Articles by David Roberts

Eco-friendly building materials: The new black

The New York Times discovers that the market for green building supplies (flooring, paint, etc.) is booming. As usual with puffy trend pieces like this, there is frustratingly little actual information, just a series of mini-profiles. One thing the piece does make clear is that this market is still the province of wealthy suburbanites. But, you know, the promise of economies of scale, blah blah ...

2006 predictions

Stuart Staniford over at Oil Drum offers some predictions for 2006 that are worth reading. I think he really lost his nerve here, though:

Civilization Collapse, Rapture, Alien invasion, etc.

I estimate the probability of any of these events in 2006 as being negligibly small.

Aw, c'mon!

More willing to predict The End, as always, is the indefatigable Jim Kunstler, who thinks 2006 ...

And other thoughts from a ‘clueless’ enviro.

As political junkies know, Grover Norquist -- a major player in the Republican establishment -- holds weekly breakfast meetings, attended by everybody-who's-anybody on the right. This is where much of the famed "message coordination" happens. It would take a brave Democrat to venture into that lion's den.

I guess Al Gore is brave (stupid? foolhardy? running for president?).

He attended last week's meeting to give a version of his basic PowerPoint presentation on global warming. According to Steve Hayward's account (via Ezra), Gore was charming and the presentation was impressive, but the Q&A session failed to dazzle.

What bugs me about Hayward's post is this:

The real environmental debate

The stereotypical environmental debate is between people who favor "command and control" regulation (big government) and those who favor market mechanisms (small government). Democrats and most environmentalists are thought to be on one side, Republicans and "free market" environmentalists on the other.

This is a woefully imprecise and outdated way of describing the current political landscape. It's a large and complex topic, too much to chew over in one blog post. But Kevin Drum, writing on an unrelated subject, nails perhaps the most salient fact:

One of the underreported stories of the past few years is the evolution of the Republican Party from being the party of capitalism and free enterprise to being merely the party of whichever business interests can help Republicans get reelected. There's a big difference between being pro-market and being pro-business -- in fact, they're often diametrically opposed ....