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Global warming is a hot potato

Last week I reported on the wide and growing partisan divide in U.S. public opinion over global warming: self-identified Democrats are 39 percentage points more likely than their Republican counterparts to rate climate change a serious problem.

But what puzzled me most was the 13-point drop in concern among Republicans since 1999. Call me naïve, but with all the scientific evidence that's been piling up on the issue -- accompanied by increasing media attention -- I guess I expected slow (though perhaps reluctant) increases in concern all across the political spectrum. Years of rising global temperatures, melting sea ice, and solidifying scientific consensus ought to have converted at least some honest skeptics, right?

A big report released last week by Pew, charting two decades of American political values and core attitudes, provides some clues about what's going on.

Typical Republicans, circa 1999, haven't necessarily found their belief in global warming shaken over the years. Instead, for whatever combination of reasons, people who believe in global warming are drifting away from the Party.

An excellent new photo blog

My new favorite blog in the whole wide world is Shorpy, "the 100-year-old photo blog." It’s just what it says: it collects old pictures. That description doesn’t do it justice, though. It’s fascinating. For instance, check out this picture of Miss America contestants from 1927 — interesting to see how standards of beauty have and […]

Not — yet, anyway

I know there are Gristmill readers with high hopes for algae-based biofuels. They will enjoy this piece in Popular Mechanics. Here’s the hope: Solix addresses these problems [algae’s finicky growing habits] by containing the algae in closed “photobioreactors” — triangular chambers made from sheets of polyethylene plastic (similar to a painter’s dropcloth) — and bubbling […]

Internet TV that doesn’t suck!

I confess I had never heard of VBS.tv before they wrote us. It’s an internet TV station that grew out of Vice magazine. Poking around their site, I must say it looks pretty damn cool. Raw, but cool. I’ve been wondering when a viable internet TV production outfit will pop up. Maybe this is it. […]

New Yorker article reminds you why you hate it

Stacy Mitchell did a bang-up job earlier this week of explaining why Wal-Mart and other big-box stores could never actually be green. But if you need a more wide-ranging reminder of Wal-Mart’s deep and abiding loathsomeness, check out Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the latest New Yorker: “Selling Wal-Mart: Can the company co-opt liberals?” If you’ve […]

Read his cranky email to a consumer

A reader wrote in to share this email exchange. This is the email she sent to GM — as I understand, it’s a form letter you can sign and send from the Plugin America website. Dear Sir, I am tired of being held by the throat by oil companies and I want to buy a […]

Fun video

This is a pretty clever stunt by Greenpeace activists. They infiltrated the filming of a Kleenex commercial to get the word out about the fact that Kimberly-Clark (maker of Kleenex) uses 100% virgin wood pulp in their products — as a result, the Canadian Boreal Forest, one of the biggest carbon sinks in the world, […]

It’s the society, stupid

Andrew Dobson posted a thoughtful and useful piece in yesterday's issue of OpenDemocracy.org:

Both sides hating a bill doesn’t mean the bill is good

There’s not much new in this story about Dingell — yeah, yeah, he’s going to move slowly and deliberately on climate change — but I really hate this way of framing things: Speaking with reporters, Dingell said that he expects the end result to elicit complaints from both environmentalists and industrialists. “I seriously doubt if […]

A sampling of recipes for Passover

Over the next few weeks, I will be writing about meals that express our connection to and appreciation for the earth. In keeping with this theme, I'll start with Marge Piercy's new book, Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own.

My interest in seders (the meal served at Passover) started when I was in high school and worked as a "hostess helper" for families who were hosting seders. Having been raised Catholic, I had never experienced a seder before, and was deeply moved by the beauty and ceremony of it. As someone who loves food and ritual, I was especially interested in the foods that were assigned special meaning on the Passover plate.

Recently, when I told my friend Rabbi Michael Feshbach that I was writing about this topic, he said, "The greens, which are the first item eaten, are seen as signs of spring. I think of the entire seder as the first multimedia teaching experience -- you tell the message, you smell the message, you eat the message."

For all of these reasons, when I heard that Piercy was going to be in Cambridge doing a reading from her new book, I cleared my schedule so that I could go.