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Grist List

  • The trouble with urban farming: What if your turkeys are cute?

    Kiera Butler is not a farmer. She and her friends have been raising their Thanksgiving turkeys in a backyard for six months, but they're not accustomed to killing animals for food, and they've gotten kind of attached to the little guys. Here's Kiera's story, originally Storified by Mother Jones, about the weirdness of knowing that […]

    Jess Zimmerman Agriculture

  • Hilton hotels recycle soap for charity

    Pretty much nobody besides Eloise and Leonard Cohen stays in a hotel for long enough to go through a bar of soap. They can't put your slightly-used soap out for the next guest, though, so hotels throw out more than 2.5 million bars a day. Hilton Hotels have now realized how stupid this is, and […]

    Jess Zimmerman Culture

  • Why the right wing fears climate action (and it’s not because they’re crazy)

    Conservatives have drummed up unprecedented devotion to climate change denialism by invoking the specter of anti-capitalism, writes Naomi Klein in The Nation, and they're not really wrong. Combating climate change will mean overhauling the free market economy and contracting the corporate sector, and people whose livelihoods depend on big business have a reason to be […]

    Jess Zimmerman Science

  • Airlines race to be first to fly with biofuel

    One day, maybe, planes will be able fly on electricity alone, but until then, the best chance they have to get off gasoline is to switch over to biofuels. And that's actually happening! Over the summer, two biofueled flights made it across the Atlantic, and now Alaska Airlines is pushing an ambitious commercial biofuel flight […]

    Sarah Laskow Energy

  • Why cities should destroy their highways

    America has a huge transportation infrastructure deficit, which means lots of our highways are due to be rebuilt. But according to Next American City editor at large Diana Lind, we'd be better off simply knocking them down, especially the ones that blight our cities. It's been done before, reports Andrew Nusca at SmartPlanet: After the […]

    Christopher Mims Buildings

  • Romney is recycling all of Bush’s EPA-hating energy advisors

    Political windsock Mitt Romney has no opinions of his own about energy, so he's hired a bunch of people to tell him what to think about it, reports Politico. And almost all of those people are former Bush Jr. employees. Already on board the Romney train are Jim Connaughton, who ran Bush’s White House Council […]

    Christopher Mims Energy

  • Spray coating makes your stuff last forever so you can buy less of it

    If you watch one video today, make it this one — the shot of chocolate sauce sliding off a pristine pair of white tennis shoes looks like pure CGI. But it's real. As Tuan Nguyen explains at SmartPlanet, what you're looking at is a new type of spray-on silicon coating that dries into a nano-scale […]

    Christopher Mims Technology

  • How your Prius is hurting the planet

    Hybrid cars like the Prius emit less carbon than conventional cars. But they also depend on rare earth materials to make their engines work. And the mining of rare earth extracts a heavy toll on the environment in other ways. China has most of the world's easily accessible rare earth (which isn't actually rare, just […]

    Sarah Laskow Technology

  • Critical List: Republicans say enviros threaten border safety; Climate change will kill the Nile

    Republicans aren't against environmental protections just because those laws "kill jobs." Supposedly they also damage national security. Canada sticks its fingers in its ears, sticks out its tongue, and tells the U.S. it'll just sell its tar sands oil to China. Forget Solyndra: California-based NRG Energy is a much more typical — and much more […]

    Sarah Laskow Science