Articles by Grist staff

Royal Flushed over Frankenfoods

Britain’s Prince Charles has bucked the royal tradition of political neutrality by loudly voicing his opposition to genetically modified crops, pitting him against Prime Minister Tony Blair. Charles, a committed organic farmer, wrote an article for the widely circulated Daily Mail posing “10 unanswered questions” about the safety, ethics, and effectiveness of gene-modification technology. Opinion […]

DDT-Free Willy

Some killer whales in the Gulf of Alaska have dangerously high concentrations of DDT and PCBs in their blubber, according to a new scientific study. Scientists worry that several pods of whales in the area could die off because of the industrial contamination, which may interfere with their reproduction. Both DDT and PCBs are banned […]

Bonn Fire

The Kyoto climate change treaty is running into real trouble over a European Union proposal to cap emissions trading. A new study of the European proposal by the Paris-based International Energy Agency estimates that a trading cap would have the largest impact on the U.S., reducing its ability to make trades by two-thirds and requiring […]

Cold Comfort

A two-mile long ice core drilled out of an Antarctic ice sheet shows that levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane are higher now than at any time in the past 420,000 years. The ice-core record is the longest obtained to date. The findings — gathered by a U.S.-Russian-French team at Russia’s Vostok […]