Grist
Elizabeth Kolbert wants us to rethink the stories we tell about climate change
Why does it feel like the world has made so much progress on addressing global warming, but also none at all?. In H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z, Elizabeth Kolbert, a longtime environmental journalist, considers hard questions like this one. Using simple language, she explains that governments are passing climate-friendly laws, clean energy is expanding, companies are creating green technologies, and yet fossil fuel emissions are still, after all these years, rising.
As climate change threatens cultural treasures, museums get creative to conserve both energy and artifacts
There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s combined. Within walking distance of the Grist office in downtown Seattle, there’s a pinball museum, an NFT museum, a Jimi Hendrix-inspired museum of pop culture, and Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, just to name a few. From tiny mom-and-pop museums dedicated to niche topics to massive institutions like The Met and The Smithsonian, museums are widely viewed as some of the most trustworthy sources of information, and also as trusted stewards of cultural artifacts.
The Fescue Fighters
This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization. America’s “fescue belt,” named for an exotic grass called tall fescue, dominates the pastureland from Missouri and Arkansas in the west to the coast of the Carolinas in the east. Within that swath, a quarter of the nation’s cows — more than 15 million in all — graze fields that stay green through the winter while the rest of the region’s grasses turn brown and go dormant.
IPLC: The acronym that is keeping Indigenous advocates up at night
Roberto Borrero will never forget standing in the United Nations General Assembly on the day that countries voted to approve the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It was September 13, 2007 in New York City, and Borrero had spent years roaming those halls on behalf of the International Indian Treaty Council, urging country representatives to adopt the new human rights standard.
Extreme heat drives up food prices. Just how bad will it get?
Sometimes climate change appears where you least expect it — like the grocery store. Food prices have climbed 25 percent over the past four years, and Americans have been shocked by the growing cost of staples like beef, sugar, and citrus. While many factors, like supply chain disruptions and...
‘Reef stars’ restored Indonesia’s blast-damaged corals in just 4 years
Out among a scattering of islands spilled like beads into the Indonesian shallows, an extended experiment in coral restoration has revealed something marvelous: With a tender touch and a community to care for it, a reef can fully recover from the devastation of blast fishing in just four years. The...
Florida is about to erase climate change from most of its laws
In Florida, the effects of climate change are hard to ignore, no matter your politics. It’s the hottest state — Miami spent a record 46 days above a heat index of 100 degrees last summer — and many homes and businesses are clustered along beachfront areas threatened by rising seas and hurricanes. The Republican-led legislature has responded with more than $640 million for resilience projects to adapt to coastal threats.
In Utah, climate concerns are now motivating candidates
This story was originally published by Capital and Main. Driving on Interstate 215 south of Salt Lake City in late January, I couldn’t help but notice the bumper stickers on the pickup truck in front of me. One featured a rattlesnake and the classic motto “Don’t tread on me,” which dates to the Revolutionary War but has been co-opted by many right-wing ideologues. And the other featured a map of a shrinking lake and the words “Keep the Salt Lake Great,” the motto of a local environmental group focused on protecting Utah’s rivers and ecosystems.
How Biden’s infrastructure plan created a ‘climate time bomb’ in Black neighborhoods
This story was originally published by Capital B. Nearly 45 years ago, the Acres Homes area north of Houston was the largest unincorporated Black community in the South, a thriving 9-square mile area where homeownership was the norm. That was until the city of Houston annexed it, and the Interstate 45 highway was built through its heart.
In Denver, e-bike vouchers run out as fast as Taylor Swift tickets
At 11 a.m. on the last Wednesday of February, Denver opened the first application window of the year for its e-bike rebate program, which offers residents upfront rebates of $300 to $1,400 for a battery-powered bicycle. Within three minutes, all of the vouchers for low and moderate income applicants had been claimed. By 11:08 a.m., the rebates for everyone else were gone too, and the portal closed.
A loophole in the EPA’s new sterilizer rule leaves warehouse workers vulnerable
This story was produced in partnership with Atlanta News First. Thousands of warehouse workers across the U.S. are likely regularly exposed to the cancer-linked chemical ethylene oxide. More than half of the country’s medical equipment is sterilized with the compound, which the EPA considers a carcinogen. Ethylene oxide evaporates off the surface of these medical products after they’ve been sterilized, creating potentially dangerous concentrations of air pollution in the buildings where they’re stored.
Plastic chemicals are inescapable — and they’re messing with our hormones
If you were to create a recipe for plastics, you’d need a very big cookbook. In addition to fossil fuel-based building blocks like ethylene and propylene, this ubiquitous material is made from a dizzying amalgam of more than 16,000 chemicals — colorants, flame retardants, stabilizers, lubricants, plasticizers, and other substances, many of whose exact functions, structures, and toxicity are poorly understood.
It’s official: US air quality got worse in 2023
When it comes to air quality, neighboring countries are in it together. In 2023, wildfire smoke from across the Canadian border became a primary source of air pollution in major U.S. cities, according to a report released this week. The annual World Air Quality Report by IQAir, a Swiss air...
A journey into home electrification
When Grist writer Tik Root set out on a journey to decarbonize his home, he didn’t intend at first to document the effort. As a journalist covering climate, he’s had years of experience reporting on electrification, energy, and technology — and demystifying those often complex topics for the average consumer. But the decision to write about his own experiences as a homeowner attempting to ditch fossil fuels came about two-thirds of the way through what amounted to more than a yearlong process.
Santander has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in LNG buildout in the Gulf
This story was produced by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and is being co-published with Grist. Santander exploited loopholes in its own climate policy in order to help raise billions for facilities relying on fracked U.S. gas. The bank then quietly watered down the same policy, making it easier to finance fracking directly in future, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, or TBIJ, can reveal.
Here's what happened when two climate reporters tried to ditch natural gas.
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with The Guardian. My wife and I live in a green, two-story colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac in Burlington, Vermont. Each spring, the front of our home is lined with lilacs, crocuses, and peonies. The backyard is thick with towering black locust trees. We occasionally spot a fox from our office windows, or toddlers from the neighborhood daycare trundling through the woods. It’s an alarmingly idyllic home, with one exception: It runs on natural gas.
With its new tailpipe rules, the EPA eyes an electric future
Transportation is the largest source of planet-warming gases in the United States, which makes reducing tailpipe pollution as quickly as possible essential to meeting our climate goals. The Biden administration took a huge stride toward that goal Wednesday when it unveiled the tightest limits the nation has ever placed on vehicle emissions.
California’s concerning embrace of a new forest biomass industry
Gloria Alonso Cruz had only just started working on environmental justice issues at a community organization in Stockton, California, when she learned about a proposal to sell wood pellets from the town’s port to overseas energy markets. Golden State Natural Resources plans to construct two wood pellet plants in...
Amazon says its plastic packaging can be recycled. An investigation finds it usually isn’t.
Feeling guilty about all those blue-and-white plastic Amazon bags piling up around the house? Fear not — they can be recycled! At least, that’s what the packaging says. For years now, Amazon’s plastic bags, bubble-lined mailers, and air pillows have featured the ubiquitous “chasing arrows” recycling symbol along with the words “store drop-off.” The idea is simple: Since most curbside recycling programs don’t accept this type of plastic — it’s too expensive to process and can clog machines — consumers can instead leave it at retail stores across the country. From there, this plastic, known as “film,” will go to a specialized facility and be turned into new products.
At prom, fast fashion slows down
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan. On a Saturday in February, high school senior Kaylee Lemmien sifted through racks of dresses at Tinker Tailor, a small shop in downtown Elk Rapids, a village of about 1,500 people in northern Michigan.
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