Articles by Grist staff

Send Me the Ivory Bill

Call it a wild goose chase: A 30-day search through a southern Louisiana swamp was called off yesterday after some of the world’s top ornithologists failed to find the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker. The bird, once the largest North American woodpecker with a wingspan of up to 33 inches, has not been seen for certain since […]

GE, We Bring Bad Things to Fish

The Bush administration asked a federal judge yesterday to dismiss a challenge by General Electric to the Superfund toxic waste cleanup law. Companies faced with multi-million dollar cleanup costs have repeatedly attacked the 1980 law, arguing that it leads to more legal tangles than environmental improvements. In the most recent sally, GE filed suit in […]

They’re All Ears

Farm states and the environment both stand to gain from a provision in a Democratic energy bill that would require gasoline refiners to triple their use of corn-based ethanol by 2012. The provision, written by Senate majority leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), would also phase out the use of the petrochemical MTBE by 2006. Both ethanol […]

Canada Dry?

Perhaps following the cue of its southern neighbor, Canada announced earlier this week that it’s in no hurry to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. The announcement, made by Environment Minister David Anderson, marked a shift from an earlier suggestion that the nation might endorse Kyoto by as early as June. With the […]