There's a lot of bad information floating around on the Internet. For instance, many conservatives blame environmental regulations, but this argument is way off base. Why? Because 75% of the cost of gasoline is in the cost of the crude oil, not in the refining. At Salon.com, Andrew Leonard spells…
Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner Mike Lester, The Rome News-Tribune Parker, Florida Today Pavel Constantin, Romania Parker, Florida Today
An enthusiastic conservation effort, coupled with a wide variety of alternative sources of energy, will soften the blow of peak oil, but it might be too little too late. And it's incredibly difficult to get people to actually do something serious about conserving energy (see Janisse Ray's "Altar Call for…
The United States and the European Union have taken a “criminal path” by contributing to an explosive rise in global food prices through using food crops to produce biofuels, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food said today.At a press conference in Geneva, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland…
The best way to get people to neglect a cause is to dedicate a Special Day to that cause each year. On that one special Day, we will hold thousands festivals where we treat the cause in a trite way and we will ignore that cause the other 364 days. We’re just too busy with our amusements and distractions to give a damn about important things here in America. Earth Day fits the mold perfectly. You would think that at Earth Day festivals, people would take the purpose of Earth Day seriously. You’d think that people would feel the need to make substantial immediate changes in their lives in order to live and procreate in healthy and sustainable ways, leaving the planet in good shape for the following generations of humans and the other animals. 
What could be done on Earth Day? We could talk big. We could make real plans to take the actions suggested by visionaries like Lester Brown, who proposes that we cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2020. It could really be done. Here’s how Brown describes his plan in his book, Plan B 3.0:
First, dramatically and systematically raise the efficiency of the world energy economy; second, massive investment in renewable sources of energy; and third, increase the earth’s tree cover by planting billions of trees.
Really doing something on a big scale could “inspire awareness of and appreciation for the Earth’s environment.” But most people aren’t doing anything at all. They …
