Grist List

Graph: The embarrassingly paltry sums government gives renewable energy

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Gee, we wish Obama would rip on Perry's denialism in public

“You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire, denying climate change,” said President Obama at a fundraiser in Silicon Valley on Sunday, allegedly. It's like he's been reading Grist! Or more like he made the obvious connection that everyone with even a lizard-like sense for irony would make. It’s nice to see the president […]

Graphic: Fast food is more expensive than homemade

The New York Times breaks down the cost of two home-cooked meals, relative to McDonald's.

Solyndra shows the government is doing its job, for once

Solyndra's failure isn’t an embarrassment for the government, says Joe Nocera in The New York Times. In fact, it’s exactly what we should expect from a government program designed to fund risky, early-stage technologies that wouldn't otherwise find traction among private-sector funders of research and development. If there were no Solyndras in this world, says Nocera, it would mean government was funding precisely the wrong kind of breakthrough energy research.

BP will be messing up Australia next

The Great Australian Bight has all of the hallmarks of a place you really don't want to mess with — incredible marine diversity, endangered whales, awesome natural beauty. But the Australian government decided that this would also be a good place to let BP prospect for oil, and gave the company a tax break to ease their way on that project.

How to save rhinos and tigers: Shoot the crap out of poachers

In India's Kaziranga National Park, rhinos and tigers are thriving, because poachers are dying instead. When it comes to poachers, the park's rangers have a license to kill, and they do. It gets results:

In 2010, only five rhinos were shot in Kaziranga, while nine poachers were killed, the first time poacher deaths surpassed rhinos. (For comparison, in South Africa, where rangers fire only in self-­defense, five poachers were killed in 2010, while 333 rhinos were poached.)

These guys were breaking the law and killing endangered species. But the moral calculus here isn't so clear-cut. In the park's region, jobs are scarce. Park animals eats crops and kill farm animals, and poaching pays better than any other pursuit. Shooting poachers on sight is apparently the most effective way to conserve the park’s threatened animals, but how does that stack up against human injustice? It’s a complicated calculation.

Critical List: Wangari Maathai passes away; NASA satellite didn’t kill anyone

Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel peace prize for her work planting trees, passed away. She was the first African woman to win the prize and the first Kenyan woman to earn a Ph.D.

Around the world, thousands of people met in more than 2,000 demonstrations to rally for a Moving Planet.

That massive NASA satellite managed to plop back to earth without killing anyone.

Save the whales, put them in the Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle is just sitting around making ships and planes disappear. Why not put it to work for something useful, like a whale sanctuary? Because when you want to save something, you definitely store it in a place where stuff mysteriously vanishes. That's why I keep my passport in the dryer.

Teen's invention boosts solar panel output 40 percent

Nineteen-year-old Eden Full is going to be taking a few years off from her studies at Princeton. That's because she's been getting a ton of grants to finish developing her SunSaluter, a technology that allows solar panels to track the sun, boosting output by 40 percent.