Articles by Grist staff

Bahn Stormer

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder kvetched this week that taking steps to protect the environment was causing the cost of highway construction to soar. “I don’t have anything against frogs,” he said as he inspected a just-completed segment of a long-delayed highway, “but the expenditures we make for protecting the environment while building roads are enormous.” […]

Give a Honk, Don't Pollute

On top of warming up the earth, pollution from burning fossil fuels is killing thousands of people a year, according to a study published in the journal Science. For starters, Devra Lee Davis of Carnegie Mellon University and four coauthors found that if Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo, and Santiago employed technologies that now […]

Landfill, Ho!

Babies born to mothers living near landfills are more likely to suffer minor birth defects, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal. The 11-year study shows that pregnant women living near landfills in the U.K. had a 1 percent higher chance of having a baby with a congenital defect. That risk jumped […]

Don't Be a Hog

Factory hog farms, as well as the cattle and poultry industries, are pressuring the U.S. Congress to pass a bill that would use taxpayer dollars to help the farms pay for cleaning up their environmental messes. The U.S. EPA is considering costly regulations to reduce pollution from the livestock operations — and the industries don’t […]