Articles by Grist staff

Researchers quantify U.S. wildfire carbon emissions

The estimations are in on the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from Southern California’s recent wildfires. And the winner is … somewhere between about 6 million tons and 8 million tons. Which sounds like a lot, but on average, wildfires in the United States each year spew some 300 million tons of […]

Oxfam warns Europe’s biofuel boom likely to worsen plight of world’s poor

The anti-poverty charity Oxfam said this week that the European Union’s rush to biofuels could hit the world’s poor quite hard. The group released a report about the issue suggesting that without proper controls to make the biofuels boom sustainable and more just, it’s likely to threaten the food supply and provide a large incentive […]

U.S. recalls 440,000 more leaded toys, including novelty teeth

If Halloween itself wasn’t the fright-fest you’d hoped for, maybe the most recent round of leaded-toy recalls will do the trick. This week’s list includes 1,500 Ribbit board games, 16,000 sets of Elite Operations action figures from Toys ‘R’ Us, 380,000 Galaxy Warriors figures, and 43,000 sets of novelty teeth. The teeth were found by […]

Canadian government’s eco-strategies not working, says audit

Sustainable development strategies introduced regularly by the Canadian government since the mid-1990s have largely failed to produce results, according to a new audit. A report by Environment Commissioner Ron Thompson notes that officials seem to just go through the motions, that there is no accountability, and that there has been no provision of “baselines or […]