How the World Works

I'm a huge fan of the news website salon.com. It contains great original investigative journalism (they were the first to break the scandal around Walter Reed several years ago), wonderful writing from its book/tv/movie reviewers (Heather Havrilesky is an incredibly clever writer and tv reviewer), and some fantstic blogging around both politics (War Room: my fave blog) and globalization.

The globalization blog How the World Works is a fantastic blog by writer Andrew Leonard covering the myriad of social, political, economic, and technical issues that are being created by the force of globalization. Leonard routinely posts articles related to biofuels, global warming, workers' rights, GMO, and other sustainability-related issues. His angle is generally well-aligned with sustainability, but he often avoids drawing conclusions due to the incredibly complex nature of global interconnectivity.

Some examples of recent articles that I've really enjoyed:

Rain forests, they come, they go: Apparently, indigenous peoples in South America were slashing and burning the rain forests before Euros arrived on the scene. Leonard's conclusion: "When global warming or bird flu or nanotechnological gray goo or nuclear war between the U.S. and China wipes out civilization as we know it and, temporarily at least, ends humanity's reign of terror upon the planet, you know what's going to happen? The rain forests will grow back. Sometimes, taking the long view can be very relaxing. "

"Switchgrass is cool, dude": Review of Congressional hearings around biofuels. "In fact, if there was a consensus on anything at the hearing, in which testimony was heard on prospects for nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind power, along with biofuels, it was that federal and state governments get by far the most bang for their buck by setting, enforcing and encouraging increased energy efficiency." And: "Only when the external costs of climate change and fossil fuel dependency become shared by individuals filling up their gas tanks and utility companies building coal-fired power plants will there be a real market incentive to deploy new technologies." Sounds familiar, eh?

Organic farming: Not sustainable?: Verrrry interesting discussion of how buying food produced on distant organic farms is more harmful to the environment than buying local food. And also, driving to the grocery store has a greater negative impact than buying food produced 1000s of miles away!

Plastic fantastic bottle recycling: Great discussion of the macroeconomics of plastic bottle recycling. "The vast majority of water and plastic soda bottles consumed in the world are made of PET, aka polyethylene terephthalate. And perhaps contrary to expectations, this is one petroleum byproduct that is eminently recyclable. Indeed, and here's a second baffling peculiarity, producers of ground-up recycled PET "flake" cannot keep up with demand. Prices per pound are strong, propelled by Chinese buyers who will buy all the flake or bales of flattened bottles that they can get, to turn into pseudo-polyester and other materials. ... What's wrong with this picture? Why hasn't the market solved this problem?" And he goes on to answer those questions. :)

The anti-Crichton: Discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson's novels on global warming. KSR is one of my favorite authors, and is disturbingly prescient about the political and meteorologic challenges we'll be facing in the coming years.

Enjoy!