Grist List

Critical List: Captain Planet movie in the works; the U.N. considering climate peacekeeping force

The producer of Transformers is backing a live-action Captain Planet movie, which will teach children about environmentalism and green mullets and the periodic table of elements (earth, air, fire, water, and heart!). Next can we do a live-action G.I. Joe Knowing is Half the Battle movie? Because it will be just as fun.

Climate change could lead to conflicts so contentious the U.N. might need a separate peacekeeping force to deal with them.

What's the legal status of a country that gets swallowed by the ocean?

By the end of this century, it's likely that at least a handful of island nations will find out what it means to become a "deterritorialized" state, writes Rosemary Rayfuse in the Times.

Nuclear power's new marketing strategy: hide behind some windmills

The tagline on this advertisement for German Atomic Forum ("founded in 1959 to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy in Germany") is "CO2 Emissions = Zero."

Thanks to the recession, recycling is booming

A few years ago, the only people who came in to Alliance Recycling in Emeryville, Calif., were were pushing shopping carts. Now, the same center is seeing people pull up in late model cars.

Is it meaningless to talk about ‘sustainable’ food?

How sustainable is your jar of Ragu tomato sauce? That is an insane question, says self-described “anti-foodie” Frederick Kaufman in his TED Talk.

Sustainability, Kaufman suggests, can be sort of like porn: you know it when you see it. But people really want it to be quantifiable. Kaufman describes efforts by a grand consortium of scientists, farmers, agribusiness, and environmentalists to track all the inputs into a product and mush those into one number that would reflect its overall sustainability.

Critical List: Mitt Romney doesn’t believe in carbon; Halliburton’s profits are up

Mitt Romney doesn't think carbon is a pollutant and doesn't think the EPA should regulate it. But he has said that we should reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. May he doesn't understand what those words mean?

The hybrid electric flying car! (Brought to you by the military-industrial complex.)

Climate change could wipe out whitebark pine trees in the West, but the Fish and Wildlife Service can't be bothered to list the trees as endangered, or even threatened.

In the future, cleaning robots will sniff out air pollution

Researchers at the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science have kitted out a Roomba -- you know, one of those robotic vacuum cleaners that cats ride around on and act out Citizen Kane -- to evaluate air quality. Lights on the Roomba indicate the presence of evaporated alcohol, and a long-exposure photo, above, can show which parts of a room are clean and which are fumey. Blue lights in the above photo mean that the robot detected polluted air.

Organic farming is not really better for you or the planet [UPDATE: Or is it?]

Science writer Christie Wilcox lays out the top myths about organic farming in Scientific American, and they might surprise you:

Half of all geothermal energy is left over from birth of solar system, say scientists

Well, hello there, enormous quantities of heat that's just beneath our feet and could potentially be tapped to provide enormous amounts of base-load electricity! Where'd YOU come from? The birth of the planet, you say? No sh*t!

Using this gigantic underground, water-filled neutrino detector, scientists have finally gotten a better idea of exactly where the Earth's heat comes from: