Articles by Grist staff

What Do Butterflies, Ski Passes, and Eggs Have in Common?

The British government plans to start monitoring numbers of butterflies and the sales of Scotland ski passes, among other indicators, as part of an effort to track climate change. Each year, the government will publish an annual report taking a look at potential signs of global warming, also including the number of floods, the time […]

Summers Hot

In a rare public dispute, Treasury Secretary-designate Lawrence Summers yesterday said the U.S. would vote against a controversial World Bank loan to China that environmentalists have criticized. The $40 million loan would pay for the resettlement of 58,000 poor Chinese farmers from an overcrowded, badly eroded area to traditionally Tibetan land, also considered environmentally sensitive. […]

Giving Public Lands the Shaft

The Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday gave initial approval to a bill that would protect Western mining interests from tougher environmental rules proposed by the Interior Department. A 1997 Interior Department ruling limited the acreage of mining sites on federal lands, but this bill would exempt hundreds of mining operations from the ruling. Earlier this year, […]

Koop Has the Vinyl Word

Millions of dollars worth of vinyl toys pulled from store shelves at the behest of Greenpeace and other groups pose no medical threats, according to a panel of leading physicians and scientists chaired by C. Everett Koop, former U.S. surgeon general. A report by the panel found no scientific evidence that two plastic softeners known […]