Climate Culture

What would you like to ask him?

Tomorrow, I’m sitting down for a chat with Paul Hawken, author, entrepreneur, and environmental legend. We’ll be discussing, among other things, his new book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. (If you’re in Seattle tomorrow, you can see Hawken at a Grist-sponsored […]

Friday music blogging comes to Grist

I’ve decided that green or no green, I’m going to start getting some music up on this blog. Every blog needs some music, right? I’ve been digging on the new Modest Mouse album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. Here’s “Parting of the Sensory,” from which this post’s title comes. And in other […]

Making public transit work

Greater Vancouver leads the Northwest in transit ridership, with somewhere between two and three times as many annual bus and train rides per person as Portland and Seattle.

So the obvious question: How come? Why does Vancouver do so much better in transit statistics than its southern neighbors?

How best to pitch the climate change message?

Mike Hulme of the UK’s Tyndall Centre says — yet again — that the language of "catastrophe" and "disaster" used by climate-change scientists and advocates is having the opposite of its intended effect: it’s making people numb and apathetic. I more or less buy this — I did, after all, write a five-part series arguing […]

Live Aid guy disses Gore’s Live Earth concerts

Here’s what Live Aid and Live 8 organizer Bob Geldoff had to say about Gore’s Live Earth concerts: “I hope they’re a success,” De Volkskrant newspaper quoted Geldof as saying in an interview. “But why is (Gore) actually organizing them? To make us aware of the greenhouse effect? Everybody’s known about that problem for years. […]

Green the Pope way

That’s the Vatican’s green vision.

Who says scientists aren’t funny?

RealClimate has an extended satire against climate denier use of false correlation=causation logic to argue for solar cycles as the main cause of global warming. As humor with extended charts and co-efficients of correlation go, it is quite funny. However, I must admit that an exchange between two commenters on the post was much funnier:

We shed a tear

Fundamentalist Christian minister Jerry Falwell is dead at 73. It’s probably churlish to use the occasion of someone’s death to point out that said person was a paranoid, avaricious, hate-spewing enabler of America’s basest lizard-brain impulses, so I won’t go there. I will, however, note that one of the proudest moments of my young career […]

When is pizza not a turkey sandwich?

What we have available to eat is controlled by different businesses in different ways. Whether they are responsive to our needs and desires is something about which Americans can and should be at lot more vocal.

We arrived at the boarding gate at George Bush Intercontinental Airport about an hour before the scheduled departure time, stripped of any liquids over 3.4 ounces not stored in a clear, quart-size, zip-top plastic bag. I went to the service desk to ask the airline rep what food would be provided on our flight. (This is the airline which runs TV ads boasting that unlike their competitors they offer food on their flights.) The airline's website establishes that economy passengers get a sandwich on a flight like this one. Here's what we got:

Trouble With a Capital B

Chemicals play a big role in breast-cancer cases, says report You know how Tammy Wynette said sometimes it’s hard to be a woman? Well, it just got harder: a new report finds a potential link between breast cancer and 216 chemicals, including 35 common air pollutants and 73 food or consumer-product ingredients. Racking up evidence […]