7 Billion and Counting: A Problem and an Answer
Why rising world population does not necessarily spell catastrophe.
Post Tagged with: "Environment"
Sustainability and the Harvard Food Desert
How do you make sure your purchases promote your politics? With great difficulty.
Quasi-Weighing in: Green Tech and Foreign Oil Dependence
Earlier this week, Jeff Kalmus responded to Will Rafey’s post “China in the Lead,” in which Rafey argues that China is poised to overtake the U.S. and “seize control of the emerging clean energy economy” (Max Novendstern weighs in here and Rafey responds here). Jeff weighs in to argue that it doesn’t particularly matter if China innovates more rapidly than [...]
Obama’s Oil Spill Talk
While anything from uninspiring to boring has been used to define President Obama’s primetime speech on Tuesday, Gail Collin’s has a great column on it, I believe that the speech was not just flawed because it was unexciting, but rather because it was reveals fundamental disconnects from the Obama Administration. First, the rhetoric of the speech rang something along the [...]
Taking Stock of the Spill
Apparently, Obama’s BP Oil Spill performance has been a total disaster. Just check the news. He’s weak, aloof, unemotive, Maureen Down explains. “Mr. President, take command,” David Gergen urges on CNN. James Carville exhorts: “This president needs to tell BP, “I’m your daddy.” And Peggy Noonan, writes, simply, for WSJ: “I don’t see how you politically survive this.” Count me among [...]
Will Wealth Bring Democracy to Hong Kong?
As long as Hong Kong’s economy is booming, calls for democracy will remain on the backburner
Do Conservatives “Just Hate All Taxes”?
In a generally well-written article, HPR staff writer Will Rafey recently addressed the need to raise the gas tax “to make the private cost of driving a car reflect its actual social costs: global warming, air pollution, traffic congestion, and highway maintenance,” and how difficult this has become in the current political climate. I have no disagreement with the thrust [...]
Drill, Baby, Drill: Searching for Nuance
In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,there has been no shortage of finger-pointing. There’s plenty of blame to go around, no doubt, but there is one group that the Right has mysteriously implicated in this disaster: environmentalists. In an editorial in the Washington Post last Friday, Charles Krauthammer wrote that environmentalists are partially to blame for the spill [...]
The Dangers of Direct Democracy
In Federalist No. 63, James Madison wrote that the defining principle of American democracy, as compared to Athenian democracy, “lies in the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity.” But since Madison wrote those words, several direct-democratic institutions have been introduced into American politics. California became the first state to adopt a ballot-initiative process in 1911, enabling citizens [...]
