Articles by David Roberts

Astroturf and the Endangered Species Act

Paul D. Thacker, who is doing kick-ass work these days, brings us another sordid tale of corporate influence, faux-grassroots ("astroturf") organizations, misleading PR, and political chicanery.

I won't ruin too much of it for you, but it focuses on the Save Our Species Alliance, an astroturf organization helping Rep. Richard "Dick" Pombo (R-Calif.) sneak through his "reforms" of the Endangered Species Act. Turns out SOSA has roots in Project Protect, a "grassroots" outfit that sank $2.9 million in advertising to back Bush's Healthy Forests bill.

Make no mistake: Corporate interests and the Congressfolk they've purchased have made this kind of manipulation of public sentiment into a science. The only effective response is to uncover the connections and expose the mechanisms. Paul's doing yeoman's work on that score.

Consumer Reports backtracks

Odograph will be happy to hear that Consumer Reports has admitted error: some hybrids save money after all.

Including fuel savings and tax credits, Consumer Reports said, the Toyota Prius hybrid would save about $400 over five years and the Honda Civic hybrid would save about $300 compared with conventionally powered models.

The magazine said it overestimated depreciation of the cars in arriving at its initial conclusion.

I guess the millions thousands tens zero people who were staying away from hybrids for this reason can now put them back on the shopping list.

(See original thread on CR report here.)

A little Exxon bashing

Nothing like a little fire breathing to start your day. So I give you Carl Pope, who really seems not to like Exxon much:

It is hard to imagine a more alarming scenario from the world's largest oil company -- we are entirely dependent on OPEC's being both willing and able to increase its production dramatically, even if we are very diligent about pursuing energy efficiency. If either one of those assumptions (cooperative, successful OPEC; energy-efficient consumers) fails to hold true, then we are cooked. So why is ExxonMobil running such soothing ads in the New York Times?

Because if the world does hit a major oil shortage, then prices will soar, and ExxonMobil, which just reaped a record profit, will become even richer.

What's really shameful is not that they feed us this toxic pabulum -- but that we seem to swallow it.

Environmental ethics II: The humanist strikes back

The environmental-ethics post below obviously raises more questions than it answers, but I was trying to keep it short, since I'm not sure how interested normal people are in such esoteric matters.

However, in comments both yankee and birdboy raise similar questions, so I thought I'd take a stab at addressing them here.

A common assumption is that anthropocentric environmental ethics leads inexorably to rape and pillage of ecosystems. After all, if non-human nature has only what value we assign it, why can't we just use up all the resources, pave all the wilderness, pollute all the water, and so on? More for us!

I think this assumption is badly wrong, in two overlapping ways: