Articles by Grist staff

Dam Nation

The Amazon Basin could become home to the world’s third-largest dam if Brazil continues with plans to build a hydroelectric plant to stave off the nation’s energy crisis. Energy consumption in Brazil is growing by 5.3 percent annually, a rate that far outstrips supply increases. The energy shortage was compounded this year by a severe […]

Norton: Here's a Whoops

An on-going battle over proposed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge took an ugly turn late last week when news surfaced that Interior Secretary Gale Norton had distorted government data about the impact of drilling on caribou populations. In a July letter to the Senate committee that had requested the data, Norton left […]

Cogito Ergo Summit

At an environmental summit being held this week in Rio de Janeiro, Latin American and Caribbean countries are forging an alliance to pressure developed nations to foot most of the bill for the planet’s ailing ecosystems. During the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, industrialized nations pledged to spend 0.7 percent of their gross domestic products on […]

Special K-O

Like the rest of the country, the town of Kellogg, Idaho, is at war. But this one is a civil war over the Silver Valley Superfund site, the legacy of a century of mining and smelting in the Coeur d’Alene River Basin. The U.S. EPA is poised to decide this week whether to expand the […]