Arguing the World
Just before the holidays, Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most influential intellectual, contacted the Prospect offering to write an essay on the future of neoconservatism. Aware that his views on the matter were not wholly consonant with ours, he also suggested that he’d be open to a “spirited dialogue” on such questions as: Have the neoconservatives accomplished…
Rich World, Poor World
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs, foreword by Bono (Penguin Books, 416 pages, $27.95) The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future — And What It Will Take to Win It Back by Jeff Faux (Wiley, 304 pages, $27.95) Jeff…
Fueling the Future
“The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust — almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery…
Arguing the World original
Just before the holidays, Bernard-Henri Lévy, france’s most influential intellectual, contacted the Prospect offering to write an essay on the future of neoconservatism. Aware that his views on the matter were not wholly consonant with ours, he also suggested that he’d be open to a “spirited dialogue” on such questions as: Have the neoconservatives accomplished…
A Renewable Economy as a Global Ethic
In a song dedicated to martin Luther King Jr., James Taylor sings: We are bound together By our desire to see the world become A place where our children can grow up free and strong. For more than three decades, the world movement for sustainable development has been driven by that aspiration. The…
A Win-Win Bargain
As presently structured, the global trading system frequently pits the working poor in the developed and developing worlds against one another. The subsidies that help sustain the livelihoods of American farmers have a direct, adverse effect on the ability of farmers in the world’s poorest countries to compete on the global market. The conventional wisdom…
European Shades of Green
“Oh, and one more thing,” said Sebastian Paauw, organizer of a recent trip I took to the Netherlands, “we’re not going to rent you a car, but we’ll give you a bike.” True to his word, he promptly provided me with a bicycle. And while the cheese, wine, and charmingly narrow streets and alleyways made…
The Right Chemistry
When the 2005 Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced last October in Stockholm, the new laureates — Yves Chauvin of the Institute Français du Pétrole, Robert Grubbs of Caltech, and Richard Schrock of MIT — won recognition for creating “fantastic opportunities for producing new molecules.” They had explained and developed a reaction known as metathesis,…
The Challenge of Peak Oil
The supply of extractable oil is subject to geological limits. At some point those limits will overcome our ability to produce oil at the ever-expanding rates that growing economies demand. The global peak is likely to occur well before societies adapt painlessly to a different energy regime. And that likely time lag contradicts the way…
Building Green
Jonathan Rose Companies LLC is one of America’s largest green developers of affordable housing and other ventures, with more than one billion dollars worth of projects under management. Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner spoke with CEO Jonathan Rose. Kuttner: What makes a building “green”? Rose: For affordable housing, we recommend a level we call “practical green,”…
Building Green
Jonathan Rose Companies LLC is one of America’s largest green developers of affordable housing and other ventures, with more than one billion dollars worth of projects under management. Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner spoke with CEO Jonathan Rose. Kuttner: What makes a building “green”? Rose: For affordable housing, we recommend a level we call “practical green,”…
Follow the Farmers
Twenty years ago, on a farm outside my hometown of Aberdeen, South Dakota, I stood with a few dozen local corn growers in a machine shack, huddled around a still. We were trying to show the farmers that their crops could be turned into what we then called gasohol — a liquid fuel that could…
Can Government Go Green?
If the “mission accomplished” photo-op was the defining moment of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, the president’s recent visit to the National Renewal Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, defined its energy policy. One week after he embraced alternative energy in his State of the Union address, Bush’s budget axed 32 employees at the nation’s premier…
Good Genes Gone Bad
Scarcely a week goes by without coverage of a new discovery by scientists revealing that yet another disease is linked to one or another gene. The range of health conditions now known to be gene related is astonishing. Some are just what you would have expected 50 years ago: many cancers, birth defects, obscure metabolic…
A New Prairie Populism
Brian Schweitzer is an agricultural scientist, a gun owner, and a third-generation Montana farmer. He is also a popular Democratic governor of a usually conservative “red” state. Schweitzer likes to joke that he has a rule for himself: If he stays longer than 24 hours in Washington, D.C., he takes a bath in tomato juice…
The Once and Future Carbohydrate Economy
Less than 200 years ago, industrializing societies were carbohydrate economies. In 1820, Americans used two tons of vegetables for every one ton of minerals. Plants were the primary raw material in the production of dyes, chemicals, paints, inks, solvents, construction materials, even energy. For the next 125 years, hydrocarbon and carbohydrate battled for industrial supremacy.…
Right to Nowhere
Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed The Reagan Legacy by Bruce Bartlett (Doubleday, 310 pages, $26.00) Even before it was published, Bruce Bartlett’s Impostor had a dramatic effect: It cost Bartlett his job as a policy analyst at a conservative think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), based…
Die-Hards
Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society by President’s Council on Bioethics (309 pages, free at www.bioethics.gov) When George W. Bush appointed the President’s Council on Bioethics in 2001, he stacked it with conservatives who had already taken stands against abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, and assisted suicide. Nonetheless, I approached the council’s sixth…
Elephant in the Voting Booth
On democratic wrongs both past and present, as told by two books and a new commission study on reform.
The Harder He Blows
Chris Matthews blows hard. This may sound less like a news flash than a crashing redundancy. And it’s true that yelling is nothing new for the omnipresent MSNBC/CNBC barking head, for whom picking up the pace and pumping up the volume almost always substitute for picking apart the fairy tales that keep the Bush White…
Bush’s Skunktails
In contrast to a president’s coattails that sweep his party to congressional victories, skunktails have the reverse effect. Bush’s skunktails consist of abuses of power, corruption, and incompetence now so widely recognized that, according to recent polls, those who “strongly disapprove” of his administration now equal those who merely “approve.” Because turnout in midterm elections…
The Conscience Clause
We liberals have a lot on our consciences. Who taught the right wing how to use religion for social causes during the Martin Luther King era? Who showed them that discrimination on the basis of race or sex was not something most Americans see as part of the generous bounty of this country? It was…
Big Bad John
Let me begin by admitting that if fortune decrees that the next president of the United States must be another conservative Republican, I’d certainly rather it be John McCain than George Allen, Tom Tancredo, Newt Gingrich, or most of the other current right-wing heartthrobs. But have no illusions: McCain is a very conservative Republican who…
Failures of Politics
When historians review this era, they will point to the striking failure of our political system to engage, much less remedy, the most pressing national problems. Consider a few key examples: The most notable economic fact is a 25-year decline in living standards of ordinary Americans during a period of rising productivity. As Paul Krugman…
The Democracy Lab
If the 2004 presidential race taught Democrats any lesson, it’s that all the policy pronouncements in the world, even if delivered by a decorated veteran, are no match for a relentless barrage of early negative ads that poison the well of public opinion and plant false information in the minds of voters. That Republican strategy…
Travelin’ Blues
The Republican two-step on ethics reform has proven an amusing spectacle this season. First come panicked promises of reform from GOP congressional leaders; then come rank-and-file pushback and a hasty public retreat. A typical case presented itself when Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Rules Committee baron David Dreier proposed a blanket ban on all privately…
The Anti-Joe
Ned Lamont is an unlikely insurgent. The founder of a small cable company that specializes in telecommunications systems for college campuses, Lamont is a wealthy man who speaks with the measured cadence of one who earns his living making deals, not political speeches. Yet the Greenwich businessman has got Connecticut Democrats all wired up: Lamont…
Not Your Father’s Detroit
In the mid-1950s, the Ford Motor Company decided that its most profitable car needed a new home. Up until then, Ford had been making Lincoln Continentals in Highland Park, the industrial enclave near the center of Detroit, where the company had first put down its roots. In 1957, though, it moved its Lincoln production line…
The New New Gore
Five years ago, Al Gore was the much-mocked pol who blew a gimme with his stiff demeanor and know-it-all style. Today? C’mon, admit it: You like him again.
