Grist List

It's not just the U.S. — China is also eating Germany's solar lunch

Germany has more installed solar capacity than any other country on the planet, despite having a population of only 80 million people. You'd think that would be enough to drive a market for domestic solar production, but only if you lived under a globalization-proof rock and ate steaming bowls of naivete for breakfast.

Germany is spending its climate change money on coal plants

Germany is raiding its clean energy piggybank to pay for dirty coal. The country is looking to withdraw millions of euros from a fund for promoting clean energy and climate change mitigation, and wants to spend that money on new coal-fired power plants.

Beautiful short film imagines a radioactive Japan

This short film, called "Blind," imagines what would happen if the gas masks that so many Japanese bought after Fukushima had ended up being necessary in Tokyo. It shows the mundane realities of a radioactive life — the blinged-out schoolgirl respirators are a particularly nice touch — but also touches on the bigger issues of […]

Nuclear plant’s pollution will never, ever be cleaned up

If you got all warm and fuzzy reading our previous post about the revitalization of the Howe Sound, and if you want to keep that feeling, don't read this post. Because it is the exact opposite story, one in which humans mess up the environment and can never, ever take it back.

In Scotland, from 1963 to 1984, a nuclear plant leaked lethal-if-ingested radioactive waste. That waste got all over beaches and other lovely sea-side resources. A while back, the Scottish version of the EPA recommended that someone make this right and return the area to a "pristine condition."

But now, they're giving up.

Once a wasteland, Howe Sound comes back to life

Humans can royally muck up the environment, but sometimes we can put things right again. Seven years ago, Vancouver's Howe Sound was a lifeless chemical stew, poisoned by contamination from a copper mine. And now, according to the Globe and Mail, there's this:

Sightings of grey whales, killer whales and schools of hundreds of white-sided dolphins are now being made regularly in the Sound, where massive herring spawns are once again occurring. “We are seeing the revitalization of an entire ecosystem. It is really uplifting,” said John Buchanan, a Squamish conservationist who voluntarily walks streams in the area to help count spawning salmon.

And this:

Critical List: #realtalk from Clinton on climate; a DIY electric car

“We look like a joke, right?” — President Bill Clinton, on the ridiculousness that is America’s climate-denying Republican candidates.

Obama is at least TRYING to cut coal, oil, and gas subsidies with his deficit reduction proposal.

Your commute could give you a heart attack. Not in some stress-related indirect way. The fumes from the cars increase the risk of your heart bottoming out.

These guys are DIYing an electric car. It’s awesome.

Here's what we can do with all the tires after the carpocalypse

In the post-peak-oil, post-automotive world, we'll have to do something while we're huddled around our campfires in Bartertown. And we'll need to do something with the parts of our now-useless vehicles. Sure, we'll have to build shelters with the metal carapaces, and we'll need some of that tire rubber for shoes and things. But there […]

Energy genius wins MacArthur grant

Shwetak Patel is revolutionizing home energy use, and people are noticing. Patel was just awarded a MacArthur Fellowship -- affectionately known as a "genius award" -- for his work creating user-friendly ways for people to monitor and control their utilities consumption. In other words, this is what certified energy genius looks like.

Global warming makes Russia militarize the Arctic

There has not traditionally been a lot of military presence in the Arctic, given as how it's mostly ice and seals. But now that the ice is melting, it's just mostly seals, and those little buggers are shifty. So Russia is sending in the troops.