Climate Culture

And other tips from celebs

Happy Monday, y’all. If your weekend was as awesome as mine (read: not awesome), you’ll need some entertaining celeb goss to get you going this week. So here goes: Leonardo DiCaprio announced this weekend during press for his documentary 11th Hour (which I’ve heard, ps, is not awesome, though I hope I misheard) that he […]

Stephen Colbert: Noah-it-alls

His new book, about stupid media, is treated stupidly by the media

Al Gore has a new book coming out called The Assault on Reason. It’s about the sickness of our democratic dialogue, the systemic features of our culture and media that lead us to ignore evidence, focus on trivialities, and accept deception after deception. Gore’s going to be out promoting the book, and there’s a certain […]

Three wheels, 40 mph top speed, and 20-mile range I can live with …

… but zebra stripes?!

Plus, He Made That Boat Sink

Leonardo DiCaprio brings climate-change film to Cannes A year ago, Al Gore spread the climate-change message at the Cannes Film Festival. Now it’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s turn. The former boy wonder produced, co-wrote, and narrated The 11th Hour, a documentary that explores how industrial society screwed itself and how it can fix the problem. Relying on […]

Green weddings are no better than white ones

It’s not exactly news — Umbra made the point in her column on green weddings a couple of months ago, and others have no doubt said it — but a piece in Salon today on the wedding industry points out that green weddings are not so magical as they seem: Then, there’s the recent development […]

I’m not sure if a rock concert is the answer …

… but I’m pretty sure “burning all the oil” isn’t.

Where are low-income and minority greens in the media?

Once again this year, the spring season brought a flood of green-themed magazines to super-market checkout stands and airport news racks all across the country.

And once again, the faces of non-white and non-affluent Americans were almost entirely missing.

Our new environmental movement is rapidly gaining visibility and momentum. That is very good news. Life-or-death ecological issues finally are starting to get the attention they so urgently deserve. And we can all celebrate that.

But now we would be wise to start paying closer attention to the kind of coverage that we as environmentalists are getting. Because I see a disturbing pattern of exclusivity that is starting to set in. And that kind of elitism can sow the seeds for a very dangerous, populist backlash, down the line.

To see what I mean, just flip through the pages of Vanity Fair's recent green issue (the one with Leo DiCaprio and that cute polar bear cub on the cover).

Is your town?

What if cities had no sidewalks and everyone walked on the road? Or, for urban recreation, they walked on a few scenic trails? What if the occasional street had a three-foot-wide "walking lane" painted on the asphalt, between the moving cars and the parked ones?

Well, for starters, no one would walk much. A hardy few might brave the streets, but most would stop at "walk?! in traffic?!"

Fortunately, this car-head vision is fiction for most pedestrians, but it's not far from nonfiction for bicyclists. Regular bikers are those too brave or foolish to be dissuaded by the prospect of playing chicken with two-ton behemoths. Other, less-ardent cyclists stick to bike paths; they ride for exercise, not transportation. Bike lanes, in communities where they exist, are simply painted beside the horsepower lanes.

People react reasonably: "bike?! in traffic?!" And they don't. "It's not safe" is what the overwhelming majority say when asked why they bike so little. (As it turns out, it's safer than most assume -- on which, more another day.)

So what would cities look like if we provided the infrastructure for safe cycling? What does "bike friendly" actually look like?

Do gas prices affect behavior or not?

Despite record-setting gas prices, U.S. drivers haven't changed their gas-guzzling habits, says AP. Not only are we consuming as much as we always have, new vehicle sales seem to be tilting even more in favor of trucks than cars.

But wait, USA Today disagrees. They say that drivers are, in fact, starting to cut back on how much they drive -- a clear sign that higher gas prices are starting to bite.

Who's right? Who cares! Either way, the consumer response to massive increases in gas prices over the last five years has been teensy-tiny.