Grist List

Sports enthusiasts urge you to ditch sports drinks

Professional snowboarders Bryan Fox and Austin Smith have started a "Drink Water" campaign, urging people to stop drinking the $20-a-gallon sugar-juice that props up their industry.

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.

Cooking grease is now so valuable that people are stealing it

Who says that clean energy policies don't create jobs? The boom in biodiesel has created not only a new commodities market in cooking grease, but a new business opportunities for security professionals -- not to mention providing work for thieves and black-market fences, which is a kind of job? That’s because fryer oil is now such a valuable resource that people are straight-up stealing it.

In recent years, a couple of state governments have realized that cooking grease has a use as a biofuel source and have regulated grease collection. At the same time, though, some less-than-savory characters have realized the grease’s value as well and are boosting it, costing some small rendering businesses losses on the order of $750,000 per year. And so the world comes to this impasse, as described by The New York Times:

The grease is often stored in black Dumpsters that reek of death, in back alleys, which is why pickups usually take place in the middle of the night.

Critical List: No Grand Canyon uranium mining; Supreme Court case on wetlands

The Obama administration will announce today that it's limiting uranium mining near the Grand Canyon.

And the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a major environmental case in which the Sacketts, a couple backed by the conservative property rights group Pacific Legal Foundation, claim the EPA unfairly restricted their use of the property by determining that it was a wetland.

A Japanese whaling ship is holding three activists who boarded it to protest its activities.

Is there a bubble in shale gas stakes?

Ladies, here’s your new tough biker chick mascot

Have you been looking for a new role model for mixing biker-chick toughness with button-boots style? If you have, comics genius Kate Beaton has you covered, and if you haven't, now you know why you should have been. This badass velocipedestrienne (no, seriously, velocipedestrienne) is based on a 19th-century cartoon about "The Awful Effects of […]

Take off your pants and hop on transit

D.C. is having its annual No Pants Metro Ride this Sunday, to raise awareness of … public transit? Indecency laws? People's bottoms? (Actually, according to the Facebook page, they're just trying to raise awareness of how funny it is when 400 people are not wearing pants, but let's go with "public transit.") This will easily […]

Tsunami disaster site rehabilitated as robot farm

The Japanese government is reclaiming land flooded by the March 2011 tsunami and turning it into what Wired calls a "robot-run super farm." The Ministry of Agriculture has claimed a 600-acre site, part of thousands of acres of farmland destroyed by the tsunami and its aftereffects, for its "Dream Project" — a farm tilled by […]

The only defense of electric cars you really need

Maggie Koerth-Baker is one of the most responsible energy journalists on the planet, in part because she writes for the blog of all blogs, BoingBoing, which has never felt the need to cloak its writers' opinions in trumped-up objectivity and false balance. So it was refreshing to see her refute the latest turd lobbed over the wall by the internet's favorite tabloid, Gawker Media: "You Are Not Alone. America Hates Electric Cars.”

These Republicans believe in climate change. And they vote

Watching this excellent short film by James West about that rare-but-not-as-rare-as-you-think species, the Republican who believes the science of climate change, I was reminded that there was a time in U.S. politics when science was not a partisan issue.