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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Farcical.
The big Asia-Pacific climate summit ended today, and I suppose I should have something to say about it. Amanda's piece on the Asia-Pacific climate pact lays out the basics, and I said a little more here.
Thankfully, Ross Gelbspan has saved me the trouble of repeating myself, with this compact and devastating post about the summit. As he says, the whole pact is basically an attempt to subsidize the further use of coal.
Clean coal technology, with its reliance on hugely expensive geo-engineering projects like mechanical carbon sequestration, basically represents a full-employment act for companies like Bechtel and Halliburton. These projects are also wasteful in the extreme. Given their huge pricetags, the same amount of money would generate far more electricity per dollar were it to be spent on constructing windfarms. A real "pro-technology pro-growth" initiative would center on a worldwide project to replace every coal-burning generating plant, every oil-burning furnace, every gasoline-powered car with clean, climate-friendly energy technologies.
Yup.
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A post more interesting than it sounds
This diary on dKos about Alito isn't all that great. It does, however, confirm what Amanda's article described: The basic bone environmentalists have to pick with Alito, and with conservative jurists in general, has to do with the Commerce Clause, which empowers Congress "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."
(I'm not a lawyer or a law scholar, so take all that follows with a large grain of salt.)
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Environmentalism = bias
Seems Grist is connected, in a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon way, to the ongoing efforts of Bush defenders (I won't call them "conservatives" any more) to free the administration of any responsibility for the Sago mine tragedy -- and many other mining accidents that preceded and followed it.
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Ha ha, stupid hippies and their, uh, markets!
Want to see what happens when the substance of libertarianism runs up against the prejudices and stereotypes held by libertarians? Read this thread on Hit & Run about Whole Foods recent move to buy wind-power credits. Deeply incoherent.
