Grist List

Lawns are evil

Climate change already killing baby polar bears

Climate change isn't just killing polar bears, it's killing baby polar bears. YOU MONSTER.

A study that tracked polar bears swimming long distances found cubs that swam more than 30 miles at a time were more likely to die than cubs that didn't. Baby polars have a hard time making those swims because:

Sunlight can disinfect water

Turns out the nonsensical yuppie idea that bottled water is “cleaner” is actually true, in very very specific circumstances. In areas where it’s hard to find drinkable water, plastic bottles and sunlight can save lives.

SODIS, or solar water disinfection, is a fancy way of saying, "Leave germy water in a plastic bottle out on your hot roof and eventually all the bad stuff will die." It's a simple idea, but remarkably effective at dealing with water contamination.

The $50,000 playhouse that oil built

Ever wonder what oil executives do with all the money they make from wrecking the planet? Well, take a tour with me through the playhouse that oil exec John Schiller ($7.7 million in compensation in 2010, including a $2.6 million bonus) had built for his 4-year-old. That's an artist's conception above, not the actual blueprint, but all the features -- air conditioning, running water, fireplace, 32-inch flat-screen TV -- are for real. (The New York Times has pictures, too.)

Critical List: DeChristopher sentencing today; Gingrich invests in renewables

Activist Tim DeChristopher's sentencing is scheduled for today. He could go to prison for as many as 10 years.

Congress is still hard at work cutting funding for all manner of environmental programs.

With the West out as a customer, Iran is selling its natural gas to Iraq and Syria.

Everyone thinks Obama is doing a bad job on the environment

Yale Environment 360 asked a series of environmental thinkers, activists, and policymakers what they think of Barack Obama's record on the environmental record so far. The overwhelming response was that they didn't think very much of it at all.

Here’s climate writer and activist Bill McKibben:

The EPA does not want you feeding arsenic to your baby

It's only 16 months until the next election, and you know what that means: We are in the thick of political ad season. Mostly that makes everybody want to crawl under a sofa, but sometimes you get arresting ads like this one from American Family Voices.

Paper antennas pull electricity from the air

The air is full of energy -- not in a woo-woo crystal-gazing way, but in a scientific electromagnetic-radiation-from-TV-stations-and-phone-networks kind of way. That ambient energy is just being wasted. But a team from Georgia Tech is developing inkjet-printed paper antennas that could generate enough energy to power a small gadget, right out of thin air.

Is this the greenest college campus ever?

California's Butte College has a 928-acre wildlife refuge. It promotes ride shares. It uses goats for landscaping, and worms for composting. It has LEED-certifiable buildings. And now it's going off the grid -- the first college in the country, the school claims, to be energy independent.