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Freakonomists get freaky on climate change
The authors of Freakonomics have a new book out. Perhaps the title, which echoes those of some memorably bad Hollywood sequels (not to mention an over-hyped 80s song), ought to be warning enough that the book offers too much of a good thing: SuperFreakonomics. The pressure was on to challenge common wisdom in all of its forms. Driving drunk is good for you; condoms are overrated and so is climate change. (Only one of these isn't actually an argument made in the book.)
Perhaps Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's argument (as recounted by the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert in an article that's well worth the read) can be instructive, after all, though.
The Steves assert that the real effects of the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere aren't fully understood. I'll concede: The theory of anthropogenic climate change is still blurry around the edges.
They say that when doubt is at play, humans tend to imagine the worst. I'm not sure I agree with that—denial is a powerful thing—but I'll go along for the ride.
But here's where they go terribly, terribly wrong. The Steves say that, in the face of such uncertainty, expensive—and, it should be said, completely safe and probably a good idea even if it weren't for climate change—fixes like renewable energy are a bad choice. You know what would be better? Screwing up the climate more with, err, expensive and unproven fixes like spewing known particulate pollutants into the air and seeding clouds.
OK, you got me, Steves: You defied conventional wisdom, and wisdom altogether. Indeed, you've reminded me of another Stephen: Colbert.
The other Kolbert puts it thus: "Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are." Indeed. It seems that any answer that's not the obvious one, anything that doesn't imply that "mistakes were made" in our love affair with fossil fuel and technology, and especially a solution that will allow us to take that love affair even further, has an appeal that renewables can't.
It was the Daily Show, however, not the Colbert Report, that hosted Levitt, and the economist offered a lot of hedges and caveats about his argument. Jon Stewart, however, is turning out to be a climate skeptic, even echoing the tedious right-wing talking point that environmentalism is a secular religion. Freaky.
Other critiques of Levitt and Dubner's climate change argument can be found on the Union of Concerned Scientists website, Real Climate (a website authored by climate scientists), Climate Progress (the blog of climate policy expert Joseph Romm), the Huffington Post, and Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman's blog.
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| November 10 2009 at 10:35 AM
World Without Ice
Much of the public debate about the climate centers on ice: Is it melting? How fast? What does that mean?
Henry Pollack, a geophysicist at the University of Michigan, was a member of the IPCC panel of scientists that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former vice-president Al Gore. Pollack has a new book out, A World Without Ice (Penguin, $26), which is part a history of ice on Earth, part a scientist's love song to his subject, and part an unsentimental eulogy to ice, which, Pollack writes "is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it changes from solid to liquid. It just melts." The book offers a great opportunity for the novice to dip into climate science first hand. I reached Pollack at his office and asked a few follow-up questions.
You write in the book about glaciers speeding up and how that could result in significantly bigger and faster rises in sea level than the IPCC has estimated. How realistic a possibility is that?
The glaciers that reach the sea are in Alaska, Greenland, and West Antarctica. The temperatures of the sea and the air are destabilizing them and they're floating faster. When you break ice shelves up, then the streams from inland are freer to flow, so we're seeing a faster drainage of the ice off West Antarctica and off Greenland.
IPCC made a conservative estimate on sea levels from the melting of ice and the warming of ocean water, but the contribution of new water from melting ice was a calculation literally of how fast one could melt ice.
That estimate said we could expect two feet of sea level rise, and that's a very conservative estimate because it doesn't take into consideration the fact that you can raise the levels just not by waiting for the ice to melt, but by simply dropping it into the sea like an ice cube into a beverage glass. That changes the pace: It accelerates things. When you take into account those kinds of changes, the estimate of sea level rise is anywhere from 3-6 feet, whether it's three feet or six feet, that's a very significant change. A change of three feet would displace 100 million people.
So you think three feet is realistically the minimum rise in sea level that we'll see?
Three feet is where I would start to talk, yes. I think two feet is too conservative—not that two feet is not important but it might lull some people into complacency. Two feet would probably displace in the tens of millions of people.
To give an example, the city of Calcutta is 50-60 miles inland, but parts are only five feet above sea level. Just a few feet of sea level would move the shoreline many miles inland. It's not a pretty scene to contemplate because where do those people go? There were 150,000 people displaced by [Hurricane] Katrina, and our record of how we dealt with that relatively small number of climate refugees is not good.
Are there any glaciers advancing? How do you explain that?
There may be one or two, there maybe even three or four, but there are many hundreds that are shrinking. You cannot expect in a system as complicated as the Earth that everything is behaving in the same way. The overwhelming story that the glaciers are telling us is that the ice is retreating.
You talk at one point about the argument some have made that CO2 will boost agriculture, make winters shorter, and generally make life better. You call that argument "parochial and simplistic." It seems to me that many of climate contrarians' talking points similarly seize on part of the story to appeal to a kind of know-nothingism. How can complicated data win out over these efforts?
You have to create analogies that help people understand better. In the "contra" mentality, they see science as a long chain of evidence and that if they can break one link in the chain, the whole thing is going to collapse.
But it's not a chain with links in it; it's like a web hammock: Even if you snap one strand, the hammock doesn't fall apart, it's still filled when many other strands of evidence.
Some people say, "This must be part of a natural cycle." Well, that's true, there certainly was climate change before there were people. But that doesn't mean that all climate change today is due to natural causes.
The analogy that I use is to ask the question, Were there ever forest fires before there were people? We know that lightning can cause forest fires, but that does not imply that all forest fires today are caused by lightning. And, just because there are natural causes [for climate change], it does not mean that today those are the only factors that are operating. There are almost 7 billion of us now; collectively, humans are the largest agents of geological and climatological changes. We're moving earth, we're clearing forests, we're changing ocean chemistry, and, incidentally, we're also changing the climate.
As someone who specializes in climate science, how much optimism do you have that we can avoid disaster?
I'm not naive in that I don't think that we won't see continued climate change and it won't have unpleasant qualities, but I think maybe we can avoid the worst of it. I don't think we can avoid three feet of sea-level rise, but I do think that we can avoid 20 feet of sea level rise—which would happen if we lost the ice in Greenland and West Antarctica.
We have a few decades to take substantial steps to stabilize greenhouse gases by mid century and then start to see it decline. Am I optimistic that we're going to do it? Part of me is. I'm old enough to have experienced World War II as a child, and Pearl Harbor got the nation's attention. Just 13 months after Pearl Harbor there was a single aircraft factory near where I live in Michigan that produced more aircraft than all of Japan. That kind of rallying to meet the challenge made a big impression on me. Big changes can come quickly, but people have to have the feeling that they need to do that.
The sad part about climate change story is that maybe it's too gradual. Perhaps if a big piece of Greenland went into the sea and led to sea level changes of a few inches in a week or two, that might catch people's attention worldwide, but I'd feel bad that it would take something like that.
Every day that we dilly-dally more, we are changing the balance between mitigation—which means we can forestall climate change—and adaptation, which says it's coming and we have to live with it. Every day that we wait, we have to think about adapting more.
If you had to put your money into a single effort to hold disaster at bay—rainforests, or boreal forests, or ending coal-fired power plants—what would it be?
I don't think there's a silver bullet. We need much greater efficiency at things we do already. That's the low hanging fruit; we need wind power, solar power, geothermal power, and for a transition at least I think we need nuclear power. We need them all; we need every horse from the stable pulling. There are going to be barriers and disappointments, so we need to be making an attack on a broad front and bringing everything we have to bear on the problem.
Do you experience grief about the loss of multi-million year-old natural formations? Or does being a scientist and thinking in terms of the really long view diminish it?
In terms of natural wildlife and terrain, it certainly will make adjustments. There will be some species that fare well and others that don't, but that's nature. I don't take comfort from the idea that Earth has a long history of stresses and strains on its communities—I can observe it, and that's a broad view, but we're one species in particular that I don't want to go extinct. So, no, I don't take comfort from the geological record: We can learn a lot from it, but it doesn't provide a lot of guidance on how to deal with a [relatively new] species like our own and over such a short period of time.
UPDATE: A new article in Nature makes an argument very similar to Pollack's points about glaciers and ice sheets breaking up faster than first thought.
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| October 26 2009 at 01:20 PM
Radio host and author Thom Hartmann talks about Threshold
Thom Hartmann, a former Air America radio host, currently hosts The Thom Hartmann Program, which claims to have more listeners than any other progressive talk show in the nation. Hartmann's book, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, inspired Leonardo DiCaprio's movie The 11th Hour. I talked to Hartmann about his most recent book, Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture (Viking, $22.95).
Wikipedia
Radio hosting and writing seem like radically different undertakings. One is interactive and spontaneous; one is solitary and highly planned. How did you wind up doing both, and how do you balance the two?
You're right that in the process piece of it, there's a real radical difference between the two. But at a larger level, they're really kind of the same thing, which is trying to share ideas with people in ways that are meaningful and hopefully transformational. These have been two of my passions my whole life. When I was a little kid—literally eight years old, I used to watch Walter Cronkite and I would try to imitate him. I always thought doing news would be just the coolest thing, then when I was 16, I got a job as a DJ and kind of worked my way through college for a while and I had been writing the whole time. I always wanted to be a writer, and I always wanted to do broadcasting, and that's what I do. It's pretty cool to do what you always wanted to do.
In the book, you make a strong critique of the way we use—and overuse—the word sustainability. What does the word ultimately mean to you?
Well if we're going to continue to use the word sustainability we need to totally recalibrate its meaning [to mean that] we are part of interpenetrated by inseparable from the world around us, we need to view every part of the biosphere, from the mosquito to the redwood as equally sacred as we are—I know that flips out a lot of religious folks. But I'm concerned that if we don't recapture that in our culture, our culture is screwed or doomed. To be sustainable is not to be in our own human cocoon or cubicle, and say, here, look at this, we can make our machines work. It has to mean to be seamlessly integrated with all of nature. And that's not what it means for most people now; it means they can recycle their plastic bags or something.
What practical suggestions would you make for businesses and environmentalists who use the word to describe efforts at becoming more sustainable, which rarely means truly sustainable?
I think sustainable is fine, I just think we just need to broaden the frame. For example, we try to conserve water, but...the vast majority of water used is not used for bathing and washing—it has nothing to do with low-flow toilets; it's used by industrial processes and industrial agriculture. We can use fluorescent bulbs all day long, but the majority of our electricity is used by industry. You can go down the list where we're trying to be more sustainable and [every category is] dwarfed by what our military and our industry are using. We need a fundamental rethink of how we've constructed our economies: the idea that growth is good, and the understanding of the carrying capacity of the earth for human flesh. In the absence of oil, the planet had only a billion people on it and it was groaning under that—and, at that we were killing off whales like crazy. Arguably, the planet might only be able to handle half a billion people without oil—and we've hit peak oil. We've got to figure out how to keep the other 6.5 billion from starving, and to stop producing more of them. I mean we need some fundamental rethinks here and they all tie in to how we view ourselves in relation to each other and in relation to the planet.
It took all of human history to reach the first billion people in 1800; the second billion took only 130 years, and the fifth billion took just 14 years. We tell ourselves that this explosion of population is simply the way it is for human beings, but there are many cultures in the world that have been population-stable for, in some cases, tens of thousands of years. What we find that the most consistent factor that will stabilize a population, even within a single generation, is when women have power equal to men, and that's a huge cultural issue.
How did you come to the conclusion that women's rights is the determining factor in population?
There's been some pretty decent research on it over last couple decades, and I don't think it's something that's highly in dispute; it's just that it doesn't get talked about very much because it gets into religious issues, and scientists don't like to get into issues that deal with religion.
The country in Europe that has highest rate of birth control is Italy, which is almost entirely Catholic. What that means to me is that it is possible for the people in a culture to move faster than the religious institutions in a culture. We don't have to go out and teach the Catholic Church, or Muslims in countries where it's legal to have up to four wives, or teach the fundamentalist Mormons that their religion is wrong—we just have to empower the women.
The Old Testament has over 600 rules in it, most of which are ignored today—but that doesn't mean that there's been a wholesale rejection of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Many people get a lot of solace and meaning from their religion but they don't follow the rules.
Part of what's revolutionary about that point is simply that it allows you to talk about population control, while, as you note, most greens don't. What would you add to lists like "51 Ways to Save the Planet" to address the issue of population?
I would say that they're just nibbling around the edges. Most of the pop-culture environmental movement, the corporate-acceptable environmental movement is just nibbling around the edges. The real issue is culture: resacralizing our world...It doesn't have to be in a religious context, but reconnecting with a sense of awe—re-respecting the Earth might be a word that people would find less inflammatory—and resacralizing each other. The obvious sense of that is the empowerment of women and ending discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation and gender—those are the biggies I guess. In a way that change brings us to another very large frame, which is, are we going to be a we society or a me society? The Northern Europeans concluded long ago that they were a we society: They have very high taxes on high income, so they don't have super wealth; they have a very strong social safety net, so they don't have super poor, and everybody's part of we.
Since the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher and Milton Friedman winning the Nobel Prize, we've celebrated ourselves as a me society, and what it's brought about is incredible destruction of our social fabric, our environment, and of many countries around the world. We need to have a national conversation about whether we're a we or a me society. And I think what we'd find is that majority of Americans really want to live in a we society.
What's your beef with Thomas Friedman?
He was the main cheerleader for [free market economics] with The Olive Tree and the Lexus. That book was very influential in the Reagan era in convincing people to go this way. The unfortunate reality is, Friedman got it completely wrong; he didn't do his homework. For two decades [Japan] heavily subsidized Toyota [the company that makes the Lexus]; they made it illegal to sell American cars in Japan. The Lexus was result of government subsidies and protectionisms: if you want a poster child on how to build up an industry, it should be the Lexus. And Friedman turned it totally on its head. It's a little bizarre, actually; economists read this book and go huh?—or at least those that aren't enthralled to the Cato Institute.
You certainly seem to be arguing for a return to big government and protectionism as important parts of ameliorating the environmental crisis. Those are not politically popular ideas—how do you imagine us getting back to them?
People don't know the history of this country and other countries and don't realize that the economies doing well around the world are those that are heavily protected: China, Japan, and the European Union heavily protect their products.
Alexander Hamilton put forward in 1791 his "Report on Manufactures"; he laid out a plan on how to create an economy that was self-sustaining, and a big piece of that was tariffs. We had strong tariffs in place from 1793 to the 1980s, and the result of that was that we made our own clothes and food and TVs, and we don't make any of that anymore. We've become a country that exports raw materials—we export trash and wood—and imports finished products, and that's a pretty textbook definition of a third world economy. We were the largest creditor and now we're the largest debtor. Thirty years of free market economics brought to you by Ronald Reagan and Thomas Friedman has destroyed this country. We've made some big mistakes, and they've really only helped transnational corporations. There are entire think tanks devoted to pushing these ideas, like the Cato Institute, and they're very well funded.
Using health care as the example, the question is not do you want a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, because we can't all afford to insure ourselves individually. The question is really do you want a representative to a democratic institution that is answerable to we the people, or do you want Bill McGuire—who, when he left UnitedHealth Group he had taken a 10-year compensation package of $1.78 billion—standing between you and your doctor? If you don't like the way your health care company is doing something and you try to protest, they will laugh at you, and if you show up at their office with a sign, they will have you arrested for trespassing. If you don't like the way the government is handling your health care, you can call your congressman or picket his office or run against him in the next election.
| August 06 2009 at 03:19 PM
Mass human extinction?
A breathtaking article in the New York Times reports that tribes living in the Amazon rainforest are facing starvation as supplies of fish in the ecosystem's many rivers dwindle due to climate change. The Amazon gets less and less rain, leaving rivers low and fish stranded.
I'm excerpting it here, but the full article is a must-read.
Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
Tacuma, the tribe's wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.
Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and "have just collapsed" since 2006, said Chief Kotok...
Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.
The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.
| July 27 2009 at 10:55 AM
Jaws no more
I admit: I'm absolutely, completely, irrationally afraid of sharks. I even get spooked sometimes swimming in deep fresh water. It's so irrational that I wonder if it's not a neuron firing in the deepest, fishiest part of my brain.
That could just be an excuse for my only debilitating fear, but it's not completely impossible. Sharks are an old, old species. They existed before the last round of mass extinctions and before any land mammals.
So, while I might personally rejoice in an ocean completely free of the toothy stalkers, it would be awfully sad to see this successful, ancient species die out. Well, that, and their extinction would likely result in population explosions among rays and other scary sea creatures. (Read this post on the frightening population spike of jellyfish.)
But die out they might, due to human overfishing of the fish sharks so mercilessly hunt and eat and aggressive fishing of sharks themselves.
Hammerheads, giant devil rays and porbeagle sharks are among 64 species on the first ever red list for oceanic sharks produced by the World Conservation Union (IUCN).....Scientists estimate that shark populations in the north-west Atlantic Ocean have declined by an average of 50% since the early 1970s.
For a great green read about great white sharks near the Farrallon Islands, read The Devil's Teeth by the unlikely New Yorker-turned-environmentalist Susan Casey.
Without the predatory, prehistoric, surprisingly intelligent deep-sea monsters, what else would we fear?
| June 25 2009 at 01:33 PM
Inside look at TVA coal ash spill
GQ has a long feature on the Tennessee coal ash spill that occurred in December.
Among the salient points: The dike holding back a pit of coal ash 60 feet above the water line was itself made of no more than ash.
The amount of toxic material released was 10 times more than in the Exxon Valdez spill.
The report TVA issued on the incident was heavily edited to understate the severity of the spill.
And my favorite quote:
Hawthorn [the coal industry's PR firm] polled what the firm considered "public opinion leaders" in September 2007 and again at the end of 2008 on... whether they favored burning coal to generate electricity. The first go-round was a split: 46 percent in favor, 50 percent opposed. But after a year of Hawthorn bleating "clean coal" over and over, support rose to 72 percent—and opposition nose-dived to 22 percent. Results such as these would be impressive no matter what the issue. Yet they are especially so in this instance, because the idea Hawthorn is selling—Coal is clean!—is complete horseshit.
| June 09 2009 at 11:49 AM
Drought or no drought?
Although California is most often a pioneer of sound environmental policies, it's important not to become too complacent to challenge areas in which there's plenty of room for progress. One such issue is water. It's a hard fought battle in the state, with farmers, cities and environmental groups all vying for more of the stuff.
Nor is the problem limited to the delta and the snowpack. There's also groundwater. And California, unlike most states, does not regulate groundwater.
As farmers get less water from the Sierras, due to low snowfall, and from the San Joaquin Delta, due to environmental protections of fish and ever-expanding urban populations, they are pumping more water out of aquifers. In most states, this water is regulated, even when the aquifer is on private property. That's because emptying the underground water supplies has far-reaching effects, including dramatic changes in the land (see the photo, tracking historic land levels). Underground aquifers are also an important Plan B for the state in case of serious drought.
And state water boards are warning residents that a serious drought is on the way—and with it, rationing. The more accurate description is likely that population has grown so much that even a minor drought will create major problems. That's bad news, because we're certainly already in a minor drought, and climate change threatens to limit the state's water supply still further. Meanwhile the state continues to promise more water—some say as much as 8 times more—than it can deliver.
Warnings of drought may make the problem worse, instead of better. Schwarzenegger's recent drought emergency alert allows him to okay water projects without the usual checks and balances. But the governor's proposals to fix the state's water woes thus far consist of canals and dams—and it doesn't take a civil engineer to know that these projects won't create more water, they'll just move around what little we have. Sooner or later, the state will have to regulate groundwater and get serious about water efficiency measures, and probably even desalination and recycling (and, yes, that does mean toilet-to-tap).
For a great green read on the West's water woes, check out Cadillac Desert.
Three easy tips for conserving water:
- Put a plastic water bottle filled with sand or water in your toilet tank for a D.I.Y. low-flow toilet.
- Pick up a free faucet aerator at SFPUC (SF residents only).
- Try a Navy shower: Turn off the water while you're soaping up and save roughly 5 gallons.
Second photo: U.S.G.S.
| May 14 2009 at 12:24 PM
The Last Flight Of The Scarlet Macaw
In the second installment of great green reads, TGL brings you this 2008 book by Bruce Barcott (Random House Trade Paperbacks, $15). The title might provoke a yawn of green ennui, evoking images of a tear-jerker about some obscure endangered species.
Not so. This book is a page-turner largely focused on the wild contortions of Belize's corrupt government in attempting to carry out a dam project that would destroy the last redoubt of the endangered Central American scarlet macaw while also costing average Belizeans in higher electric bills.
In other words, if you've ever wondered how some of the most absurd-sounding, destructive projects could come to be realized, this book is a case study. Though Belize is relatively poor and small, its laws aren't all that different from those of the United States, and many of the twists and turns—such as burying a geological study if it doesn't suit the needs of dam investors, which is easy to do because all contract researchers sign gag orders, or passing legislation to exempt projects from standing regulations—could and do apply to projects in industrialized countries.
Bruce Barcott once wrote for Outdoors magazine, so he is also able to capture the adventure of exploring the wilderness that would be flooded as aptly as Edward Abbey did in Desert Solitaire. Without a whiff of pedanticism, Barcott describes how a truly unadulterated ecosystem, like the one where the macaws (and tapirs and peccaries and jaguars) make their home, functions. You'd have to be not just hard-hearted but also un-curious not to lose yourself in the almost Edenic perfection he describes.
Of course, you'll also get an object lesson about what happens when foreigners— even those as well-intentioned and persistent as Last Flight's utterly eccentric human hero—interfere in developing countries' political machinations.
So do our heroes, and scientific truth, prevail? No spoilers here!
If you've read The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, tell other readers what you thought.
| February 16 2009 at 12:52 PM
Great Green Reads: Big Coal
This is the first of what will be a regular feature on The Thin Green Line: Short reviews of green-themed books that are well worth the read. My goal is to focus on books that are well written and useful, whether you're a die-hard green or just someone trying to stay informed.
For no particular reason, the—ahem—inaugural great green read is Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future by Jeff Goodell (2006, Mariner).
One of the book's cover blurbs reads, "Big Coal does for energy what Fast Food Nation did for the American meal," and the book delivers. Like Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, Goodell sheds light on the coal industry through a cast of diverse and fascinating characters and their individual stories. The book is a great read, and doesn't impose a particular ideology on its subject matter; its criticisms stem from unearthed facts.
Big Coal traces the fuel through its life cycle: first mining, then power generation, and, finally, political wrangling over the ever-controversial fossil fuel. Several major points stuck with me: Appalachia is a living laboratory for the economic and environmental value of coal power. Appalachia is among the poorest regions in the United States, and there is little doubt about what coal does to humans and the landscape in much of the region. The personal stories Goodell retells are rich and powerful.
Secondly, the industry's claim that coal is so plentiful in the United States is based on outdated estimates that do not consider the expense and energy expenditure involved in extracting particularly remote coal deposits.
Finally, anytime the industry is confronted with potential environmental regulations—regardless of how necessary, or how minor—it fights them using the same talking point: It will drive electricity rates up dramatically. But Goodell points to data from industry insiders demonstrating that, with carbon caps all but a sure thing in the near future, lower rates would actually result from an immediate turn to coal gasification. The gasification process, called IGCC, is one meaning conjured by the PR slogan, "clean coal." The process also facilitates carbon capture and storage, another definition of "clean coal." Yet, the industry has made no moves to embrace either technology.
The coal lobby is mightily powerful, and although this book focuses on the impressive concessions it scored under the Bush administration, you can expect ongoing battles over coal's alleged necessity to the American energy diet to continue. Inform yourself as a voter, consumer, and planetary inhabitant by checking out this great green read.
If you've read Big Coal, or you do so on my recommendation, share your thoughts and opinions in the comments. Each great green read will also have a permanent forum on it. Big Coal's is here. The list of book discussions will grow here.
| January 19 2009 at 12:11 PM
Great Green Reading: New Yorker on Van Jones
This week's New Yorker has a profile of Van Jones written by Elizabeth Kolbert.
I've blogged before about how inspirational Van Jones is, and the article captures that. It also suggests, without quite saying, that the green jobs juggernaut of 2008 is the result of Jones' work.
| January 10 2009 at 10:28 AM
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