grist-georgia-psc-header-ai

Grist List

  •

    Infographic: Fracking violations in Pennsylvania

    The orange dots here are natural gas extraction operations with one or more environmental violations. But, you know, deer and rainbows! Click through to NPR's interactive graphic to find out more about each operation and how many laws they're flouting. (You can also get more detailed maps and information by county.)

    Jess Zimmerman Energy

  • Congress passes the wrong pipeline bill

    It turns out Republicans and Democrats truly can work together to craft a bipartisan pipeline safety bill that satisfies both parties! And then they can accidentally pass the old version instead. The bill, which laid out new penalties for pipeline safety violations following a deadly explosion last year, was laboriously hashed out in a bipartisan […]

    Jess Zimmerman Politics

  • Police seize computers in connection with Climategate hacking

    When the University of East Anglia's servers were hacked and emails stolen, the victims — the climate scientists whose largely innocuous messages got misrepresented all over the blogosphere — were subjected to multiple independent investigations (and cleared). The hackers? Not so much. Nobody really knew who did it or apparently cared. But evidently they're cracking […]

    Jess Zimmerman Accountability

  • Facebook and coal are no longer in a relationship

    Until recently, Facebook had an "it's complicated" relationship with coal; an April 2011 Greenpeace report found that 53.2 percent of the company's electricity use was coal-generated. Now, the company is pledging to move away from dirty fuel and work towards powering its operations, including energy-suck data centers, using renewable energy. And they're helping to spread […]

    Jess Zimmerman Technology

  • Radioactive monkeys will patrol Fukushima

    Scientists have a new approach to monitoring radiation levels around Fukushima: They're outfitting local monkeys with radiation-measuring collars, then releasing them back into the wild. The monkeys will spend a month frolicking around the (potentially) nuclear forest, collecting data about radiation levels on the ground. The experimental device, which will also include GPS tracking and […]

    Jess Zimmerman Energy

  • Sucking carbon out of the air: Probably not an option

    With all this talk of the impossibility of averting catastrophic levels of future climate change, it's tempting to daydream of using technology to clean up the bed we just shat. Economists, especially, love this kind of thinking — if we just hoard enough precious gold today, maybe we can transmute it into a livable planet […]

    Christopher Mims Science

  • Arctic methane turns out to be a huge problem after all

    While the nerd herd was busy declaring the threat posed by gigantic new plumes of methane from the Arctic Ocean to be a non-starter, we all managed to miss the real methane menace, highlighted by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe: surprise. Surprise and fear. The two real methane menaces are fear and surprise. The bottom line: […]

    Christopher Mims Science

  • I can haz climate change?

    According to Australia's News.com, climate change is leading to "too many unwanted moggies." What are moggies, you ask? It’s British for “kitty cats.” Climate change has lengthened the moggie breeding season in Australia, from October through May (that's summer down under), leading to "record numbers" of cats being born. On the one hand, this means […]

    Christopher Mims Science

  • IKEA to design an entire neighborhood

    Exciting news for those whose entire house is populated by IKEA furniture (we know you're out there): the Swedish furniture company is going to be building an entire neighborhood in London. We know. It'll be like living in the IKEA store! With a Swedish meatball shop on every corner and 24/7 access to lingonberry jam. […]

    Sarah Laskow Buildings