The food that makes it to your plate is but a fraction of what actually grew in a field somewhere. Cassava, corn, wheat, rice — all critical crops produce waste biomass that farmers might be burning or throwing into piles to rot, both of which send planet-warming carbon into the...
How climate change is fueling your sugar addiction
In the thick of summer, little else can seem more appealing than the promised respite of an ice cream cone or a chilled can of soda. Turns out that as climate change warms up the planet, that sugary siren song is getting louder: A new study published last week in...
This Pennsylvania settlement could set the standard for preventing tiny plastic pellet pollution
When Heather Hulton VanTassel went looking for plastic pellets in the Ohio River in 2021, she was simply trying to establish a baseline level of contamination. A new plastics facility was being constructed nearby, and she wanted to be able to compare the prevalence of pellets — known as “nurdles”...
‘Green’ diesel producer’s supplier linked to Amazon deforestation
Diamond Green Diesel, or DGD, a U.S. leader in renewable diesel production, imports beef tallow from a supplier fed by Brazilian slaughterhouses fined for illegal deforestation. These include a plant that purchased cattle from a rancher described by Brazilian authorities as the “largest destroyer of the Amazon” ever investigated. Repórter...
Gas stove makers quietly delete air pollution warnings as they fight mandatory health labels
The home appliance industry would like you to believe that gas-burning stoves are not a risk to your health — and several companies that make the devices are scrambling to erase their prior acknowledgements that they are. That claim is at the heart of a lawsuit the Association of Home...
Farmworkers face harsh conditions. Now they’re eyeing a pay cut.
When President Trump campaigned for his second term on the promise of deporting millions of undocumented workers from the United States, farm groups were quick to voice their discontent. An immigration policy focused solely on removing those without legal status “would cripple agricultural production in America,” according to the American...
How to get Georgia voters to turn out for the PSC election? Talk about their power bills.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station. While any election brings ads, events, door-knocking, and other efforts to remind people to get to the polls, this year campaign workers concerned with Georgia’s Public Service Commission races have another hurdle: education. Climate and...
How low oil prices turned Trump’s call to ‘drill, baby, drill’ into a pipe dream
When President Donald Trump took office, he promised to “unleash American energy” — and quickly left no doubt that he meant fossil fuel energy in particular. In the months since, he has opened up vast stretches of public lands and U.S. oceans for drilling and reduced the royalty rates that...
Republicans are using an arcane oversight rule to permanently dismantle federal land protections
In the spring of 1996, lawmakers quietly buried a rider in a humdrum bill meant to make life easier for small businesses. That addition, the Congressional Review Act, granted Congress the power to kill new federal regulations with a simple majority vote. Thirty years later, Republican lawmakers are wielding it...
How a profit-sharing agreement could be a new model for mining on Indigenous land
In 2020, when Brian Mason began his first term as Chairman for the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation, gold miners came calling. Just a few years before, Integra Resources, a Canadian mining company, had acquired an abandoned gold and silver mine on the tribe’s homelands in southwestern Idaho,...