Grist List
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Icelandic moonbow plus Northern Lights is methadone for your nature-starved eyeballs
Iceland sits just below the Arctic circle, at the confluence of multiple ocean currents, which means it a) has the Northern Lights and b) gets tons of rain so is covered with waterfalls. No doubt the descendants of Norsemen chant heartily whenever they behold this rare confluence of events:
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Las Vegas’ new water park is literally the dumbest thing ever
Scene: Las Vegas Valley, Nevada. A desert. Las Vegas developer: We need more family entertainment! Therefore it is imperative that we BUILD AN $18 MILLION WATER PARK! There is literally no other possible solution. Citizens of Vegas: But the latest assessment of the declining water level in Lake Mead, from which Vegas gets its drinking […]
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U.S. roads are built to break
Why do we have to pour so much of our transportation money into highway infrastructure? Well, because 50 years ago, the U.S. decided to structure roads in a way that was cheap to build but expensive and difficult to maintain. It's the infrastructure equivalent of buying a cheap crappy blender and then having to replace […]
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The new fracking battleground: Trenton
There's a new battlefront in the fracking fight: the Delaware River Basin, which provides water to 5 percent of the country's population. And anti-fracking dreamboat Mark Ruffalo is asking for help in fighting against fracking there. You don’t have to take Ruffalo’s word for it — you probably want to fight fracking anyway. When 350.org […]
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Congress wants to count pizza as a vegetable in school lunches
Parents! You needn't worry about what public schools are feeding your kids, because the USDA is reforming school lunch standards and cutting out things like potatoes and salty foods and … oh wait, that was true. But now Congress has gotten involved. And that means that the government is on track to declare pizza a […]
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Paper wine bottle is classier than a box and just as compostable
Typically, drinking wine from paper vessels doesn't exactly scream "classy." Think about wine from a box … or a Dixie cup … or a paper bag. But the makers of GreenBottle are trying to break that trend with the world's first paper wine bottle. The bottle has a thin layer of plastic on the inside, […]
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Mongolia plans to combat warming with giant ice cube
Scientists in Ulan Bator, Mongolia are planning to save energy in summer by cryogenically preserving winter. They want to encourage extremely thick ice to form on the local river, thus storing up cold temperatures that can later be used to cool the city. The scientists are artificially creating "naleds," which are slabs of ice up […]
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U.S. release of British nature doc skips the part about climate change
Global warming is too hot for TV in the U.S., even when the TV is really cold. Frozen Planet, the BBC miniseries about the Arctic and Antarctic, has an episode about climate change impacts — but that episode's not being aired in the United States. The BBC made seven episodes of Frozen Planet. Six feature […]
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Critical List: Texas’ neverending wildfire season; clean energy investments could double
Texas' wildfire "season" has lasted for more than a year and won't end anytime soon. Obama: "Over the long term, [reducing carbon emissions] is good for our economies." By 2020, investors could be pouring $395 billion a year, double the current total, into clean energy. Only about half of the Department of Energy's spending for […]
