Grist List

Want to save energy? Stop wasting water

Turns out one of the single biggest sources of energy use in your home doesn't even show up in the electricity section of your utility bill.

Christopher Mims Buildings

Western Pacific nations create the world's largest shark sanctuary

If you never quite believed your parents when they told you big, scary animals have more to fear from us than we do from them, consider this, via The New York Times' Joanna Foster: Sharks kill two or three people every year. People kill 73 million sharks in the same time period.

To protect these sharp-toothed scapegoats, Micronesian chief executives have decided to create a shark preserve of 2 million square miles in the western Pacific -- the largest shark sanctuary in the world.

Sarah Laskow Science

Fox News public enemy No. 1: Spongebob Squarepants

Is Fox News getting bored now that Obama's produced his birth certificate and the Casey Anthony trial is over? Apparently, since their new barely-tethered-to-reality flogging point is that SpongeBob SquarePants is indoctrinating kids with a sort of extremist environmental zealotry. The Department of Education hosted an event where kids got to pick out free SpongeBob books, and the Fox hosts' heads promptly exploded. Why? Because in one of the books on offer, SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs try to use car exhaust to cause global warming, in order to sell pool admission tickets.

Jess Zimmerman Accountability

Critical List: Canada’s pushing tar-sands oil; cutting methane also helps cut climate change

In 110 meetings over less than two years, the Canadian government tried to convince Europe to delay or derail legislative changes that could affect the imports of tar sands oil. Basically, Canada doesn’t want Europe to know how carbon-heavy the oil is, because that could affect U.S. and European imports. So they’re pushing it as environmentally friendly. Because hey, if you don’t know how dirty something is, maybe it’s clean!

We often talk about cutting carbon, but here's a reminder that cutting gases like methane and nitrous oxide can also slow climate change.

The EPA found that, left to their own devices, companies don't tell consumers that their processes release or their products contain chemicals harmful to children.

Sarah Laskow Health

Please enjoy this mariachi band performing for a beluga whale

One step up from "save the whales" on the environmentalism ladder is "do nice things for whales, they've had a hard time." You know, fruit baskets, flipper rubs, playing music outside their tanks because they don't have Spotify. This beluga is LOVING. IT. He's like "Christ, finally, after 30 years of people singing me that […]

Jess Zimmerman Uncategorized

How cities could save bees

Bee populations are struggling everywhere, but ironically they may be better off in cities than in the countryside. Why? Because rural areas have larger swathes of flowering plants when they're in season, but cities have them year-round in the form of urban parks and gardens.

Jess Zimmerman Agriculture

Nissan wants you to power your house with your electric car

What if you could buy power at night, when it's cheap, and run your house off it by day, when it's expensive (and, in Japan at least, in short supply)? Nissan wants to give customers who buy its Nissan Leaf just this ability, by selling them special chargers for their electric cars that can be reversed to feed power back into a home.

Christopher Mims Technology

China working on solar yaks

China is going to increase its solar capacity 10-fold in the next five years. Driving this solar great leap forward will be the "feed-in tariff" -- Chinese citizens who install solar panels will be paid 15 cents for every kilowatt-hour they produce. Germany uses the same strategy, and as a result it has more solar power than any other country in the world.