Natural Resources | ModeShift

Kunstler on Tom and His Green World

by Keith SchneiderApril 18, 2007April 18, 20070

Jim Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere andÂ wielder of one of the sharper editorial knives in the country, takes slices out of Tom Friedman’s Sunday New York Times Magazine article on the global green movement in anÂ essay that published on his site at kunstler.com andÂ picked up by Alternet.org.Â The money passage: “Friedman goes on to tout Wal-Mart’s mendacious campaign to “green” up its operations by, among other things, improving the mileage of its …

Tom and His Green World

by Keith SchneiderApril 16, 2007April 29, 20073

Tom Friedman, the New York Times’ great foreign affairs columnist and a former colleague of mine wrote this in a must read Sunday Magazine article yesterday: “After World War II, President Eisenhower responded to the threat of Communism and the â€œred menaceâ€ with massive spending on an interstate highway system to tie America together, in large part so that we could better move weapons in the event of a war with the Soviets. That highway …

Pure Michigan

by Keith SchneiderApril 4, 2007April 4, 20070

If you’ve followed what’s going on here in Michigan you know thatÂ we continue to lead the nation in too many categories that aren’t welcome — joblessness, rates of obesity and heart disease,Â income gap between wealthy and poor,Â racial segregation, home foreclosures. And weÂ are at the bottom of the heap in categories that define well-being –Â income growth, business starts, educational achievement,Â the quality of our big cities, state fiscal health. There are many reasons why Michigan has slid …

In Time For Earth Day, Eco-Luxury

by Keith SchneiderMarch 31, 2007March 31, 20075

Â How mainstream has the greening of the world become? Fortune Magazine this month joined the lengthening list of big dog old media publishing “green” issues. Car companies, especially the Japanese, tout their energy-efficient vehicles.Â Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is busy cementing his legacy as the George Wallace of thisÂ era, the man who stood on ideology andÂ misguided principle to deny an undeniable fact of experience and history: The earth is warming.Â Â Â And then there’sÂ one …

Why Give Barack a Pass on Energy?

by Keith SchneiderMarch 27, 20072

It’s understandable that many Democrats are enthused about Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. He’s young, hip, smart, and charismatic. He’s an African American in a race that also features a woman and a Hispanic man. And he talks a good line about energy, the environment, the economy, national security and global climate change that intelligent progressives have accepted uncritically, including those at ThinkProgress.com. But from this vantage his candidacy feels like it’s wrapped too …

Cleaning Up Those Coal Plants

by Keith SchneiderMarch 16, 2007March 23, 20071

Tom Friedman has a very interesting piece in the March 16 edition of the New York Times that reports the back story of the announcement last month that TXU would not build eight high-polluting coal plants in Texas. Turns out that the new owners of the utility were concerned about the public relations fallout from the battle they’d been engaged in with grassroots groups in Texas, and national environmental organizations, particularly Environmental Defense and the …

Live Maps And New Perspectives

by Keith SchneiderMarch 3, 2007March 4, 20071

My writer’s lifeÂ occurs principally inÂ twoÂ media arenas. One is the reporting I do for the New York Times and other mainstream pressÂ that involves structuring the gathered facts into a narrativeÂ that is purposefully designed not to have a point of view. My focus is delivering expertise in a 1,000 to 3,000 word package distinguished by studied detachment.Â The other arena is the public interest journalismÂ I prepare for the Michigan Land Use Institute. The idea is toÂ dig just …

On the Bubble and A Little Bit Off

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 25, 2007March 23, 20070

Tonight Al Gore could win an Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth.” Later this year he could also win the Nobel Prize for Peace. And if he lost 50 pounds and jumped into the 2008 presidential race, he could win that, too.Â Ever since he publishedÂ “Earth in The Balance,” his 1992 best-seller, Gore’s two issues have been global climate change and himself. The first, global climate change,Â is drawing the nation inexorably to logical choices about energy, …

Organizing Principles

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 21, 2007February 22, 20072

Seven years ago New Yorker magazine writer Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, which explored the mix of episodic and serendipitous stages that turn a good idea into a cultural event.Â Gladwell’s book is as useful for explaining the genetics of a modern sensation as Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave was in the 1980s for understanding the economic and cultural consequences of rapid change. Both books are essential reading for grasping how global climate change has …

Why Details Matter

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 20, 2007March 2, 20072

“The stuff that matters, especially when it comes to the environment, is not the big flashy stuff,” explained Keith Bartholomew, a lawyer who teaches planning at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.Â “It’s the small actions. Environmental damage is an accumulation of 1,000 cuts. So repairing it means applying 1,000 Band-Aids. Each one is important. It’s the many small Band-Aids that matter. Real relevance is the cumulative effect.” I interviewed Keith last week for …