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Scientists claim junk food is as addictive as heroin

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Grist - By Tom Laskawy - Nov. 03 (Review) - The conclusion: the brain responds to junk food the same way it does to heroin:

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Michael Specter’s new book ‘Denialism’ misses its targets

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Tom Philpott - Oct. 31 (Review) - Like the great institutions of European Christianity, modern science has amassed tremendous power—and not always lived up to its founding creeds. Science needs a Gibbon—someone who appreciates its intellectual grandeur and potential, but who also can train a cold eye on the “inevitable mixture of error and corruption” that has accompanied its tenure since the Enlightenment. That Gibbon is not Michael Specter, a New Yorker staff writer and author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. His book purports to defend science from its philistine critics—people who, in Specter’s view, reflexively deny the validity of the scientific process. In his intro, Specter sets up the defining focus of the book. He contrasts the “rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science” with “the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment” (i.e., “denialism”). Already, we’re on thin intellectual ice; Specter evidently believes in a pure science, one that exists completely apart from ideology. In Gibbon’s phrasing, he’s defending a science as “she descended from Heaven [read: the Enlightenment], arrayed in her native purity.”

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Six months after the outbreak, who’s investigating the CAFO-swine flu link?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Tom Philpott - Oct. 29 (Investigative Report) - Scientists at the University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa revealed last week they had identified the H1N1 strain in seven pigs at the Minnesota State Fair in late summer as part of a study of virus exchange between swine and people. Some of those animals may have caught the bug from the hordes of visitors at the 12-day event. But not all: One infected animal was swabbed while being unloaded and almost certainly arrived with the virus.

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Big Ag’s odd obsession with You-Know-Who

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Tom Laskawy - Oct. 09 (Opinion) - Big Ag has clearly decided that Pollan is a latter-day Lenin (or perhaps Trotsky?) leading a cadre of food revolutionaries who threaten to overthrow its hard-fought hegemony—rebut his arguments and perhaps the whole movement will collapse like a bad soufflé. All in reaction to a relatively unassuming guy who’s written some articles and a few books. Isn’t this all, like, a bit much?

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Gaza water supplies in danger of ‘collapse,’ U.N. says

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - Sep. 15 (News) - “The underground water supplies, upon which 1.5 million Palestinians depend for agriculture and drinking water, are in danger of collapse,” the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) said in a statement accompanying a new report.

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Pollan says health-care reform will fail unless we change the way we eat

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - Sep. 14 (News) - If we don’t get a handle on these health care costs, the new system or the old system, we’ll go broke. And that’s why I think that really food is the elephant in the room when we’re talking about health care.

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How much energy does the U.S. waste?

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - Sep. 11 (Opinion) - Add those all up and we’ve got 100 quads of primary energy and 60 quads of waste energy. For all the reasons noted above, the waste energy is probably much higher, but even at this level, it is a massive opportunity. Recovering just half of this total would reduce every issue associated with fossil fuel use by one third with no detriment to our standard of living. Getting this waste out of the system ought to be a priority of our national energy and environmental policy.

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EPA turns the lights on mountaintop removal

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - Sep. 11 (News Report) - This post originally appeared at TheNation.com . The Environmental Protection Agency made good on its promise today to assert greater scrutiny and “use the best science and follow the letter of the law” with regard to controversial mountaintop removal mining permits in the Appalachian coalfields. In a highly anticipated announcement, the agency declared that all seventy-nine pending permits in four states would “likely cause water quality impacts” and sent them on for additional review under the Clean Water Act. Does today’s big announcement end the practice of mountaintop removal—which has clear-cut more than 1.2 million acres of deciduous forests, employed billions of pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil ...

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Home power plants project unveiled in Germany

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - Sep. 09 (News) - An ambitious project was unveiled in Germany on Wednesday to install mini gas-fired power plants in people’s basements and produce as much electricity as two nuclear reactors within a year.

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Van Jones seeks a ‘healing for our politics’

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Brad Johnson - Sep. 04 (News Analysis) - Jones’s true record is one of turning away from anger and finding hope, abandoning division and seeking consensus. Speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas this August, Van Jones argued that “for all of the battleground politics that’s going on,” energy policy should be “the one place that should be a safe harbor for all of us.” Van Jones praised the “bipartisanship” of Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who as a representative from Los Angeles succeeded in getting “the first president ever to sign into law a green jobs act, President George W. Bush.” He recognized that the summit participants came to find a “healing for our politics” in a “common ground agenda”:

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Big Oil creates phony climate denial site, lies about it

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Miles Grant - Sep. 04 (News Report) - A friend just alerted me to the website PlantsNeedCO2.org, which is running ads on NYTimes.com. From the site’s “about us” page: Our mission is to educate the public on the positive effects of additional atmospheric CO2 and help prevent the inadvertent negative impact to human, plant and animal life if we reduce CO2. Plants Need CO2 is a 501 (c)(3) non profit corporation. How do I say this? False. I know you’re never gonna believe who really owns the website ... Big Oil. It’s registered to Quintana Minerals Corporation:

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Could we replace the nation’s pavement with solar panels?

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By David Roberts - Aug. 28 (News Report) - So crazy it just might work? Apparently the Dept. of Transportation thinks so: Solar Roadways has received a $100,000 contract from DOT to build a prototype:

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EPA Fails to Inform Public About Weed Killer in Drinking Water

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Danielle Ivory - Aug. 24 (News) - Records that tracked the amount of the weed-killer atrazine in about 150 watersheds from 2003 through 2008 were obtained by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund under the Freedom of Information Act. An analysis found that yearly average levels of atrazine in drinking water violated the federal standard at least ten times in communities in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas, all states where farmers rely heavily on the herbicide.

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Four Democratic senators call for delay on climate legislation

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Kate Sheppard - Aug. 14 (News Report) - “The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift,” Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) told Bloomberg. Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) are also calling for a delay on climate action. While they are amenable to moving ahead with the energy bill that passed out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in June, they are less enthusiastic about passing a bill that would cap carbon dioxide emissions.

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It’s time to end the practice of shark finning

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By John Kerry, John Ford - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - Sharks are the ocean’s top predators. They sit at the apex of the food chain, and their presence balances out the populations of the ecosystem. They’ve roamed the seas since hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs, adapted to perfection for their habitat and purpose. But many species of shark are now facing extinction because of finning. Sharks are often large, slow-growing, and slow to reproduce. They just can’t be slaughtered in large numbers and still survive as species. Already some scientists believe that there are species that are “functionally extinct,” unable to perform their role as top predator.

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EEStor CEO says game-changing energy storage device coming by 2010

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By David Roberts - Jul. 30 (Special Report) - If the Texas company EEStor is running a scam, it’s a frakking brilliant one. For years the otherwise tight-lipped outfit has been promising a capacitor that can quickly charge, quickly discharge, and hold enormous amounts of energy—on all accounts, performance far beyond any battery on the market, or even contemplated. If it performs as promised, the EESU (Electrical Energy Storage Unit) will revolutionize the electric vehicle market. It will enable cost-effective, high-capacity storage for renewable electricity sources. It can radically increase the utility of portable electronics. It would be an honest-to-god game changer.

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Dow Agrosciences: farm like there’s no tomorrow!

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Tom Philpott - Jul. 28 (Review) - “If you’re going to farm a piece of land, you ought to farm it for all its worth.” —Tim Hassinger, commercial vice president at Dow AgroSciences, quoted in an AP story called “Chemical makers go on the offensive in agriculture.”

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Blackout: Heinberg on dwindling coal reserves and the siren song of “clean coal”

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By David Roberts - Jul. 27 (Review) - There isn’t nearly as much coal left as most people think. “Clean coal” will run down limited reserves even faster. If humanity doesn’t begin massive, sustained investment in renewable power sources immediately, civilization could be at risk before the end of the century. And that’s without considering the impacts of climate change. Such is the stark conclusion of Richard Heinberg’s Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, which despite its dry tone and technical complexity is one of the scariest f*cking books I’ve ever read.

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t r u t h o u t | The Climate Bill Shouldn't Give Coal a Free Pass

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Bruce Niles - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - Big Coal has long sought and enjoyed loopholes for their dirty industry - anything to keep the money rolling in as they avoid cleaning up. And now, over objections of our clean energy champions, this bill gives them another massive loophole that the Senate must correct.

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Big Ag not content with concessions in House climate bill

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Kate Sheppard - Jul. 15 (News Analysis) - Appearing at a hearing of the Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday, Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman not only pushed for provisions that environmentalists believe would limit the efficacy of a climate bill, he also repeated climate skeptic talking points, questioning whether climate change is even happening, according to written testimony submitted to the committee:

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EPA attorneys criticize Obama nominee | Grist

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Joaquin Sapien - Jul. 07 (News Report) - The Obama administration’s nomination of Ignacia Moreno to head the environment division of the Department of Justice is moving quietly through the confirmation process, with hearings expected to begin in the next few weeks. Moreno has worked for the environment division before, during the Clinton administration. But her most recent job—as environmental counsel for General Electric—has raised eyebrows among Environmental Protection Agency attorneys. Before Moreno worked for GE, she spent five years defending other companies in pollution-related lawsuits.

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Yet again, Vilsack bows to ethanol gods

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Tom Philpott - Jun. 30 (Comment) - “Corn-based ethanol will continue to be part of the solution but by no means the only way to produce ethanol. “We are working very hard to make sure that we maintain the infrastructure of the ethanol industry in the United States ... There will likely be some companies that will succeed and some companies that won’t, but it won’t be because we haven’t been giving them an opportunity to succeed.”

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Third of open ocean sharks face extinction, says study

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - Jun. 25 (News Report) - The smooth hammerhead, great white, basking, and oceanic whitetip sharks are listed as globally vulnerable to extinction, along with two species of makos and three types of threshers. Some 100 million sharks are caught in commercial and sports fishing every year, and several species have declined by more than 80 percent in the past decade alone, according the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The IUCN issues the Red List of Threatened Species, the most comprehensive and authoritative conservation inventory of the world’s plants and animals species.

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We are what we think: Why the press fails us and how to fix it

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Michael Tobis - Jun. 24 (News Analysis) - In the past century, the century of mass media, it was the media that mostly provided the language, the Lego blocks, the molecules of thought for most people. Tiny little cultural clusters coalesced under the pressure of very powerful aggregators and distributors of information, not just through news but even through entertainment.

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Seeking a tougher climate bill, green groups set eyes on the Senate

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Grist - By Kate Sheppard - Jun. 24 (News Report) - The biggest flaws environmental organizations have identified in Waxman-Markey include the removal of the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act, the grandfathering of old coal-fired power plants in the initial years of the cap-and-trade program, and the delay in considering the climate impacts of indirect land use in biofuel production, among others.

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