Culture & Ethics
Barry Commoner’s Instructive Errors
The reflections published since the death of Barry Commoner a few days ago – including here by Dan Farber, and in many other places – have appropriately celebrated Commoner’s huge contributions to environmental science, and to raising public and political awareness of the gravity of environmental risks and the need to reduce them. But these …
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CONTINUE READINGJust Overheard
A non-renewable natural resource walks into a bar. The bartender growls at it. “Sorry — nothing for you! You’ve been getting wasted all day!” Thank you, thank you; I’ll be here all week.
CONTINUE READINGBarry Commoner and Our Interconnected World
Barry Commoner was born in Brooklyn in 1917 and died there yesterday, having helped conceptualize environmentalism in the meantime. You can learn more about his life from the NY Times obituary. Commoner is probably best known today for his four environmental “laws”: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. …
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CONTINUE READINGRoger Cohen Has a Lazy Day
I suppose that it’s tough writing two 750-word columns each week; that’s why the NYT’s Roger Cohen decided to rehash his hatchet job on organic foods in today’s paper. In a previous column, Cohen ridiculed fans of organic food, pointing to a Stanford study finding that organic foods were no healthier for human beings than …
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CONTINUE READINGGenetically Modified Foods: a Controversial New Study and Prop. 37
Genetically modified organisms are in the news these days for two big reasons. First, California voters will decide in November whether to require the labeling of foods that have been genetically engineered. And second, a new study — subject to significant criticism even from some who advocate labeling — found that rats fed with genetically …
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CONTINUE READING“Green Status” Through Vegan Eating
More and more micro economists are writing papers on social networks and how we learn from others. For example, here is a well known paper about pineapple farmers in Ghana learning from each other. In your life who is “influential”? If your mom makes a suggestion, do you embrace it? If President Obama endorses …
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CONTINUE READINGMayor Bloomberg and the Granny State, or: When is a Soda Ban Not a Ban?
Yes, that’s right: granny state, not — as conservatives are wont to call it — the nanny state. Dan’s thoughtful post the other day suggested but did not spell out an important theoretical implication of New York City’s prohibition on large servings of sugared soft drinks: it represents an almost-classic form of the “nudge,” the …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy Developers Shouldn’t Blame Environmental Review for the Lack of Infill
Members of the business community are smelling blood when it comes to effectively dismantling environmental review statutes like the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). They now have a political opening with the high unemployment rate, some well-publicized bad outcomes of CEQA litigation, and examples of lawsuits by rival businesses abusing the process for competitive purposes …
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CONTINUE READINGThis Blog Post is Full of Crap
As Cara and I have noted previously, many municipalities are seeking to limit or completely ban plastic bags in grocery stores. Good for the environment, right? Well, maybe. How shall I put this? Plastic supermarket bags, while terrible in many ways, are particularly good at the removal of a particular form of non-toxic canine waste that often …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Environmental Impact of Cloud Computing
The NY Times has a long article and a Room for Debate piece about cloud computing energy demand. Basic economics tells us that these data centers are likely to locate in places where electricity is cheap but the article doesn’t tell us the geography of where these data centers locate. Internet companies will ignore the …
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