Articles by Grist staff

They'll Finnish the Report Annan

The head of a U.N. team investigating environmental damage in Yugoslavia said yesterday that the team has found no evidence that NATO bombing caused major ecological catastrophes. But Pekka Haavisto, the former Finnish environment minister who led the team’s 10-day tour of Serbia, called for urgent action to help clean up “hot spots” of war-related […]

Riders Knocked Out of Their Saddles

Senate Democrats knocked four anti-environmental provisions out of an Interior Department spending bill yesterday, including riders that would have blocked new energy-efficiency rules for federal agencies and permitted lead mining in a Missouri national forest. But Democrats failed to remove language that would let mining companies dump large amounts of waste on public land, and […]

Carbon Sinking

Worldwide emissions of carbon from the burning of fossil fuels fell by 0.5 percent last year, the first drop since 1993, according to new estimates from the Worldwatch Institute. This decline took place even as the world economy expanded by 2.5 percent last year, undermining the argument that reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate […]

Boyz 'n the Oxygen Hood

Children in poor, predominantly minority neighborhoods in New York City are as much as 21 times more likely than children from affluent parts of the city to be hospitalized for asthma, according to a new study. Doctors suspect that a number of environmental factors contribute to the nation’s urban asthma epidemic, including indoor and outdoor […]