Articles by Grist staff

Paris-stroika

In his quest to make Paris greener, the city’s new Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, wants to add more than 25 miles of bus lanes and discourage more cars from coming into the city. “Today, private motorists, who make up a quarter of road users, use up 94 percent of Paris’s road surfaces. I have a […]

Label-minded

The Bush administration is pressuring the European Union to drop new restrictions on genetically engineered foods. Last month, the European Commission gave preliminary approval to require labeling on most biotech foods. Administration officials say the rules would discriminate against U.S. products and violate World Trade Organization requirements. They say that the rules could cost U.S. […]

In the Drink

The gasoline additive MTBE, a known carcinogen, has already leaked into 48 public wells that provide water to hundreds of thousands of Californians, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis of state data. The additive is leaking from 1,189 underground storage tanks within 1,000 feet of public wells or drinking water aquifers, threatening the water […]

Scrambled Egg Labels

With few federal rules in place, many eco-labels and related markers placed on food in the U.S. are meaningless or confusing, says Consumers Union. For example, because the U.S. Agriculture Department doesn’t have standards for free-range eggs, no one checks up on whether the chickens producing such eggs really have the run of the farm. […]