Grist List
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Patagonia asks customers to overthrow capitalism’s basic tenets
Patagonia, the official apparel of green-minded outdoorsy people and all of San Francisco, wants its customers to buy fewer of its products. Instead, the company is asking that Patagonia lovers reuse and repair their clothes. The company will mend its products for cheap, and help customers sell them on eBay or through their website. It […]
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Critical List: Rina heads to Cancun; French wildflowers are disappearing
Hurricane Rina is heading towards Cancun. The U.S. wants to start trade wars all over the place. First, the solar industry goes toe to toe with China, and now the House of Representatives is mixing it up by trying to exempt U.S. airlines from the EU emissions scheme. Multinational energy companies who want to exploit […]
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High BPA levels in pregnant moms may change their daughters’ behavior
It's not just hippie paranoia that should keep pregnant women from eating too much BPA-laced canned food. A new study found that 3-year-old girls were more likely to show symptoms of depression and anxiety if their mothers had tested higher for BPA levels during pregnancy. (There didn’t seem to be a correlation for boys.) The […]
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Energy-saving LED light bulbs fuel this insane light display
Okay, it's no Dancing Dror, but this is a pretty amazing Halloween light display done primarily with LED bulbs. Switching to LEDs can cut your holiday lighting energy expenditure by 90 percent, according to DOE (though they're just talking about a Christmas tree, not a full-front singing house display), and widespread use of LEDs for everyday […]
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Investors representing $20 trillion get behind climate change prevention
It's sort of a no-brainer to realize that we need to invest in clean energy technology and get governments to institute policies that support those investments. Greens have been saying that for ages. But greens, for the most part, do not represent $20 trillion in assets. So when people who do wield that amount of […]
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Wind turbine with Inspector Gadget arms makes twice the power
A simple new idea in wind turbines could increase their power production by 100 percent over the course of a year, and even make it possible to put turbines in places where they were uneconomical before. By giving turbines blades that extend — longer for lower speed winds, shorter for faster winds — researcher Rajnish […]
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iPod inventor’s next trick: a smart thermostat
I've said before that the next Steve Jobs would be in energy, not in information technology, but I had no idea that day would arrive quite so soon. As filmmaker and design critic John Pavlus reports at Fast Company, Tony Fadell, who invented the iPod, is working on a thermostat as intuitive and potentially revolutionary as … […]
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Energy prices haven’t budged in 50 years — but oil is crazy expensive
Americans pay about the same as they did in 1960 for most forms of energy, says this infographic produced by the home energy audit folks at WellHome. Except for oil, which is now on average even more crazy-expensive than it was during the oil crisis of the 1970's, when people were ready to bash each […]
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No more Javan rhinos in Vietnam
The Javan rhinoceros, an endangered species, no longer exists in Vietnam: poachers killed the last one and took its horn, according to the World Wildlife Fund. That rhinoceros was killed last April and since then there have been no signs (viewings, scat, etc.) of any others remaining in the Cat Tien National Park where they […]