I recommend a new blog from Liz Stanton, Public Goods: The economics of climate, equity and shared prosperity. Stanton is "a senior economist with the Stockholm Environment Institute-U.S. and a research fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE) of Tufts University." I know her because we were in economics grad school together a [...]

A couple weeks back I linked to the video of a lecture given by Allan Savory, on the topic of "Keeping Cattle: Cause or Cure of Climate Change?" Unexpectedly, and to my delight, a reader of the blog who knows Savory put me in touch with him, and Savory generously agreed to answer questions I [...]

The February Center for Rural Affairs newsletter includes a couple articles especially worth noting. Bad news first: the Obama administration isn't holding to the President's campaign promise to clamp down on the loophole that allows unlimited subsidies to go to the biggest farms.
In a repudiation of the president’s central campaign pledge on rural policy, the [...]

Check this out. It's a lecture by Allan Savory sponsored by Feasta, an Irish organization ("The foundation for the economics of sustainability"). There's a 10 minute version and a 1 hour version. The full version includes a lot of seriously interesting stuff not in the condensed version.
I'd love to have the opportunity to talk with [...]

Maybe lots of other people are making Avatar analogies, but I haven't happened to see them myself. So I'll just throw this out there. (Spoiler alert for people who haven't seen the movie and don't want to know the storyline: avoid this diary entry.)

Here's my fantasy—if you have some way of making this into a reality, let me know! So it goes like this: the Senate version of health care reform, stripped of any semblance of a public plan by Joe "Take That, You Pathetic Citizens!" Lieberman, meets up with the House version in conference. They get merged [...]

Senators Cantwell and Collins have introduced a cap-and-dividend bill into the Senate, S. 2877, "A bill to direct the Secretary of the Treasury to establish a program to regulate the entry of fossil carbon into commerce in the United States to promote clean energy jobs and economic growth and avoid dangerous interference with the climate [...]

It is often assumed that coal miners view the possibility of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program as a threat to their livelihoods. I'm sure that's true: that they view these as threats. What's not so clear is whether or not they really are threats.
Consider this:
While coal production in the US increased 32 percent between [...]

The world will be a better place if well-meaning people would please think a little harder and deeper about the aphorisms they impose on the rest of us.

If you don't live in Vermont you might not see that one too often, since it's given out by the Vermont Secretary of State, but I see it [...]

My feelings about healthcare reform run hot and cold. Sometimes I fall out of line with the "official" progressive perspective, getting more and more excited by the prospect that reform, even 3rd rate reform, might actually pass. People in the United States have been striving for some kind of universal healthcare system since at least [...]