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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Famed progressive blog raises money to buy turbines.
Dang, I don't know how I missed this:
The Kossacks over at famed progressive weblog DailyKos are trying to raise money to build a wind farm. A dKos-branded wind farm, no less!
Another Kossack suggests that the money would be better spent establishing "a foundation dedicated to funding independent and innovative energy technologies that help people, not corporations."
The comment threads on both posts are well worth reading.
So what do you think? If you had a huge group of investors, where would you put the money?
(Via Mobjectivist)
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A grim vision of the future mega-city.
Mere moments ago I was whinging about Seattle being unable to build the monorail, paralyzed by an excess of open, transparent democratic process. Then I read this -- "Camel trainers claim that the children's shrieks of terror spur the animals to a faster effort." -- and I remembered that there are worse problems to have than too much democracy.
That problem certainly does not plague Dubai, the subject of a mind-bendingly fascinating essay from Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz, among other books), hosted on Tom's Dispatch.
The Persian Gulf city-state is rapidly being fashioned into a kind of massive walled community for the global wealthy and dissolute:
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Pick on the bad guys, not the kinda bad guys who claim to be good.
I've said before that the unremitting negativity of the environmental movement toward corporations bugs me. I'm fully aware of the evils committed by corporations, but the tactic seems to be to find those that are talking about green issues and accuse them of hypocrisy, thus creating a massive disincentive. The lesson for corporations is: keep quiet.
But don't we want them talking about green issues?
The example I always use is Ford -- Bill Ford is, by all accounts, a committed environmentalist and has been pushing against the massive inertia of the Ford bureaucracy to do some good things (yes, yes, with limited success). But because the Ford fleet overall still has poor fuel efficiency, Bill ends up getting compared to Dick Cheney. Could anything be more insulting? The lesson for Bill -- or rather, for the Ford board of directors -- is: lower our profile on environmental issues. Don't draw the attention of the greens.
Yeah, so, that bugs me. And yet for some reason, this bugs me too. I guess the lesson is that everything bugs me and I should relax. Perhaps drink more.
Oh, wait! Here's something that doesn't bug me: ExxposeExxon, the new coalition trying to put together a boycott of Exxon. (Okay, the spelling bugs me, but ... baby steps.)
The problem with Exxon, you see, is not that they're saying one thing and doing another. It's that they're doing malignant things. Evil, not hypocrisy, is Public Enemy No. 1.
