Climate Health
All Stories
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Julianne Moore wants clean air for kids
Did you guys know Julianne Moore wrote a children’s book? This is apparently the thing celebrities do when they’re over 25 (under 25, they start a perfume line). It’s about the heartbreak of being a ginger, and not about environmental stuff at all, but that isn’t stopping Moore from plugging it in her video for […]
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Red color in Texas river turns out to be pig blood
Apologies for starting off y’all’s Monday mornings on the grossest note possible, but this story was too appalling not to share. In Texas, near Dallas, an amateur drone pilot snapped a pic of a suspiciously red creek. (Weird, we know! But just get past that bit.) The drone pilot decided it was suspicious enough to […]
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Hidden risk: Mercury pollution’s costs to wildlife and people
A new report details the widespread presence of mercury in nature -- and its effects on birds and bats should make humans worried, too.
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Shocking but true! The director of ‘Revenge of the Electric Car’ wants to chat with you!
Chris Paine, director of the documentaries "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and "Revenge of the Electric Car," chatted with Grist readers.
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Old dumps, new tricks: Turning landfills into nature preserves
The Brookfield landfill was a neighborhood menace for decades. Now, it’s becoming a park with woods and wetlands -- something the experts didn’t think could be done.
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Sick of the suburbs: How badly designed communities trash our health
There’s no way around it: The suburbs make us sick. One brave researcher has set out to spread the word -- and suggest healthy alternatives.
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Capsized cruise ship could ruin pristine marine park
The reef-stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia managed to crash itself in one of the most pristine marine areas in the Mediterranean. Of course. And as the ship lists dangerously, threatening to fall further into the ocean and spill tons of oil, endangered species and other marine life are at risk. The ship has 2,400 tons […]
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North Carolina gets great clean air news
Great clean air news out of North Carolina today – the Sierra Club and four of our key allies are announcing a settlement that will retire 1,600-megawatts of dirty coal power. North Carolina has long been a clean air leader, from passing the landmark Clean Smokestacks Act a decade ago, which requires all coal plants […]
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Critical List: ‘Super fracking’; pollution threatens Lake Titicaca
Natural gas companies are looking into "super fracking," which uses larger, deeper cracks and draws power from our planet’s yellow sun.
West Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and Ohioans are all hoping that Shell will choose to build a petrochemical refinery in their state, because the plant promises jobs.
Maybe it's time to abandon Ulysses S. Grant's laws for federal land, which dictate that hard-rock mining is the best use for any plot. -
Monsanto won’t have to clean up dioxin in West Virginia
West Virginia continues to win the game of exposing human beings to extremely hazardous conditions in exchange for working-class pay, then telling them to deal with it when they get sick. The latest example of this behavior doesn't even have to do with coal, but with Monsanto and Agent Orange.
For 30 years, the Monsanto plant in a town called Nitro (named after the chemicals produced there! For real!) produced a defoliant ingredient that would later be used in Agent Orange. But the herbicides made in Nitro were contaminated with dioxin, which meant that Nitro residents were exposed to the toxic chemical beginning in the late 1940s. Dioxin has been connected to every bad health impact imaginable—for adults, problems like cancer and immune suppression, and for kids, problems like birth defects and learning disabilities. And now, because of the way West Virginia law works, the most that the citizens of Nitro can ask from the company is that it covers the cost of medical testing fees.
