team

In 2005, Henry Paulson stepped down as chief of Goldman Sachs to become President George W. Bush's Treasury secretary. The Wall Street-to-Treasury story is a bit dog-bites-man; Robert Rubin had taken the exact same path a decade before under Clinton.

Yet Paulson's appointment generated excitement in green circles, of all places. The new secretary had sat on the board of the Nature Conservancy and collaborated on projects with Conservation International. An article by Grist's own Amanda Griscom Little summed up the mood. She quoted Conservation International Chair and CEO Peter Seligmann:

My hope is that Paulson will raise the level of understanding around these issues [i.e., climate] within this inner circle, and rally a critical mass that will push the administration to make substantive moves in the right direction.

Since then, of course, Bush has done approximately nothing on climate. And Paulson has evidently been a less-than-constructive presence, as David Roberts recently pointed out.

So the Wall Street-friendly finance minister, despite his Big Green cred, ended up caving on climate. What does this tell us, as the Obama administration prepares to install its own Wall Street-friendly economics team?

New book offers a prescription for 21st century suburbia

Pay no attention to the images of skeletal subdivisions abandoned in the face of high gas prices (remember those?) and the burst housing bubble: Suburbia is not dead. It's not even dying. Half of all Americans live in suburban areas, and 40 percent of American jobs are rooted there.

But our suburbs are unsustainable, and not because we've rediscovered the joys of urban dwelling and a connection between vehicle miles traveled and quality of life ... and air. In fact, the greatest threat to suburbs over the next decade is this: "There might not be enough people to live in them."

So says June Williamson, author of Retrofitting Suburbia. In the 1950s, 50 percent of American households had children. Now, says Williamson, that percentage has shrunk to 35; by 2030, it'll be down to 25 percent. Without families to fill those McMansions, suburbs will need new housing types for retirees who want to downsize and grown children who wish to remain close to home (though this unearthed article has one housewife comparing suburbia to jail). Not all those folks want to shift into urban centers, or can afford to. So suburbia is due for a massive makeover. Yes, it's time for a retrofit.

Transport ministers plot climate action in Japan

TOKYO — Officials from 20 nations met Thursday in Japan to find ways to tackle global warming related to transport, which causes nearly one-quarter of carbon emissions but has partly evaded strict regulation. Transport ministers or envoys from nations including all members of the Group of Eight industrial powers opened two days of talks in […]

A knuckle-dragging senator teaches Vilsack that size matters

In yesterday's post about the Vilsack hearing, I missed one small but remarkable bit of drama (notable at an event marked by lack thereof).

Turns out that Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) delivered a sarcastic and, well, imbecilic little monologue comparing "small" organic farmers to the real men who run 10,000-acre wheat plantations in the plains of his state. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) had dared suggest that the USDA should think about supporting the work of family-scale organic farmers. That led Roberts to offer up a definition of "small farmer" for Vilsack's edification:

That small family farmer is about 5'2", and I'm looking to see if Mr. Leahy is sitting here, from Vermont, and he's a retired airline pilot and sits on his porch on a glider reading Gentleman's Quarterly -- he used to read the Wall Street Journal but that got pretty drab -- and his wife works as a stock broker downtown. And he has 40 acres, and he has a pond and he has an orchard and he grows organic apples. Sometimes there is a little more protein in those apples than people bargain for, and he's very happy to have that.