Articles by David Roberts

The Ghost Map

Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You, has a blog post up about the new book he's just finishing, The Ghost Map. It's about the Broad Street cholera outbreak in London in 1854, and it sounds goood.

In many ways, the story of Broad Street is all about the triumph of a certain kind of urbanism in the face of great adversity, the power of dense cities to create solutions to problems that they themselves have brought about. So many of the issues that define the modern world today -- the runaway growth of megacities, environmental crises, fears of apocalyptic epidemics, digital mapping, the need for clean water, urban terror, the rise of amateur expertise -- are there, in embryo, in the Broad Street outbreak.

Jeremy Rifkin calls it for hydrogen fuel cells

In an interview with the EU Observer, Jeremy Rifkin says the world is on the verge of a fundamental change:

"We are on the cusp of a new energy regime that will alter our way of life as fundamentally as the introduction of coal and steam power in the 19th century and the shift to oil and the internal combustion engine in the 20th century", argues Mr Rifkin in an interview with the EUobserver.

"The hydrogen era looms on the horizon and the first major industrial nation to harness its full potential will set the pace for economic development for the remainder of the century."

The way I see it, he's right about renewable energy, at least in the long-term. But on the storage end, the struggle is between hydrogen fuel cells and advanced lithium/ion/nano/whatever batteries.

Which do y'all think it will be? Fuel cells or batteries?

(via EnergyBulletin)

Project Energy on WCCO

I don't remember how I came across this. Nor do I know why a local Twin Cities TV station in Minnesota is doing better work on this issue than the national networks. Regardless: check out "Project Energy" from WCCO. There's a whole series of friendly, accessible, and bizarrely progressive segments on the end of oil, the price of gasoline, energy-saving tips, the benefits of mass transit, and more. There's even one on the moral aspects of personal energy choices, with random bits of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics floating around!

If every local station across the country did a series like this, we would be in a much better place. As I say over and over, it's not enough to have facts on your side -- you need trusted voices spreading those facts, and no voice is more trusted and familiar than local TV news.

(Really well-designed website, too. Go Minnesota!)

More on the Center for Consumer Freedom

A while back, Chris asked, "Is FishScam.com a scam?" The short answer is Yes, but there's more to the story.

As a couple of readers pointed out, FishScam is one of many projects of the Center for Consumer Freedom. This SourceWatch page on the CCF is good background. I've also written a little on how the CCF is a background player in the recent "eco-terrorism" scare.

Today, Carl Pope wonders how and why Richard Berman, the driving force behind CCF, seems suddenly flush with cash, buying full-page ads in the New Yorker defending mercury in fish and full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post bashing organized labor. These ads are not cheap, to say the least.

You should read the whole post, but the nut of Pope's theory is that it's tied to the departure of Tom DeLay and the general crumbling of the Republican power structure in Washington:

My own guess is that Abramoff's guilty plea, DeLay's departure, and Berman's sudden wealth are connected. For years, corporate polluters could simply get their business done in Congress by having Jack Abramoff take members of Congress like DeLay on golf trips. Now that the junket strategy has run into trouble, the polluters are back in full public-relations mode, trying to discredit physicians, public health groups, environmentalists, and workers' advocates. Their hope: That we'll have no more credibility with the public than their departed Hammer, Tom DeLay, does.

If it's true, we can expect a flurry of flimflam in coming months. Keep your eyes peeled and let me know if you see anything.