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Collection: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 2/10/12

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Anna:

Don’t miss the latest from Bill McKibben on why Big Oil is clinging so fiercely to fossil fuels and fighting so hard against climate policy. It’s the money, of course:

The giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

As McKibben puts it, “the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry.” But, “telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing.”

And more on Big Oil’s banner year from Center for American Progress. Higher prices, record profits, less oil. What else have oil companies been up to lately while the rest of us suffer through a crappy economic climate?

  • They produced 4 percent less oil and “oil equivalent” in 2011 compared to 2010.
  • They spent a total of $38 billion, or 28 percent, of their profits to repurchase their own stock.
  • They are sitting on more than $58 billion in cash reserves as of the end of 2011.

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Weekend Reading 2/3/12

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Looking for the next weekend reading. Look no further.

Eric dP:

My top recommendation this week is the Boston Globe’s first-rate photo essay on the global coal industry.

I got some laughs from Local Brew’s comedy series. (The snowmadgeddon piece is the best one.)

And with a tip o’ the hat to former Sightline intern Matt Schoellhamer, I note that NBA superstar Lebron James could bring some high-wattage star power to bike commuting. As Matt points out, given the right incentives, even a highly recognizable man, worth something like $120 million, will ride his bike 40 minutes to work once in a while.

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Weekend Reading 1/27/12

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Editor’s note: We’re curious what readers think of this series. Is it useful? What do you like most? How can we make it better? Leave a note in comments.

Eric dP:

My top recommendation this week goes to James Wells’ righteous rant at Daily Kos, “Pretty Much the Dumbest Idea Ever.” Wells unleashes a real fire-breather on the Northwest coal export plans:

The plan is to dig up two trillion pounds of rocks and ship them 6,000 miles to China.  There they will light those rocks on fire, so they can make more pieces of cheap plastic crap that we will buy and then owe them even more money, while we choke on their pollution.  What could possibly go wrong?

In the year 2012, if this is the best new project we can think of to improve our livelihood, we are in serious trouble.

Considerably more measured in tone, I also recommend the Economist on the inevitable decline of American coal.

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Weekend Reading 1/20/2012

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Alan:

My contrarian nature had me—during Cascadia’s week of snow and ice—belatedly devouring Timothy Egan’s treatise on drought and fire. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), like Egan’s others, is a masterfully told and deeply researched chronicle of people and nature. In this case, it’s about the state-sized firestorm of 1910 that engulfed Cascadia’s eastern forest province. The Bitteroots of northern Idaho and western Montana erupted in flame, consuming in hours many millions of board-feet of sun-dried timber, along with whole towns and scores of their residents. The subject matter is captivating, like many disaster stories, but what makes it worthy of Egan’s attention is not the disaster itself but the role the fire played in US history. Former President Teddy Roosevelt and his close friend and former Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot used the fire to rally the United States to the idea of conservation and, specifically, to the then-radical notion that the federal government in Washington, DC, was the guardian of the nation’s natural heritage. The political meaning of the fire—the way it cemented in US thought the progressive ideals of public stewardship and of natural resources as a universal birthright—justifies Egan’s subtitle about saving America. For me, it was also a story of exceptional relevance in today’s climate debates. Natural disasters and the political meanings we assign to them could save us, or destroy us, again.

Eric dP:

This week I came across the single best chart depicting income inequality that I’ve ever seen. It’s a chart that its creator economist Alan Krueger calls “The Great Gatsby Curve”—take a look at it here on Paul Krugman’s blog. Plotting income inequality against “generational earnings elasticity” (basically, the ability for younger generations to earn more or less than their parents), the chart shows that not only is the United States among the most unequal of wealthy nations, but it also provides among the worst opportunities for advancement. Even more astonishing, the US has gotten considerably worse on both measure since the 1980s, even relative to other countries. It baffles me that anyone can look at this chart and continue to argue that the American economy works for ordinary people.

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Weekend Reading 1/13/12

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Alan:

Michael Thomas had this righteous rant in Newsweek over the holidays. The argument is not original: Wall Street and big money generally have corrupted US democracy. But the writing is arresting:

I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now.

Clark:

Wondering how to make your New Year’s resolutions stick?  Researchers are doing some fascinating work on willpower — see, for example, these articles in the New York Times and Wired.  The trick is to recognize that willpower is limited — so you should focus your limited reserves of willpower where they’ll do the most good. That typically means focusing on simply avoiding temptation, rather than resisting it.  To lose weight, for example, focus all your willpower on not taking a walk down ice cream aisle. Because once you get the treat in your freezer, you’ve set yourself up for a losing battle with your cravings.

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Weekend Reading 1-6-2012

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Clark:

What if you created a dictionary without the help of lexicographers?

On my reading list, a book by a friend of a friend—Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Video introduction here.

Anna:

Two interesting reads for anybody who likes to eat food.

First, a new take on women and dieting that implicates corn and soybean oils—namely Omega-6s—which are found in all kinds of processed foods. Get this: “the single best predictor of how much a woman will weigh is how much omega-6 is in her diet.”

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Weekend Reading 12-16-11

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Eric dP:

This week it seemed I read nothing that wasn’t depressing. It started with the Nation taking a troubling look at the fracturing of Occupy Wall Street.

More troubling was Eric Scigliano’s media analysis of recent global warming coverage, or lack thereof. Despite a spate of major developments, he finds that journalists are almost ignoring the topics.

Finally, it’s not accurate to say that I “enjoyed” reading them, but I was moved by Dave Roberts on the brutal logic of climate change (and the follow-on piece), as well as by Marc Lee’s post-mortem of the Durban climate talks.

Clark:

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Weekend Reading 12/2/11

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Clark:

Now this is a true catastrophe: a craft brewer is worried that climate change is making beer more expensive! Gahh!

Valuable tips for the holidays:  4 ways to hack your brain to avoid impulse purchases!

Physicists with lasers and very big brains are trying to figure out if reality is actually just a hologram.  “More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t exist at all, and that the 3-D universe…actually exists in two dimensions and the third is an illusion produced by the intertwining of time and depth.” Uh, thanks for taking care of that, physicists!!!

It’s been about 5 years since the real estate bubble burst — and Christopher Leinberger argues in The New York Times that depressed fringe suburbs may never rebound.

Drive through any number of outer-ring suburbs in America, and you’ll see boarded-up and vacant strip malls, surrounded by vast seas of empty parking spaces. These forlorn monuments to the real estate crash are not going to come back to life, even when the economy recovers…Many drivable-fringe house prices are now below replacement value, meaning the land under the house has no value and the sticks and bricks are worth less than they would cost to replace. This means there is no financial incentive to maintain the house; the next dollar invested will not be recouped upon resale.

I don’t know if he’s right, but it’s certainly sobering reading.

Alan:

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Weekend Reading 11-18-11

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Clark:

Reusable bag humor.

Graphs: It’s taking longer and longer to replace jobs after a recession.

The world’s sexiest programmable thermostat.

AHH! Maybe neutrinos CAN move faster than light.

Anna:

Here’s polling that shows—yet again—that American values differ from those of Western Europeans. Most notably, and no big surprise, at the same time we’re more religious, and more likely to think our country is superior (49% of us), we’re more individualistic and are less supportive of a strong safety net than are folks in Britain, France, Germany and Spain.

I like his novels; now I like Jonathan Franzen even better, knowing he’s a greenie. Check this Grist interview.

Here’s a valiant attempt to recast the 99 percent as middle Americans, not “animals,” “freaks,” “anarchists,” and “stinky hippies”—the side of this phenomenon that most of the mainstream media isn’t telling. (Compare this especially to this Salon writer’s account of bravely watching 2 days of Fox News coverage to see how they are portraying OWS. Spoiler: they mostly only say that the occupation is “gross.”)

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