Grist List

Critical List: Climategate scientist cleared; Halliburton exec drinks fracking fluid

The National Science Foundation found Michael Mann, a scientist at the center of Climategate, did nothing wrong. You don’t say.

Ford and Toyota are going to be working together on technology for hybrid trucks and SUVs.

Apparently Michele Bachmann wants to the United States to become an Iran-like state where oil is government-subsidized. How else to explain her continued, irrational insistence that gas will be $2 per gallon during her presidency?

Daryl Hannah joins tar-sands protest

It can be mildly annoying when movie stars get activist, because it usually just means looking sincere while wearing the ribbon color of the day. Which is why it's kind of cool that Daryl Hannah, who has never really stopped defending the environment since she came out of the ocean in 1984, is headed down to the Keystone XL protests where people are being arrested left and right. 

Jon Huntsman speaks out on climate change

In a tweet last week, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman made the apparently super-controversial claim that he "trust[s] scientists on global warming." This weekend, he went a step further, telling ABC's Jake Tapper that his opponents' opposition to the idea of climate change is wrongheaded and extremist.

Climate change makes alien invasion more likely

Update: Depressingly, this wasn't funded by NASA at all, although one of the authors is from NASA's planetary science division (he worked on it in his free time). It's still a good read though. (Thanks, Kate Sheppard!)

Here's good news for people who have been trying to draft the tinfoil-hat crew into the fight against climate change: A genuinely not-at-all-made-up-by-me NASA not NASA study posits that global warming could alert extraterrestrial civilizations that humanity is getting too big for its britches, and prompt them to attack us.

PETA is starting a porn site

PETA has finally decided to drop the pretense that they're about something besides ladies in underwear. When .xxx domain names go into action in September, your friendly neighborhood animal rights crazies will be first in line --  and they presumably don't just intend the site for closeups of cow udders and literal beaver shots, but for the barely-clad, barely-legal college students that have become their trademark.

The New York Times thinks the tar-sands pipeline sucks. Here’s why.

The New York Times has come out with an editorial position on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and it’s unusually definitive, considering that we still have news media trying to represent “both sides” of the climate change “debate.” Here’s how they break it down.

One thing the fall of Tripoli won't get us is cheap gas

It would be natural to imagine that the fall of Tripoli would mean a significant decrease in the cost of oil and the pain that the average consumer feels at the pump. After all, in February, when unrest in Libya commenced, oil prices hit a two-year high. Libya is only the 15th biggest oil exporter in the world, but the oil it exports is of a particularly desirable type.

Up close and personal with blight fungus and bugs

2011 is the International Year of Forests, and as part of their efforts to promote the sustainable forestry, the National Association of State Foresters, which represents state forestry agencies, and the National Network of Forest Practitioners, granted a fellowship to photographer Josh Birnbaum to document the state of the nation's forests.

Birnbaum's first stop was in West Virginia, where he hung out with young foresters (pictured above), visited with the wood industry, traveled with researchers to a post-mining reclamation area, and documented blight fungus.

Critical List: Keystone XL protests begin; Fukushima area could be uninhabitable for decades

In DC, protests against the Keystone XL pipeline began this weekend. The first round of protesters that cops arrested sat in jail through the weekend, longer than police had said they'd be detained.

The area around Fukushima has levels of radioactivity so high, it could be uninhabitable for decades.

The U.K. cycling industry contributes more than $4.7 billion to the country's economy each year.