Articles by Grist staff

For Pit’s Sake

Back in the Cold War era, the Soviet-owned company Wismut ran massive mining operations in the East German states of Thuringia and Saxony. Thanks to the arms race, East Germany soon became the world’s third-largest uranium producer and a crucial supplier for Moscow. But when the USSR disintegrated, so did the market for uranium; with […]

Working on Their Gulf Swing

Most of the goings-on of Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force are cloaked in secrecy — but one outed meeting, held a little over a year ago, sheds light on how the task force functioned. In early February 2001, Cheney met with representatives from Shell Oil and Anadarko Petroleum, who pressed the veep to […]

For Heaven’s Sake

There’s a new voice in the debate over President Bush’s energy policy: God’s. Religious groups in the United States are increasingly invoking the word of God to oppose drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, support stricter fuel-efficiency standards, and call for increased reliance on renewable energy. The National Religious Partnership for the Environment, a […]

For Peat’s Sake

As a source of fossil fuel and gardening compost, peat bogs, those eminently British landscape features, are highly in demand — so much so that some environmentalists fear they are in danger of disappearing. But that danger might be staved off for a while, thanks to a multi-million dollar plan to use taxpayer money to […]