Articles by David Roberts

America’s most loathsome

Did you know that you're the fourth most loathsome person in America (for 2005, anyway)?

And my fellow blogger Tom will be happy to see that someone agrees with him about the Mustache of Understanding, who comes in at No. 7:

A cool head on Cape Wind

Ultimately, I come down against Bobby Kennedy on the Cape Wind issue. But I've been bothered by the strident, dismissive tone of some of the criticism directed against him by his fellow environmentalists.

My sentiments are expressed eloquently in a post by Tom Andersen, author of This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound. It's the most thoughtful thing I've seen written on this contentious topic.

Energy use matters as much as — or more than — energy supply

Of the many ideas Amory Lovins has pushed into our cultural dialogue, here's one of the most important, one that everyone involved in energy debates should take to heart:

It is not energy that people want; it is the services energy provides.

The obsessive focus of energy debates on supply -- nuclear or wind? clean coal or hydrogen? -- is so narrow as to distort. The way we use energy is just as important: How do we store it? Transmit it? Where do we live? How do we get around? How can the same services be provisioned with less energy? How much is wasted?

The whole energy system is the proper focus of our attention.

Not a new point, obviously, but worth repeating, as it leads to very different policy debates and outcomes.

Are FBI informants prodding people into committing ‘eco-terrorism’?

This is not a particularly new subject, but: When exactly does an informant cross the line into entrapment? As readers of my obsessive "eco-terror" blogging know, the big indictment brought recently against 11 people crucially turned on participants that were "persuaded" to act as informants. A closer look at an ongoing case in California that […]