Articles by Sarah Laskow
Sarah Laskow is a reporter based in New York City who covers environment, energy, and sustainability issues, among other things.
All Articles
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Rick Perry signs weirdly reasonable fracking disclosure law
Rick Perry must have a secret plan to recapture George W. Bush's long-squandered image as an aisle-crossing Texas governor and run for president to the left of the Tea Party-addled Republican field. Or maybe he just decided to something right for a change. Whatever his motivation, the Texas guv signed into law a bill that requires natural gas drillers to disclose the chemicals they're pumping into ground during hydrofracking.
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Ed Glaeser: Locally grown produce can shove it
Ed Glaeser, everyone's favorite urban economist, loves density and (he says) local, seasonal oysters. But he also says that, as a rule, locally grown produce can shove it, because in all cases density > any other public policy goal.
Glaeser argues that urban farms will lead to less dense cities, which will increase the world's carbon emissions. Here's his math: -
Critical List: Two nuclear plants in the path of Missouri River floods; sea levels are rising
Two nuclear power plants are in the path of the Missouri River floods, but DON'T WORRY EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A new study verifies that the sea has risen more quickly during the past one hundred years than at any other time in the last millennium, and that climate change is definitely, absolutely, positively, no question to blame for that.
Because the Obama administration likes tourist attractions that bring in gazillions of dollars to Arizona's economy, it's not going to let anyone mine for uranium on the 1 million acres of land surrounding the Grand Canyon for the next 20 years. After 20 years … well, hell, it’s only a big hole in the ground. -
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Pipeline industry funded two-thirds of pipeline safety studies
Wondering whether natural gas and oil transportation pipelines are safe? Why not ask a neutral objective party -- like, say, the pipeline industry? The federal government’s Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration is supposed to study and regulate pipeline safety. But as the San Francisco Chronicle discovered, in practice, the agency tends to hand that responsibility back over to the pipeline industry.
