Grist List
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Bill Nye explains science, the moon, and climate change to Fox News, using very small words
Bill Nye's years of experience teaching science to children seem to have prepared him well for talking to Fox News hosts. Here, he attempts to help Happening Now host Jon Scott grasp difficult concepts like "volcanoes are not connected to the burning of fossil fuels" and "the science that happens on the moon ... is the same science that happens on Earth." Favorite line: "When you say to yourself, well, I'm going to ignore all the evidence of climate change, you're saying, I'm going to ignore the best ideas anybody's ever had."
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Good lord, American homes are huge
This infographic from the BBC shows how much newly built North American, and especially U.S., homes dwarf those currently being built in Europe. The average new U.S. home is more than twice as big as the average new home in the U.K.
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Chill your beer without using any electricity
A one that is not cold is scarcely a one at all, but keeping beer frosty on a hot day normally sucks up energy. Not anymore. This ancient innovation uses clay pots, sand, and water to keep stuff cool even on a hot day.
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Critical List: New fuel economy standards; flat screens use less energy
Both options currently on the table for raising the debt ceiling would cut environment and energy spending.
The president will announce new fuel economy standards -- cars and light-duty trucks will need to be at 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
The EPA is proposing the first air standards for fracking. -
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The plastics industry will do anything to keep you using plastic bags
Plastic bags are the genital warts of litter -- they're incredibly widespread, nearly impossible to get rid of, and can lead to much worse problems down the line. The only thing that works is prevention -- i.e. not using them in the first place. But the plastics industry doesn't take too kindly to that. Here's a sampling of the tactics the industry has used to keep people from weaning themselves off plastic bags:
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British kids build greenhouse out of plastic bottles
What do you do with the empty plastic bottles that you really shouldn't have been drinking out of, anyway? These British school children spent a year and half collecting 1,500 of them and used the bottles to construct a greenhouse, in which they are very successfully growing tomatoes.
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People living near mountaintop-removal mines have way more cancer
Mountaintop-removal mining is not only bad for the environment, it's bad -- very bad -- for the health of the people who are exposed to it. A new study, based on a door-to-door survey, found that in communities exposed to this type of mining, cancer rates were twice as high as in communities that weren’t exposed. That's after controlling for all of those other cancer-causing factors: age, sex, smoking, occupation, etc.
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Destroying nature so people can look at nature in Yosemite Park
Yosemite National Park is a great place for appreciating nature, what with the mountains and the wildlife and so forth. But there's one thing spoiling the bucolic beauty for everyone: All those damn trees. They are so in the way! They're like the mist that comes up off Niagara Falls and ruins all your photographs. If only they'd cut them down, so we could get back to looking at nature!
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After hundreds of earthquakes, Arkansas shuts down fracking disposal wells
Here's a novel idea: if your local extraction industry is causing hundreds of earthquakes, make them stop doing whatever it was that was causing the earthquakes.
That's exactly what the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission did yesterday, when its members voted to shut down a fracking fluid disposal well and ban the drilling of new ones. The Associated Press explains:
