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Brown alumni magazine profiles Grist leader Chip Giller

The latest issue of Brown Alumni Magazine (BAM!) contains a long and appropriately adoring profile of our brilliant, witty, and dashingly handsome leader, Chip Giller. My only beef with the piece is this bit:

The humor is most visibly expressed in its headlines; when the Bush administration tried to undermine European governments' efforts to test the public-health impact of industrial chemicals, Grist titled its story "No Chemical Left Behind."

Um, exsqueeze me, but that is one of our least funny headlines ever. The writer couldn't find anything better than that?

For future writers of adoring profiles, may I suggest the stone classic Cattle Star Redactica.

Market mechanisms are your friend

In the July-August issue of Sierra Magazine was an essay called The Common Good, a broadside against the market system and the field of economics generally. It didn't sit well with Jason Scorse, Assistant Professor of International Policy Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He wrote an article in response and sent it to Sierra; they passed on it. (Read the background in this post on the Environmental Economics blog.) I offered to run an abbreviated version of the essay. Part one follows; I'll publish the second half tomorrow.

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Economics is largely the study of incentives, resource distribution, and how institutional arrangements affect behaviors and outcomes -- and therefore, economics is largely the study of trade-offs. Above all, economics is based on simple principles of how people generally act in the real world, not necessarily how we would like them to act.

Let us begin with the primary problem surrounding open-access resources. Open-access resources are those for which there are no clear and enforceable property rights and to which it is very difficult to limit access. The world's ocean fisheries and much of the world's largest forests are prime examples. Unless there is some type of agreement by the parties who access the resources to better manage and preserve them, rational individuals acting in their own self-interest will exploit them (catching fish or cutting down trees) until the resources are exhausted. In this way they obtain all the benefits from their efforts while the costs (the ultimate degradation of the resources) are dispersed among the entire population. When large numbers of parties are involved and the geographic area is large, cooperative management is unlikely to occur. This basic logic underlies why 90% of the world's ocean fisheries have either collapsed or are near collapse, and why the Amazon rainforest continues to be cut down at unprecedented rates.

So what are the solutions?

China, eco-cities, Arup. Er, Arup?

So it's Sunday night and I'm browsing through Slashdot, when this Guardian article caught my eye: British to help China build 'eco-cities'

The eco-cities are intended to be self-sufficient in energy, water and most food products, with the aim of zero emissions of greenhouse gases in transport systems.

Sounds fairly encouraging. Oh, and as is always the case with these type of deals, there is a press release from Arup, the company hired for the job. Check for an Arup office near you!

Video previews, an Earth pod and more

Being the young and growing organization that it is, Current TV seems to be constantly tweaking its website -- for the better. Me, being the Current TV fan that can't actually watch it, I get a little frustrated. But luckily, they've thrown me a bone in the form of video previews. And I like what I see.

Another change is that one can now browse what is airing by "pod" category. Low and behold, there is an Earth pod just for us. Yippee! In it we find a clip on saving gorilla and rhino habitat, two (!) on climate change in Alaska, another on hurricanes, and one animated short on Bush and his love for oil.

Those of you who have been keeping up with my Current TV posts might notice a few clips missing from the Earth pod. You'll find them categorized elsewhere: "A Visit with Cody" (Current Casa) and "From the Fry Daddy to Your Car" (Current Ride).

And there is a new clip awaiting the greenlight in the Current studio on the Solar Decathlon that was recently featured in our own Grist List. IMHO, this one definitely deserves to be on air and is example of the type of video I'd like to see on Grist. If you agree, submit your greenlight vote.

Renewable energy investments booming

Joel Makower brings word of a very encouraging report on global investment in renewable energy. The picture is the same as always -- renewables are a tiny sliver of the total energy-investment picture, but growing rapidly -- but exciting in that the sliver is larger than you thought and growing faster than you thought. Give it a look.

It’s easy if you try

As I was walking my two-month-old (already!) son around the neighborhood the other day, I started daydreaming. It was silly, and I wasn't going to bother writing about it, but then I saw a post on eliminating the private automobile (hat tip: Jeff) and thought, hell, my daydream is only a little kookier than that, so why not?

My dream started this way: What if we didn't need roads? What if we just ripped them all out?

Reaching the hipsters

So I went to a show this weekend. (A band called My Morning Jacket, whose recorded output, though excellent, scarcely hints at the head-exploding, ball-rocking, thunder-f**king awesomeness of their live performance. I would recommend their latest album, Z, but every copy of the CD is crippled by Sony's absurd digital-rights-management software, and buying that kind of product is as contemptible as selling it. Don't blame the band, though -- they had no idea, they opposed the move when they found out about it, and their label even tells consumers how to circumvent the DRM. In the meantime, just buy It Still Moves or At Dawn from your local music store. Wait, where was I ...)

Anyhoo, I went to this show, and as I checked out the merch table, I wondered why you never see environmental materials at venues like this small club. You see them at, say, Bonnaroo, or a Phish show (back where there were Phish shows), or a Dave Matthews Band show maybe. But they only seem to crop up around bands that are from the hippie-tinged jam-band scene -- i.e., precisely the shows where the attendees are likely already on board with the eco-program. See, for instance, this InterActivist we had, who runs an outfit called Rock the Earth. He works primarily with a band called the String Cheese Incident, and, you know ... god love 'em, but SCI fans are already down with nature. They even smell like it.

What about the hipsters? What about the semi-affluent, college-educated, tech-savvy, media-saturated twenty-somethings with artfully disheveled hair? They are, like it or not, apt to be central players in our culture in coming years ("the next generation," blah blah).

They have no tolerance whatsoever for the kind of earnest, soft-focus appeals most enviro-groups pitch. They are, let's face it, a tad self-absorbed, but they are attracted to all that is innovative, cool, and cutting-edge. Coolhunting is practically a genre unto itself on the net these days. And lots of stuff that's going on in the green world these days fits the bill.

Is anyone trying to snag this crowd? Is anyone tailoring a message to them? Is there anything I could imagine seeing on that merch table that wouldn't make me cringe, that might actually turn some heads?

I got no answers, only this persistent ringing in my ears. Any ideas?

RenewAmerica columnist claims

I have three things to say about this "issues analysis" from RenewAmerica columnist Fred Hutchison, who claims global warming is a crock:

First of all, does this strike anyone else as a bit too coincidental?

Readers who wish to try the smell test might go to any Environmentalist or Global Warming interactive web site with an intelligent criticism and see if they can get an intelligent answer. If the Global Warming advocates flunk the smell test, should one join with Horatio and say "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"? Not at all. If we jump to hasty conclusions, we become just as bad as the partisans of junk science.

Environmentalist or Global Warming interactive web site? "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"? This is obviously a direct attack on Grist!

Poll on impeachment comes up with strong results

Twelve hundred voters voted in a new poll,  and the results are in: 53 percent of Americans want to impeach Prez Bush, and 42 percent don't. That'd be 76 percent of Democrats, 29 percent of Republicans, and 100 percent of environmentalists. Ha, just kidding about the environmentalists part.

Hm. Interesting. I'm skeptical, to be honest. I know Bush's approval rating has dropped, but come on -- almost 1 in 3 Republicans want to impeach him?

Also, the question on the poll was very awkwardly worded: Do you agree or disagree that if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment?

Um?

There's a 2.9 percent margin of error, too, which, if I remember my Sociology minor correctly, is somewhat hefty.

AND if the sample is adjusted from "Adults" (PDF) to "Likely Voters" (PDF), the numbers become 51 percent support, 45 percent don't.

What do you think, oh politically knowledgeable Grist readers? Let the picketing begin, or just more liberal propaganda?

Climate heroes

Congrats to Amanda for her work on the big new Salon/Rolling Stone package on "Climate Warriors and Heroes." It's pretty great -- a nice overview of the many approaches to fighting the fight of our time. And I quite enjoyed Al Gore's essay as well. He's doing an adept job framing the issue not as scientific or political but moral: What kind of people do we want to be? Powerful stuff. Give it a read.