Category Archives: activism

The release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth climate change documentary next week has oil co-funded deniers at the anti-regulation Competitive Enterprise Institute and at FOXNews in full tizzy mode. According to Kevin Drum and Christina Larson at Political Animal, the "thinktank" is responding with a week-long television advertising campaign in fourteen US cities thatContinue reading “Al Gore Speaks: Deniers Freak”

"The environment" (God, I hate that word) also includes our lives at work, and in an important column last week in the NYTimes (excerpted below the fold) Paul Krugman discusses a carefully designed study that compared the health of Americans versus the health of Britons. The study finds that despite spending twice as much money, on average, as the Brits, Americans are far sicker.

Malcolm Gladwell, the gifted writer for the New Yorker, discusses the column and solicits comments on his fairly-new blog, and makes the crucial point:

Krugman argues that this is evidence of how much more stressful living in America is than living in England. I think that’s absolutely right. I would simply add that it is one more nail in the coffin of the notion that good health is something that can be purchased through fancy, high-tech drugs and doctors and hospitals. I know the idea that health care is just another consumer good is pretty popular at the moment. But its very hard to read the JAMA study, see what our $5274 actually buys us–and still believe in that notion. Our health is in reality a function of the broader society in which we live–the pressures and conditions and environments in which we find ourselves.

As one of the comments on Gladwell’s post points out, Americans consider themselves lucky to get paid for two or three weeks a year of vacation; in Britain, it’s five or six weeks. This is no small difference; and, I strongly suspect, a big reason why Americans lives are so much more stressful and so much less healthy than the Brits, even though Americans smoke less and drink less.

A solution? My fantasy is that a well-liked candidate runs for President on a platform of providing a month of paid vacation per working American per year. When I mention this people give me the sort of tolerant looks that one turns on crazy people, but why is this deranged? That we should have a tenth or so of our time for ourselves? And not for money? Man, don’t even mention it. That’s crazy…

From Time magazine, which has been surprisingly feisty lately, a story called The Fix For High Gas Prices  That Congress Won’t Touch. The telling quote: The cantankerous Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa has made repeat appearances on CNBC this week to bark out a stern conservation message. "If everyone cut back their driving byContinue reading “The 3% Solution”

Back in the l980’s, the Reagan administration famously categorized ketchup as a vegetable, to meet minimum nutrition requirements for school lunches. Now the second Bush administration has continued this glorious tradition of Republican prevarication, this time in regard to wetlands. Check out "Field & Stream" conservation director Bob Marshall’s biting column on the topic. ThisContinue reading “Remember Ketchup the Vegetable?”

A great image from Australia, the clear winner (according to the quite wonderful Oikos environmental economics blog) in an advertising competition sponsored by the Australian Conservation Foundation. David Jeffrey sensibly asks: Why are you interested in environmental issues? Because you’re passionate about nature? Because you’ve visited places that are beautiful and think we can makeContinue reading “Advertising Sustainability”

According to polls, as Rosa Brooks writes in a column in the LATimes, the people have at last woken up to the lies of the current administration, even if they’re too apathetic to do anything about it. What would happen if mainstream Americans [demonstrated their opposition]? If the 33% of Americans who think Bush shouldContinue reading “Sing It! “Impeach the President””

A great piece in this week’s New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell looks at how to effectively solve problems when–it turns out–the real issue is not a large group of small offenders, but a small group of gross offenders. The issue at the heart of the story is homelessness. It turns out that cities in thisContinue reading “Do Big Problems Require Big Regulations?”

People often confuse environmentalists, who–crazily–care for the whole envelope of life that supports us on this planet, with Not In My Backyarders, or NIMBYites, who are very concerned with what is happening in their neighborhood, but often show little interest or involvement in the big planetary picture.  The only way to show the essential idealismContinue reading “Enviros vs. Nimbyites”

Irwin Seltzer, an economist who writes the economic and forecasting column for the influential right-wing conservative publication The Weekly Standard, this week endorsed a carbon tax. In his column, called Petropower, Seltzer implicitly warns of of the danger that our economy could be held hostage, if not by the Saudis (as in the past) thenContinue reading “Another Conservative Opinion Leader Endorses Carbon Tax”

From LAWeekly reporter Bill Bradley’s new blog on politics in Sacramento, an inside look at how Governor Schwarzenegger’s "Million Solar Roofs" plan came to pass.