Grist List

Critical List: Al Gore praises Romney; a fifth Brazilian anti-logging activist dies

Al Gore is doing his best to ensure Barack Obama gets reelected. Yesterday, he endorsed Mitt Romney's climate stance.

The Arizona wildfire is the largest in the state's history.

A fifth anti-logging activist in Brazil was killed.

Your HD cable box uses more electricity than your refrigerator.

How close are you to the country's dirtiest coal plants?

If you live west of D.C. and east of Omaha, there's a good chance you're pretty close to one of the 25 dirtiest coal plants in the U.S. Twenty of them are 50 to 100 miles away from major urban areas, according to Climate Progress.

Introducing the booze-fueled power plant

Bourbon's birthday was yesterday, but if you're anything like me, you're still celebrating. So you'll be glad to know that whisky -- we'll go with the Scottish spelling, because this is happening in Scotland -- is the newest addition to the Unlikely Biofuels Club. Helius Energy is building a 7.2-megawatt plant in Scotland that will run off of waste from whisky distilling. Isn't that so much classier than powering your car with Four Loko?

Google to spend $280 million to give you solar panels — free

The challenge with putting solar on your roof is that even if it saves you money over the long run, you're essentially pre-paying your utility bill for the next ten to 20 years -- and who has that kind of scratch?

That's why SolarCity exists: to pay for and install those solar panels, and then lease them to you or sell you the power they produce, for less than your current utility bill. Google just dropped $280 million on the company because they think this is such a fantastic and, in their words, "safe" investment.

Russia building floating nuclear power plants to unlock Arctic oil

Ex-nuclear engineer says it can never be safe

Back when Italy was trying out nuclear power for the first time, Cesare Silvi was one of the guys who had to figure out how to make it safe. Sometimes crazy things would happen -- once, an oil pipe burst, fouling the cooling water intake of a nuclear power plant miles away, shutting it down. Soon Silvi discovered there were many other pipes even closer to that plant; his attempt to study them was stymied by the moneyed interests who own them.

The longer he looked, the more small, improbable, but potentially disastrous scenarios piled up -- war, terrorism, plane crashes, missiles, extreme weather -- leading him to eventually conclude that if you armored a nuclear power plant against all potential disasters, you could never produce power for a reasonable amount of money.

Pop-up book brings kids' ideal green cities to life

Spanish design firm Play Studios asked kids to describe what they thought cities would look like in the future, then animated the kid-rendered cities in pop-up book form. There's plenty of fantasy here, but these budding urbanists also have an eye for connected, sustainable, eco-friendly living. Check out the monorails running between buildings in Boscopolis, or the cars in Bright City that run on fallen leaves.

One-third of Indonesia's electricity could come from geothermal energy

Here's an old clean energy maxim: If life gives you volcanoes, make geothermal power. That's Indonesia's strategy, anyway, and it's working for them. By 2025, the country could get a third of its electricity from geothermal sources, and Al Gore has said it could be the first "geothermal superpower."

Renewable v. Renewable: Oregon wind and hydro fight over grid space

The Northwest coast right now has a problem most places in the country could only wish for: too much renewable energy. And while hippies would like us to believe that clean energy sources will work flawlessly in harmony to edge out coal and oil, this abundance is pitting wind producers and hydroelectric producers against each other.

Alongside the Columbia River, in Oregon, wind power is becoming a big player, working in concert with dams on the river to produce renewable energy. But right now the Bonneville Power Authority, which controls the dams, is ordering wind farms to generate less power, saying it needs more space than usual on the grid to handle the power the dams are producing.

Wind farms are, understandably, peeved.