Last week, Elizabeth Kolbert, a respected New Yorker journalist who writes admirably about our climate catastrophe and the environment, wrote a scathing attack on my book, No Impact Man. Sadly, casualties on the battlefield of Kolbert’s wrath included not only me, but also the work of James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith (authors of 100 Mile Diet), Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden), and other writers who used their own experiments in alternative lifestyles as narrative vehicles to, hopefully, propel into the popular discourse vital cultural issues that transcend the particularities of their experiments. MacKinnon and Smith wrote about their year …

This may seem hokey, but I'm so far beyond frustrated with the legislators of this country that I've gone and written my own piece of climate change legislation. My bill is simple. Once you get past all the "whereas" and so forth, it simply calls for the United States to aim toward stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at 350 ppm and to lead international negotiations on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol toward the same goal (you can read the full language here). This follows the lead of Hansen's findings and Bill McKibben's 350 campaign. The bill, as I've written …