Climate Climate & Energy

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  • If Cousteau went to Copenhagen

    As we grapple with global warming, ocean acidification, and the possibility that life on earth really is doomed, it is with considerable chagrin that we recall how Jacques Cousteau sounded the general alarm thirty years ago. The celebrated underwater filmmaker, co-inventor of scuba diving, television star, sage of the environmental movement, and bon vivant died […]

    Brad Matsen Climate & Energy

  • API and ACCCE spend the big bucks

    Coal companies and the nation’s biggest railroad association accounted for 50 percent of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity’s (ACCCE) $47 million budget in 2008, according to ACCCE’s tax return, E&E News reported on Wednesday. Yowza! Arch Coal, Peabody, and Consol each put in $5 million; Foundation Coal put in just $3 million. Meanwhile, […]

    Peter Altman Climate & Energy

  • Make the kids pay: The economic effects of climate change on future generations

    If someone offered you $100 today or an inflation-adjusted $100 in 10 years, it’s unlikely you’d choose the latter. But if taking the money now cost your child’s generation billions of dollars, that option would seem pretty miserly. The debate over the economics of climate change boils down to that very calculation: how much are […]

    Michael A. Livermore Climate & Energy

  • Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!

    Editor’s note: It seems that Al Gore reads Grist. And, um, doesn’t credit it. We’re just saying. From a sharp-eyed reader comes this ad for Humble Oil (which later merged with Standard to become, yes, Exxon). It may win the All Time Millenial Award for Maximal Irony. It’s from a 1962 edition of Life Magazine, […]

    David Roberts Climate & Energy

  • New York passes clean energy financing bill

    The New York State Legislature has not, of late, been able to agree on anything — the budget, same-sex marriage, and even, for awhile, which party was in the majority. But there is one thing they are unanimous about: clean energy finanancing. Last night, by a vote of 192-0, the famously combative body passed S66004-a/A […]

    Adam Browning Climate & Energy

  • Why won’t Lisa Jackson/Nancy Sutley visit a mountaintop removal site?

    I think at the Obama administration we all believe that everybody has the right to live in a clean, healthy environment and a prosperous economy. And we’re working towards that. We need to reach out to communities whose voices have been ignored and where there are disproportional impacts, whether it’s environmental protection or promoting [a] […]

    Jeff Biggers Climate & Energy

  • Nuclear companies face reactor design problems, ethics questions

    Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor design. Federal regulators have expressed serious safety concerns about the design for 14 of the nation’s 25 proposed new nuclear reactors, raising questions about the future of what the industry calls its “renaissance.” The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced last month that Westinghouse failed to demonstrate that the building designed to shield its […]

    Sue Sturgis Climate & Energy

  • Copenhagen news & views: follow all the latest

    There were plenty of hints over the past month that world leaders would down-shift expectations for drafting a new, international climate treaty in Copenhagen next month. Still, when news broke over the weekend that key nations, including the United States, were planning to push a final treaty into 2010, it came as shock to climate […]

    Grist staff Climate & Energy

  • One doctor’s quest to sound the alarm on ‘wind turbine syndrome’

    By the time the pediatrician Nina Pierpont settled in upstate New York, she had already built a rather diverse and full career. As the Connecticut native tells it, she studied birds in the Amazon jungle on her way to earning a Ph.D. in behavioral ecology, then enrolled in medical school, completing a degree and practicing […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Climate & Energy

  • An Appalachian tale

    Editor’s Note: Author Ann Pancake grew up in the heart of West Virginia coal country. Her 2007 novel Strange as this Weather Has Been is the story of one family’s struggle against the relentless destruction of its beloved mountains. I went home to West Virginia a couple weeks ago. October is the most beautiful season […]

    Ann Pancake Climate & Energy