Articles by David Roberts
David Roberts was a staff writer for Grist. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.
All Articles
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Sunstein on global warming incentives
There's a smart op-ed in today's WaPo by University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein (via Dessler).
The basic point is simple: The two countries that are contributing most to global warming (the U.S. and China) will be among the least harmed by it, according to most projections, and thus have the least incentive to do something about it.
(In case you're wondering, India and Africa are going to take the brunt of it, via damage to agriculture and especially vulnerability to disease.)
The dynamic more or less insures inaction, unless one of three things happens.
First, we could decide that even though we will be better off relative to other countries, the absolute losses will be too much to risk. Sunstein alludes to that here:
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Still have glimmers of childlike wonder and hope?
Well, time to give 'em up. Dolphins are stupid.
(Thanks to reader ET -- or should I say, "thanks.")
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Werbach and Wal-Mart
Lest I let a single article about Wal-Mart pass by without notice: check out the San Francisco Bay Guardian's long look at Wal-Mart's greening and the company's hiring of Adam Werbach.
(And lest I let you forget that I wrote an op-ed on the subject: here's my op-ed on the subject -- and a bloggy follow-up.)
Listen to Werbach:
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Peter Schweitzer, Al Gore, and hypocrisy
About a week ago, USA Today published a piece by Peter Schweitzer, who's a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. It accused Al Gore of hypocrisy, for asking viewers of An Inconvenient Truth to scale back their lifestyles and carbon emissions while ... well, there were a number of charges. According to Schweitzer, Gore owns three homes and stock in Occidental Petroleum, still receives royalties from a zinc mine on his property, does not participate in the green-power option his utility offers in Nashville, and lets Paramount pay for his carbon offsets.
As per standard practice, the conservative media machine spread the charges far and wide -- most recently they popped up on Glenn Beck's show on CNN and, bizarrely, in a recurring poll on AOL's homepage.
