Articles by Grist staff
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By the Hair of Our Chinny Chin Chin
As building materials go, straw generally gets a bad rap: A straw man is something that can be knocked over easily, and, as everyone knows, any decent wolf can blow down a straw house. But people have been building homes in the U.S. from straw bales encased in plaster or drywall since at least the […]
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Made in China
China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, has already come under fire from environmental and social activists for the massive ecological and demographic changes it will cause. Now there’s a new reason to be concerned: A government meteorologist predicted today that the reservoir created by the dam would raise local temperatures, thereby changing […]
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On Acid
Dealing a major setback to New York’s efforts to reduce acid rain in the Adirondacks, a federal judge yesterday overturned a law penalizing power plants in the state for trading pollution credits to plants in 14 other states. According to U.S. District Court Judge David Hurd, the state’s 2000 Air Pollution Mitigation Law conflicted with […]
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On the Railroad to Nowhere?
Europe has long set the standard for rail travel, with a system whose efficiency, extent, and affordability has been the envy of rail advocates in the United States. But now it seems that European transportation trends are in danger of imitating those in the U.S: In the last decade, the highway network in the European […]
