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.
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Hidden costs, despite being hidden, are costs
Harold Pollack has a post on gold mining making the familiar point that there are all sorts of market failures that support destructive environmental practices. If the mine in question actually had to pay for the costs it imposes — or even pay fair price for the land it occupies — it could never compete […]
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New poll: The public trusts EPA, loves the Clean Air Act, and wants Congress to butt out
That’s love.Original photo: Matt CramptonAs everyone knows by now, Republicans have launched a massive, coordinated assault on EPA, attempting to block its greenhouse gas regulations, its air and water regulations, and in some cases its very existence. In the surreal hothouse atmosphere of the Beltway, where anti-government radicals are ascendant and everybody’s watching the same […]
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The U.S. government is an insurance conglomerate and it should insure against climate change too
Photo: David HilowitzMainstream economic modeling isn’t very good at incorporating the more severe risks of climate change, as I mentioned last week. The low-probability, high-impact possibilities that show up in the “long tail” of probability distribution — collapsing ice sheets, massive methane emissions from the permafrost — just completely short-circuit conventional models. As a result, […]
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Budget posturing is a game, and the left is losing
Chop chop.Today is Budget Day — Obama unveils his FY 2012 budget proposal — and political reporters the land over are aflutter. I’m being bombarded with press releases, think tank analyses, denunciations, and counter-denunciations. Politico is having multiple Os. Meh. Ryan Avent gets it right: it’s political theater, and poor theater at that. Congress controls […]
