Artist Yao Lu's works look like classical Chinese landscape paintings, but they're actually photographs of landfill garbage covered in construction netting. We trust you can all figure out the message here, and we don't have to go all art school on your ass.
This is a real soccer ball. You can head it, kick it, knee it, slap it out of a goal with your fist, or, if you are Diego Maradona, knock it into one. A soccer ball does not need another reason to be a wonderful thing, but this particular soccer ball provides one: Kick it around for 30 minutes and it powers an LED bulb for three hours.
Two months ago, my report “Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight Against Global Warming” [PDF] was posted online (along with an important companion report, “The Too Polite Revolution” [PDF], by journalists Petra Bartosiewicz and Marissa Miley). These reports probed what happened with the big push for cap-and-trade legislation in 2009 and 2010, and mine used the results of months of research to place this episode within the larger political trends that have been playing out in U.S. politics in recent years.
As a scholar of U.S. politics, I am accustomed to analyzing social movements as well as efforts to enact big policy reforms, and I always look forward to learning as much from debates about my writings as from the original research. Nevertheless, I was surprised by the sudden and intense debate my report helped to kick off.
The whole report was accurately summarized in the first major news article on it, by Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian, but the editors assigned her article a headline and teaser that hit a sore spot: “Climate Change Inaction the Fault of Environmental Groups, Report Says: Academic Paper Largely Clears President Obama of Blame Over Failure to Pass Climate Legislation Through Congress.” No matter that my report pointed to Republican extremism as the problem that had to be “named,” faced, and effectively countered. No matter that it called for forward-looking strategies and hardly used the word “blame” at all (except in brief accounts of how various wings of environmentalism fingered each other for the cap-and-trade shortfall).
Almost instantly, Cap-and-Trader Joe Romm at the Center for American Progress called troops into battle, going after me for doing a 145-page “opinion piece” rather than a properly “refereed” research article (an odd accusation coming from a blogger). When comments at CAP's ThinkProgress blog deteriorated into tagging me as a plant by climate-change deniers, I left the Democratic Party’s “progressive” think tank to its own circular firing squad and focused on learning from discussions at my talks and from much more substantive debate at Grist and other media outlets.
I recently picked up a book that's been sitting in my must-read pile for a long time: David Halberstam's The Children, a remarkable account of the African-American students who began the momentous lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville in February 1960 and went on to risk their lives as Freedom Riders and as movement leaders in Birmingham and Selma. Half a century on, it can be easy to forget that citizens of this country took such risks, and made such sacrifices, in order to gain basic human rights.
Still, I thought I knew the story. So I was startled to find myself pierced, on the very first page, by Halberstam's description of one young woman's inner struggle:
Years later, though she could recall almost every physical detail of what it had been like to sit there in that course on English literature, Diane Nash could remember nothing of what Professor Robert Hayden had said. What she remembered instead was her fear. A large clock on the wall had clicked slowly and loudly; each minute which was subtracted put her nearer to harm's way. ... It was always the last class that she attended on the days that she and her colleagues assembled before they went downtown and challenged the age-old segregation laws at the lunch counters in Nashville's downtown shopping center.
Halberstam then describes Diane Nash's memory of the night before the first sit-in, on Feb. 13, 1960:
On that evening, she had sat alone in her room at Fisk University. Suddenly she was hit with an overpowering attack of nerves. What had she gotten herself into? she wondered. ... She, Diane Nash, a coward of the first order in her own mind, a person absolutely afraid not just of violence but of going to jail, was going to join a small group of black children and ministers and take on the most important and resourceful people in a big, very white, very Southern city....
It was a joke, she thought, it will never happen. We are a bunch of children. We're nice children, bright and idealistic, but we are children and we are weak.
I think I know why those words pierced me the way they did. Over the past year and a half, I've gotten acquainted, and at times worked closely, with a group of student climate activists in the Boston area. And while the situation they face is vastly different on multiple levels -- historical, cultural, political, personal -- from what students like Diane Nash confronted, I've seen them begin to make similar choices, and to take, or be willing to take, similar risks. A number of them have been arrested -- some multiple times, and in unpredictable circumstances -- for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience protesting the Keystone XL pipeline and extreme fossil-fuel extraction. And they are ready to do more.
Ed Orcutt is a Republican state representative in Washington, and he appears to be confused. As a member of the House Transportation Committee, Orcutt had a somewhat testy email exchange recently with a bike shop owner about a proposed bike fee. Reuters reports:
"You claim that it is environmentally friendly to ride a bike," Orcutt wrote to Dale Carlson, the owner of three bicycle shops in the Tacoma and Olympia areas who voiced concern that a proposed $25 fee on bicycle sales of $500 or more could hurt his business.
"But if I am not mistaken, a cyclists has an increased heart rate and respiration ... Since CO2 is deemed a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclist [sic] are actually polluting when they ride," Orcutt wrote late last month.
Carlson thought Orcutt "was being sarcastic or something." That wasn't the case, but Orcutt soon felt compelled to apologize.
Busted streets + incompetent city employees + you + bike = potential lawsuit! At least for now.
In most cities, if you injure yourself because of a neglected or damaged sidewalk or street, you can file a "trip and fall" lawsuit and claim damages. But California may soon change that for bicycle riders.
Assemblywoman Diane Harkey, (R-Dana Point) has proposed a law that would provide total immunity for governments and their employees in the event of a bike accident caused by faulty city infrastructure. Public agencies already have "design immunity" under state law (i.e. you can't sue because of the poor layout of a road or bike lane), but this bill would broadly extend that immunity:
Rich dude/dreamer Dennis Tito wants to send a man and a woman on a round-trip journey to Mars in 2018. One of the challenges of such a journey: cosmic radiation. A solution for this challenge: lining the walls of the spacecraft with water, food, and -- we really hope this stuff isn't all going to be touching each other -- the astronauts' own feces.
While we've been pumping the atmosphere full of heat-trapping gases, Mother Earth has been belching sulfur pollution through volcanoes and slowing down global warming.
That's the conclusion of a new study that's helping to explain why the globe warmed less during the first 10 years of this century than climate models suggest it should have. If volcanic activity calms down and sulfur pollution levels fall away again, runaway global warming could ensue.
I was already pretty irked when I heard about a study that said women gain weight because they don't do enough work around the house, but I mostly resolved to ignore it because it is dumb. What I didn't realize at first, though, is that it was funded by the Coca-Cola company. Suddenly, the frantic flailing for any bullshit, sexist, non-soda-related explanation for U.S. average weight gain makes a lot more sense.
The study looked at a bunch of diaries and found that women averaged 13 hours a week doing housework in 2010, compared to 26 hours in 1965. They also spend more time sitting at computers than they did in 1965, for some mysterious reason. Boom: An explanation for why we as a country tend to weigh more, one that doesn't have to account for tricky variables like food culture, weight thresholds, health care, potential hormone disruption, the idea that women are capable of doing other active things besides housework, or the existence of men!
On Friday afternoon, The New York Times discontinued the Green blog, the paper’s one-stop shop for environment-related news. Then on Monday, the Washington Post announced it was pulling its star climate reporter, Juliet Eilperin, off of the beat and putting her on an “online strike force” covering the White House.
All of this can only mean one of two things: 1) The environment is fine, or 2) imminent global catastrophe is not as interesting as photo essays of matching, over-upholstered apartments in Manhattan.
The Times decision in particular has people's heads spinning. Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review called the paper’s recent pledge to continue its robust environment coverage “an outright lie.” Paul Raeburn captured the sentiment in a post on the Knight science journalism blog Tracker: “The editors of the Times have perhaps forgotten that they work on an island, and that the entrance to their building is not too far above sea level -- current sea level, that is.” Slate served up a sampling of “the 65-odd other Times blogs that did not get the axe,” which include The Carpetbagger, about awards shows, The Rail, on horse racing, and six blogs on style, fashion, and leisure.
