Articles by Grist staff

Australia continues to deal with epic drought

Longstanding drought has wreaked havoc across Australia, drying up lakes into shallow, acidic puddles and threatening drinking-water supplies. Unable to coax rain from the sky, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has fast-tracked a plan to buy back water entitlements from the heaviest irrigators in the Murray-Darling basin, an agricultural stronghold which produces all of the country’s […]

Chevy Volt gets prettied up, almost ready for testing

The design phase of the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt is “essentially finished,” General Motors declared Thursday. The new design is more aerodynamic than the concept Volt unveiled in Jan. 2007, allowing the car to travel solely on battery power for at least 40 miles, according to GM. The automaker hopes to have a few prototypes […]

Ginormous solar plants to be built in California

Two gigantic solar plants will be built in California under deals announced Thursday between utility Pacific Gas & Electric and companies OptiSolar and Sun Power. Together, the plants could generate 800 megawatts of electricity at peak capacity, enough to power 239,000 homes. (Perspective: The total peak capacity of every photovoltaic panel in the U.S. as […]

Number of ocean dead zones increasing dramatically, study says

As if fish didn’t have enough to worry about, now those near coastal areas are threatened by an unprecedented number of dead zones, says a study being published Friday in the journal Science. The number of dead zones — oxygen-deprived areas that can no longer support marine life — has doubled every decade since the […]