Articles by Grist staff

L.A. building schools close to freeways

More than 60,000 students in Los Angeles attend school within 500 feet of a highway, and seven more traffic-spooning campuses are in the works, despite health experts’ warnings that such pollution-proximate students are at increased risk of asthma and other illnesses. All of the schools will be built with air-filtration systems, but such systems do […]

Loggerhead turtle populations declining

Loggerhead turtle populations rose in the 1990s but are now falling again, according to a recent federal review. Thanks, commercial fishing!

Faster phaseout of ozone-damaging chemicals agreed to by 191 nations

At the conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Protocol last week, some 191 nations agreed to a faster phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals than had originally been negotiated in 1987. Hydrochlorofluorocarbons, or HCFCs, emerged in the 1990s as a less-ozone-damaging alternative to CFCs, which did truly nasty things to the ozone layer. But HCFCs […]

U.N. climate summit kicks off in New York; Bush preps for his own climate meeting in Washington

Al Gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and lots of other bigwigs and heads of state are gathering at U.N. headquarters in New York on Monday for the most high-level climate summit ever, but one world leader will be noticeably absent: George W. Bush. The meeting is intended to build […]