Articles by David Roberts

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of … KA-DUUUM!

So Friday night, I finally got around to seeing Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, with a group of folks at my wife's church.

Perhaps I went in with distorted expectations. The movie's been showered with hype, promotion, and gushing reviews since before it came out, so I anticipated something a little more ... polished.

But it struck me as rather amateurish. I mean, if you want to make a point, is throwing spinning text at the screen with a big loud KA-DUUUM! really the way to do it?

I could forgive the scrappy, seat-of-the-pants technical quality. What I couldn't get past is the constant sense that I was being manipulated -- pretty crassly. I mean, I'm on the film's side. I hate Wal-Mart's labor and environmental practices as much as the next guy. But still I felt like I was being played for a dupe, that my intelligence was being underestimated. What few actual facts and statistics showed up in the film (there was way, way too much "chatting with average red-state folks" for me, but maybe I'm not the target audience) seemed, with a few exceptions, vague and cherry-picked.

In the end, the documentary is designed purely for rabble-rousing. It's openly partisan -- a big haymaker rather than some kind of nuanced look at a company, its effects, and the economic system that produced it. A wonk like me would have preferred the latter.

(I should also say that the activist campaign built up around the film is more admirable in many ways than the film itself.)

Update [2005-12-13 11:59:37 by David Roberts]: Julian Sanchez's review of the film in Reason is quite astute.

Greens are supposed to like high oil prices, but …

... as oil prices rise, so too does pressure to drill in the Arctic Refuge.

It’s not easy being a NIMBY in China

Efforts to ramp-up clean energy have come to China, and with them, NIMBYs.

Of course, Chinese police shot these particular NIMBYs, so it might be a bit churlish to criticize them in this case ...

Montreal snit

The Bushies were annoyed that Clinton came to Montreal to try to move things along, so they took their toys and stormed out:

Two weeks of treaty talks on global warming neared an end today with the world's current and projected leaders in emissions of greenhouse gases, the United States and China, still refusing to take any mandatory steps to avoid dangerous climate change.

The Bush administration was sharply criticized by environmental groups for walking out of a round of informal discussions shortly after midnight that were aimed at finding new ways of curbing gases beyond steps taken so far.

Lovely.