Articles by Grist staff

A roundup of news snippets

• Democratic lawmakers are criticizing the Bush administration’s plan to ease pollution reporting requirements for factory farms. • A global water crisis is right around the corner, says the U.N. • Shell Oil wants to quintuple the amount of oil it produces from Canada’s tar sands. • The ports of L.A. and Long Beach have […]

Postal service and direct mailers join together in a pro-junk-mail campaign

A number of state legislators are introducing bills that would allow residents to block junk mail, and the group ForestEthics recently launched a campaign calling for a Do Not Mail Registry. This sounds appealing to most everyone with a mailbox, but is loudly opposed by direct mailers and the U.S. Postal Service. The Direct Marketing […]

Fifteen years after the Great Flood of 1993, floodplain development is booming

Once it was a cornfield; now it’s a Wal-Mart, a Taco Bell, a Target. Here along a stretch of Missouri’s Highway 40, in the Chesterfield Valley area just west of downtown St. Louis, what’s said to be the largest strip mall in the country sits on about 46 acres of Mississippi River bottomlands. Less than […]

Energy could be harvested from mixing of fresh and salt water

Through an osmotic process we don’t pretend to understand, the mixing of fresh and salt water at the world’s river mouths produces enough energy to feed 20 percent of the world’s electricity demand, say Dutch scientists. Could we start running our gadgetry on salt power? Small projects in Norway and the Netherlands are testing out […]