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Let’s not fetishize size

Many environmentalists are reverse size queens -- "small is beautiful."

When Schumacher wrote the book of that title, he was responding to a real tendency to ignore diseconomies of scale -- a tendency that still exists. Up to a certain point, both organizations and physical plants produce more output for each unit of input as they grown in size. Past that point, costs of gigantism kick in, and efficiency begins to fall instead of rising.

But Schumacher assumed that this point always occurs at small or medium sizes. In fact, there are many cases in which you get economies of scale up to very large sizes indeed.

For example, computer CPUs are still made in giant factories, not neighborhood plants; your computer would cost a whole lot more if that were not the case.

From Stern to Al

My editors have always told me: if you want to reach the biggest audience, publish late on the Friday before Christmas weekend.

Mission accomplished!

My list of the top 10 environmental stories of 2006 is available here. I hope all three of you enjoy it.

E-waste recycling in U.S. prisons

Only 10 percent of the nearly 500 million obsolete computers in the U.S. are recycled, but where does even that 10 percent go? Many of them are shipped overseas to the developing world, but a large number are dismantled here in the U.S. by prisoners working in largely unregulated facilities.

In mid-October, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, along with prisoner-rights activists and environmental groups, released a report [PDF] detailing health and safety violations taking place at these facilities, "Toxic Sweatshops." The report includes statements culled from prisoners at 106 facilities run by Federal Prison Industries, which does business as UNICOR, and details their health problems associated with exposure to the thousands of chemicals in electronics.

The use of cheap, under-regulated, captive labor and the environmental implications have made the report a topic of concern for health and environment activists, labor groups, prisoner-rights advocates, and businesses whose prices are being undercut by UNICOR. I had some time to catch up with Aditi Vaidya, program director at SVTC, on the results of the report, how citizens can be more active on this issue, and some of the other SVTC projects to look out for.

Sorry, GM

And how did they do it? Producing high-quality cars with good gas mileage. Often the market rewards the right actors.

U.S. oil and gas leases screw taxpayers

It looks like the oil and gas industries are getting what we pay for when it comes to drilling rights.

The NYT reports today that it's finally gotten its hands on an Interior Department report which paints a pretty bleak picture of the benefits that come from our leasing deals (another blow to subsidies, eh Dr. Scorse?).

The top 10 green stories of the year

Photo: iStockphoto 10. A Stern reminder In October, venerable economist and senior U.K. government adviser Sir Nicholas Stern released a major report on global warming. Its claims were explosive. On the grim side, global warming stands to shave up to 20 percent off the world’s annual GDP by the end of the century. On the […]

How the internet is changing news consumption habits

I've made a living for two decades in the media business, and at times have subscribed to three newspapers, along with countless magazines. But now I'm wondering: Is it time to ditch the hard copy, save those trees, and avoid the weekly chore of recycling a bundle of papers?

This obviously won't help the newspaper business, which is hemorrhaging subscribers, nor my friends who still work in the ink biz, but I'm realizing I no longer need paper. Newsprint's a dinosaur.

Discuss

People talk about the "politicization" of science all the time, usually in the form of an accusation designed to paint an opponent as biased or corrupt. Let's take a moment to think about the term and what it means.

Science is a multi-layered, collective, and impersonal process consisting of three parts:

1. individual scientists working under the scientific method,
2. the results of the individual scientists undergo peer-review and are published for the community to evaluate, and
3. important claims are then re-tested in the "crucible of science" -- they are either reproduced by independent scientific groups or have their implications tested to insure consistency with the existing body of scientific knowledge.

‘Natural emissions dwarf human emissions’–But emissions are only one side of the equation

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: According to the IPCC, 150 billion tonnes of carbon go into the atmosphere from natural processes every year. This is almost 30 times the amount of carbon humans emit. What difference can we make?

Answer: It's true that natural fluxes in the carbon cycle are much larger than anthropogenic emissions. But for roughly the last 10,000 years, until the industrial revolution, every gigatonne of carbon going into the atmosphere was balanced by one coming out.

What humans have done is alter one side of this cycle. We put approximately 6 gigatonnes of carbon into the air but, unlike nature, we are not taking any out.

Cutting-edge nature writer discusses … nature

Jenny Price is a nature writer, but unlike most of the species, she insists on writing about nature as it actually exists in our lives. If that means writing about plastic pink flamingos and concrete-bound rivers, well, that's the nature we see in the 21st century.

Her recently published dissertation from Yale is the remarkably light and witty Flight Maps. On the site L.A. Observed, she has a popular guide to half-secret access routes to the beaches of Malibu. For The Believer, she recently wrote a spectacular essay on the Los Angeles River, and last month published a tribute to the late, great plastic flamingo for The New York Times ($) that concluded: "Rest in peace, my pink plastic friend. It was fun while it lasted."

She is a Guggenheim fellow whose writing takes chances, and can open minds. For Grist, she graciously consented to an interview via email, which went back and forth for nearly two weeks. Take a look:

Kit Stolz: Last month the Union Products factory that has been making the plastic pink flamingo for nearly fifty years shut down, and the inventor Don Featherstone said he thought his creation would soon become extinct. Can we use that word for something that was never alive in the first place?

Jenny Price: Well, I think it's more accurate to say it's stopped reproducing.