Articles by Grist staff

IEA forecasts boom in renewables through 2030

The influential International Energy Agency has released its annual report on world energy demand, predicting that renewables will make big gains worldwide, increasing their overall market share 5 percent to meet 23 percent of the world’s total energy needs by 2030. However, coal consumption is also predicted to increase, eventually providing some 44 percent of […]

Japan’s emissions hit record levels

Last year, Japan’s greenhouse-gas emissions reached record levels, hitting 1.5 billion tons of CO2 equivalent — an increase of some 2.3 percent. Much of the rise was due to an earthquake shutting down the world’s largest nuclear plant in northwestern Japan, which pushed utilities to rely more on fossil fuels. But critics have also said […]

Major mass-transit initiatives did well in U.S. election

Overall, more than 70 percent of the major public-transit projects that appeared on ballots in the United States on Nov. 4 were approved, according to the mass-transit group Center for Transportation Excellence. Some of the more notable projects approved by voters were a high-speed rail network in California and $18 billion in public-transit improvements in […]

‘Hypermiling’ is the word of the year

Beating out such worthy contenders as “staycation” and “CarrotMob,” “hypermiling” has been crowned the 2008 Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.