Climate Culture

Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park brings nature to a city setting

Alexander Calder’s Eagle against an Olympic mountain backdrop. Photo: iotae via flickr I’ve never seen the Pacific Northwest. I mean, I live in Seattle, and I look around, but I’ve never really seen it. I came to this realization while walking the zig-zagged trail at Seattle’s new Olympic Sculpture Park with Grist mascot Chip Giller […]

Silly reader, books are for kids!

Remember when you were a kid and the best part of the day was when you were just starting to get sleepy and you’d snuggle up in bed with your mom/dad/sibling/nanny/manny/Uncle Leroy to read a bedtime story? And the best bedtime stories were the ones with big illustrations of imaginary creatures like “Mr. Ferebee” and […]

OMFG

Don’t look directly at it!

Multimedia series honored in ‘explanatory reporting’ category

The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for “explanatory reporting” today for its impressive Altered Oceans series, with its rich online multimedia features as well as hard-hitting reporting and images that went into the print edition. Getting depressed about the appalling state of our oceans has never been so much fun! (See Grist’s mini-summary […]

Robert Redford chats about the new green programming on the Sundance Channel

Robert Redford. With his legendary Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford brought sex appeal to the business of independent filmmaking. Now, with his Sundance cable channel, he’s aiming to do the same thing for another underappreciated art form — eco-themed television programming. Tonight, the channel launches “The Green,” a block of environmental programming that will air […]

A reintroduction

I'm restarting my series on solutions to global warming, both on how to phase out fossil fuels and the best means to sequester carbon, because I consider the topic a critical one.

The carbon lobby has mostly (not entirely) given up disputing that global warming is occurring. They know that they won't be able to confuse the public on its human-caused nature much longer.

But a final stalling tactic is open to deniers -- to pretend that nothing can be done, or at least nothing that most people are willing to live with. There is an old engineering saying: "no solution, no problem."

Converging with this, there is a small but unfortunately influential primitivist movement. In their belief that technology itself is totalitarian, they also contribute to the idea that the only solution to global warming is a drastic reduction in the technical level of civilization -- perhaps down to the hunter-gatherer level. Many well-meaning, intelligent people promote a less extreme version of this trope -- the conviction that we need to impoverish working people in rich nations to solve our environmental crisis and deal justly with the poorer countries.

The primary purpose of this series is to ensure that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies become known as inexpensive fossil fuel substitutes available today, rather than a high-priced vision of tomorrow. The U.S. needs to understand that continued use of fossil fuel is a political decision rather than a technical one.

Umbra on wine corks

Dear Umbra, Not that I am a big-drinking old lady or anything, but I find myself with a lot of wine corks that I can’t find a recycling outlet for. All of my retired farmer friends have made all the cork trivets the neighborhood can stand. What to do with our corks, please? Marianne de […]

What a bunch of whiners

So, remember that lawsuit by the automakers against states implementing California’s clean air standards? The one I said might be dismissed, um, several weeks ago? Breaking: it wasn’t dismissed! In fact, the trial is rolling along, and the whiny-ass-titty-baby automakers are in court right now arguing that they don’t have the smarts, money, or time […]

With Habitat for Humanity

In a recent collaboration with U2 on "The Saints Are Coming," Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day sang about a house in New Orleans. But he spent this weekend hammering soffit onto one, as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. Armstrong brought along some friends and his fam to help with the project as well, […]

Is the information age killing off honeybees?

For a while now, scientist have been scratching their heads over the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon in which bees away from their hives never return after going out to collect pollen.

But according to a recent report filed by The Independent, scientists are now considering the possibility that the cause of CCD may be electromagnetic interference from mobile phone networks. From the article: