Climate Climate & Energy
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Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe gives climate change a human face
Elizabeth Kolbert began building a fan base among political junkies with a series of vivid New Yorker profiles that were collected in 2004’s The Prophet of Love. Ranging from George Pataki and Hillary Clinton to Regis Philbin and Al Sharpton, from title character Rudy Giuliani to former Weatherman Kathy Boudin, Kolbert’s pieces were filled with […]
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Three new books put the spotlight on our warming world
Here at Grist, we tend to be good at detecting extremely subtle patterns. Like, say, the way certain politicians keep trying to drill in certain areas. Or the way love letters inevitably come after we publish a striking photo that might portray Umbra Fisk. Or the number of rainy days in a row outside our […]
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Fools Russia In
Russia to build oil pipeline within half-mile of world’s deepest lake A 2,550-mile-long oil pipeline is set to be built within 900 yards of the world’s deepest lake. And really, what could go wrong? Lake Baikal — home to a variety of unique species of flora and fauna and over 20 percent of the planet’s […]
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An interview with the founder of Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institute
There are few titans remaining in the environmental world — figures that command respect not only inside the movement but in the larger global political milieu as well. Lester Brown is one of them. In 1974, he founded the Worldwatch Institute, one of the first think tanks to focus on the global environmental situation (its […]
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Any Portugal in a Wind Storm
Portugal gives wind power a big bear hug; England gives it the finger Portugal is already building the world’s largest solar power plant; now, to make us feel even worse about ourselves, it’s planning a huge new project to more than double its wind-energy capacity. A contractor bid will be accepted by this summer for […]
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Portraits of loss in the wake of Katrina
On a misty November morning in 2005, I was photographing in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward neighborhood a few blocks from where one of the levees had failed 10 weeks earlier. Squatting in a driveway in foul-smelling mud, adjusting the knobs on my camera, I stood up to stretch my back and noticed a man sitting […]
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Beetle Bailiwick
Warmer B.C. ravaged by beetles, haunted by dead birds The flora and fauna of British Columbia, Canada, are having a rough go of global warming. B.C. forests are suffering through a massive insect infestation that’s ravaging an area three times the size of Maryland. The mountain pine beetle can’t survive severe cold, but milder winters […]
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Global Warring
Climate change a major security problem, says U.K. defense chief U.K. Defense Secretary John Reid has echoed a growing number of analysts by stressing that global warming is not just a weather problem, or a health problem, or a problem for biodiversity. It’s a global security problem. In a Monday speech, Reid called on the […]
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City Slicker
New Yorkers sue Big Oil over decades-old underground contamination The words “oil spill” tend to summon images of remote coastlines and goo-covered wildlife. But one of the nastiest spills going is in Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Greenpoint neighborhood: a 17-million-gallon underground oil slick (bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster) that has spread over an area as big […]
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No Taxation Without Allocation
Americans would support gas tax in service of green goals, poll finds Most Americans would support a higher federal gasoline tax if the proceeds went toward ending dependence on foreign oil, reducing global warming, or cutting energy consumption, a new nationwide telephone poll shows. Some 85 percent of adults polled opposed an increased gas tax […]
