Articles by David Roberts

Ride the white crony

Speaking of TIME, and of more pressing short-term threats to our environmental health: Check out "How Many More Mike Browns Are Out There?" It is, as you might suspect from the title, an investigation into how many other important government agencies are now headed by Bush administration cronies with no qualifications and no principles aside from their loyalty to Bush.

Scary, scary stuff. And it doesn't even touch on the EPA and FWS and other eco-related agencies, which as we all know are led by and increasingly (as long-timers leave in disgust) staffed with ex-industry lobbyists.

This kind of rot and incompetence at the core of our government is one of those dire threats that environmentalists pay insufficient heed to, what with it not being "environmental." Heed should be paid.

(Anybody get that title reference?)

Hurricanes and global warming, part 548,389

I'm sure everybody's sick of reading about it by now, but if not, TIME has a cover story on whether global warming is responsible for the recent hurricane damage.

After going on and on about how mixed and controversial and ambiguous the science is, it concludes:

In Washington successive administrations have ignored greenhouse warnings, piling up environmental debt the way we have been piling up fiscal debt. The problem is, when it comes to the atmosphere, there's no such thing as creative accounting. If we don't bring our climate ledgers back into balance, the climate will surely do it for us.

This is certainly a valid perspective, but it seems basically unconnected to what came before it. Global warming may do many bad things over the long haul, but raising average hurricane wind speeds from 100mph to 105mph doesn't really seem like one that's well-suited for the kind of rabble-rousing everyone is trying to use it for.

McMansions on the wane?

This NYT article on the alleged leveling off of new home sizes is a rather mild ray of hope given where we need to get, but it's worth reading. I found this bit particularly amusing:

In less populous areas, builders of large houses are derided for despoiling the natural environment. Arthur Spiegel, who is retired from the import-export business, is building a 10,000-square-foot house in Lake Placid, N.Y., in the Adirondacks. The hilltop house has brought protests from the Residents' Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, and construction has been halted by local building authorities.

Mr. Spiegel said that the house "is only 6,500 square feet, unless you count the basement," and that it's the right size for his extended family to gather in for ski vacations.

A strategy of fear

Good essay by Ira Chernus over on TomDispatch. It's about fear, and the recent attempts by anti-Bush forces to use the fear frame -- "he's not keeping us safe" -- to topple the administration. It's an effective short-term tactic, he says, but perhaps a bad long-term strategy.

We'll never be safe if we make safety our ultimate goal. We'll be safe only if we let safety be a by-product of a society working together to improve life for everyone.

The best way to be secure is to imagine a genuine politics of hope. Imagine. Unfortunately, when John Lennon said, "It's easy if you try," he was quite wrong. After six decades of our national insecurity state, it's incredibly hard. But it's an effort that anti-Bush forces ought to make. The alternative is, however inadvertently, to reinforce the politics of fear that Bush and his kind thrive on. The belief that danger is everywhere -- that we must have leaders whose great task is to keep us safe -- is the one great danger we really do need to protect ourselves against.

The implications for how greens approach global warming are, I trust, obvious.