Climate Culture

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  • Yeah, But How’s Shiloh Doing?

    Climate change gets splashy coverage in USA Today and U.S. News The paradigmatically middle-of-the-road USA Today is running a series on global warming this week — guess that means mainstream America is getting hep to the crisis. Articles cover the life of an eco-groovy family in Colorado, the greening of corporate America, and the likelihood […]

    Grist staff Culture

  • From Dems to Diva

    It’s just a jump to the left Welcome to Grist List’s time-warp edition! This week, Al Gore and both Clintons made noise about global warming and energy policy. For a sec we thought we’d been transported to 1996, but then we realized: a decade ago, they weren’t saying a damn thing. Photo: AP/Denis Paquin. And […]

    Katharine Wroth & Sarah van Schagen Culture

  • We’ve Been Cartwheeling to Work

    Gas prices spur Americans to change behavior Americans hit in the pocketbook by high gas prices are, shockingly, changing their consumptive behavior. A survey by Consumer Reports found that over a third of American drivers are pondering getting a more fuel-efficient vehicle in place of their current one; half of those are considering a hybrid, […]

    Grist staff Culture

  • Gore’s new flick, An Inconvenient Truth, improbably succeeds

    It’s something of a miracle that An Inconvenient Truth, the chronicle of Al Gore’s quest to raise alarm about “climate chaos,” exists at all. A movie with a scantily clad Jessica Alba presenting a computer slideshow on climate science is implausible enough. Al Gore doing it, well … even C-SPAN could be forgiven for having […]

    David Roberts Culture

  • Umbra on the cost of organics

    Dear Umbra, How come it’s so expensive to go organic? I could swing it by myself by eating a bare minimum of food, but I’m charged with feeding consume-mass-quantity types who favor the traditional American diet, and they eat meat. I would be in debt buying just half the monthly food consumption. One would have […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture

  • From Bare Ass to Bono

    Look at the set of issues on that chick! At a boring heads-of-state summit, a bikini-sporting beauty queen crashed a photo shoot, protesting a pulp mill planned for Uruguay. “It was one of the best things that has happened at this summit,” said Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He added, “I didn’t see anything about pulp, […]

    David Roberts & Sarah van Schagen Culture

  • The CEI ads

    OMFG, so, I finally went and watched the TV ads to be aired by the Competitive Enterprise Institute a week before An Inconvenient Truth is released.

    I'm not sure what I expected, but these things are genuinely funny. They look like nothing so much as a parody produced by Saturday Night Live. The tag line -- the last line of the ad, read dramatically as a little girl blows a dandelion -- is: "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life."

    It's a pro-CO2 ad. Seriously. It turns out, we breathe CO2 out. And plants absorb it. It comes from animals! And oceans! Who could hate it?

    As though there were a huge cabal of people out there who viewed this particular molecule as intrinsically evil.

    Obviously, I'm not in the target audience. But I can't imagine anyone being persuaded by something so self-evidently absurd. I guess we'll see, though.

    (One thing to note: It's "some politicians" and "global warming alarmists" making these claims about global warming. Not, say, scientists.)

    Update [2006-5-17 15:48:57 by David Roberts]: Oh, I also meant to draw attention to a classic interview with CEI founder Fred Smith, from which this amazing passage is drawn:

    David Roberts Culture

  • Umbra on composting weeds

    Dear Umbra, I’ve been weeding the garden and yard, and got to thinking about some of the more invasive plants. I’ve heard that not everything goes in the compost pile, but what weeds can I toss in? I’m fairly new to the composting game, so any advice is much appreciated. Danielle Walker Monroe, Ore. Dearest […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture

  • Daryl Hannah makes a splash with her new eco-blog

    Daryl Hannah. Courtesy dhlovelife.com. The day started a long, long time ago, but Daryl Hannah’s got that laid-back, just-woke-up vibe — occasionally stumbling for a word, inserting a slow, easy laugh here and there. And who can blame her? She’s been working long nights shooting a film in Vancouver, B.C., about dirty cops. And on […]

    Vanessa McGrady Culture

  • Umbra on building a deck

    Dear Umbra, It’s spring, my house turns 100 years old this year, and I would like to celebrate by adding a deck. But what type of building materials should I choose? Wood, plastic, or composite? In my market there is no ready supply of FSC-certified wood — I would have to have it milled and […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture