Grist List

Look! Up in the sky! It's an inflatable wind turbine!

In the department of cool inventions you'll probably never use, the inventor of the Segway has come up with an idea for an inflatable wind turbine.

Its main advantage is that it's mobile: imagine parking your EV and sending your inflatable wind turbine up into the sky to charge it while you're at work. It could be moved to take advantage of the best winds as they shift, and, more to the point, It could also be mounted on top of a building or on the side of the road in order to double as a billboard.
 

Wall Street and ethanol cause starvation, say scientists

Today's supervillains are soooo boring. If only they'd wear tights and touch entrapped damsels’ hair in a way that made us uncomfortable, we'd be up for patriotically pistol-whipping them, Captain America style. Instead we find out that Wall Street and ethanol -- a diffuse network of trading computers and a colorless inebriant, respectively -- are the reason billions are going hungry in the developing world. How are we supposed to launch a hideously expensive vendetta-war against that?

Make a speed-displaying vest for cycling at night

There are a lot of bike accessories that will let cars know you're there. But it can still be hard for them to tell whether you're speeding up or slowing down — which can make it tough for even a well-meaning driver to keep a safe distance. Mykle Hansen's speed vest is designed to reduce […]

Critical List: DOE’s loan guarantee head out; some beluga whales are toxic

Jonathan Silver, DOE's loan guarantee czar, is the first government employee to lose his job over Solyndra. leaving the government because the loan guarantee program doesn't have any money left, anyway.

Solyndra's also screwing the rest of the cleantech industry.

The BP spill is still affecting Louisiana, where the oyster season could be delayed and shrimp harvests dropped 99 percent.

A judge ruled that the EPA was a little too excited about regulating West Virginia coal mines and should have gone through more formal rulemaking on guidelines to dump coal waste into streams. Another part of their work, on water quality, is still at issue, which means coal companies could lose in the long run.

Car-crushing mayor wins an Ig Nobel prize

Remember Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, who ran over a Mercedes parked in a bike lane USING A TANK? He's just won an Ig Nobel prize, the coveted award for research (or, you know, a mayoral publicity stunt) that first makes people laugh, then makes them think.

WSJ: We can't trust climate science because neutrinos might go faster than light

Someone at the Wall Street Journal read a press release about a scientific finding! And then decided that since people are evidently still discovering things, climate science is probably going to turn out bullshit.

Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere. 

People love smart cities, as long as you don't call them smart cities

The vast majority of Americans — almost 80 percent — are totally on board with living somewhere that's close to jobs and schools, where the environment is clean and you don't have to spend much money on gas. They just don't want to live in places that are "sustainable" or involve "smart growth," because that […]

Tolkien parody turns recycling into an epic journey

What I know about Lord of the Rings can basically be summed up in a single Flight of the Conchords song, but someone clearly had a terrifically good time making this recycling-based parody, so I still think it's pretty super. I haven't yet stayed awake through an entire Lord of the Rings movie but I […]

Greens join Occupy Wall Street, protest against everything being super screwed up

In all of the navel-gazing that climate activists conduct in order to figure out why the world is on the highway to carbon hell, one thing that's easy to forget is what we're up against: Gigantic, tremendously wealthy entrenched interests whose only goal is to maintain the status quo right up until the Once-ler burns the last of our fossil fuels. In other words, corporations.

Corporations fund the climate denial machine, lobby for subsidies to keep themselves viable long after the social and environmental costs of their ways have become egregious, and at the slightest provocation, sic their anointed party on any alternative energy that should threaten their unsustainable model.

That's why it should be no surprise that a movement aimed, at least vaguely, at reducing the power of corporations should be appealing to anyone who cares about the future of life on earth.