Skip to content
Grist home
All donations TRIPLED!

Articles by Richard Graves

Richard Graves is the Founder of Fired Up Media and was the blogger for the TckTckTck campaign, an Associate Producer with LinkTV's EarthFocus, and the editor of It's Getting Hot in Here -- dispatches from the youth climate movement. He is an online journalist who focuses on climate issues and human health, youth engagement, and the politics of the environmental movement. He also is a food blogger at Food with Fervor.

Featured Article

Bill McKibben gets arrested in front of the White House.Photo: Shadia Fayne Wood/Tar Sands ActionCross-posted from It’s Getting Hot in Here.

Seventy people from across the U.S. and Canada were arrested in front of the White House Saturday morning on the first day of a two-week sit-in aimed at pressuring President Obama to deny the permit for a massive new oil pipeline. More than 2,000 additional people are expected to join the daily civil disobedience over the coming days.

At stake is what has quickly become the largest environmental test for Obama before the 2012 election: The president must choose whether or not to grant a Canadian company a permit to build a 1,700-mile pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

Environmentalists warn that the pipeline could cause a BP disaster right in America’s heartland, over the largest source of fresh drinking water in the country, the Ogallala Aquifer. The nation’s top climatologist, James Hansen, has warned that if the Canadian tar sands are fully developed, it could be “game over” for the climate.

“It’s not the easiest thing on earth for... Read more

All Articles

  • Disasters and Resilience: Why Clean Energy Can Save Us

    Kaifukuryoku (回 復力) is the Japanese word for resilience. For many in Japan, resilience has become a a way of life, a goal that has driven one of the most advanced efforts at planning for disasters in the world. The word tsunami is also Japanese, originating in their long familiarity of living on the knife […]

  • Why environmentalists should love universal voter registration

    Election season is upon us! This year has been distinguished by the sheer number of crackpots running for office, as well as the number of people with yachts trying to ‘self-finance a campaign’ or ‘purchase’ a political post. One of the few upsides of races so far has been skepticism of political candidates who were […]

  • Climate advocates should build ties with the public-health community

    They can be climate activists too.“Green jobs now” has become the rallying cry for environmental activists over the last few years as they have worked to build political support for climate action by tying it to economic growth — a powerful message in a world rocked by the worst recession in decades. Politicians have responded […]

  • ClimateGate is Watergate redux

    Some environmental leaders have been working to minimize the scandal of ClimateGate, by focusing on the fact the hacked email archive of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has nothing, besides a few cherry picked quotes taken out of context, that casts a shadow of a doubt upon validity of modern climate science. They are wrong. […]