A story by Jeffrey Ball in today's Wall Street Journal asks whether Earth Day is bad for the planet - the argument being that it creates a cozy feel-good picture that that fools us into thinking we're actually making progress, and distracts us from the massive (and expensive) changes we need to make to fight global warming.
It made me wonder whether - in a different way - No Impact Man is bad for the planet.
It's not that I don't deeply admire Colin Beavan, who set out to spend a year living in New York City without making any environmental impact. He's heroic; I consider myself a pretty good environmentalist, but I couldn't do - or rather do without - half what he did.
And that's my point. The fact is, just about none of us (even Colin, who's now only Low Impact Man) can do what he did long-term. And probably only a few of us are willing even to come close. No TV? Handkerchiefs instead of tissues? No take-out (because no plastic containers)? Buying food only from farmers markets and bulk bins in health food stores? Collecting used paper from other people's trash and using the other side?
I fear that presenting uncomfortable personal steps like this as a way to help preserve the planet feeds into the Dick Cheney take on global warming - that what environmentalists really want all of us to do is live in dark, cold houses, sell our cars, and risk visits from the trash police if we don't separate our garbage properly.
If that's what it's going to take to stop global warming, I'm pretty sure global warming won't be stopped.
There's a real public relations problem here. The uncomfortable truth is that anything any of us can do individually is a drop in the bucket to what needs to be done. We need huge shifts in technology and infrastructure that can't be brought about except by an enormous, sustained government-corporate effort that will look more like the New Deal than like some nice suburban tree-planting.
In other words, this is going to cost a lot of money. This is going to raise your taxes. And the reason we need to do it (setting aside the fact that keeping the earth habitable for humans is arguably a Good Thing) is that the cost if we don't do it will be unavoidable and exponentially greater. Don't like $3.50 a gallon gas? Try $10 a gallon gas.
What's scary is that pundits have been making exactly that argument about Social Security and Medicare for decades now, and they haven't been able to persuade any government, Democratic or Republican, to take even such a comparatively simple step as eliminating the social security tax cut-off.
I don't know how we make our case in a way that actually gets the job done. But I suspect it's at least possible that a massive deployment of technology (aimed at saving the world, no less) might be more exciting, to more people, than composting their garbage and hanging their laundry on the line - worthy, and even pleasant, as those activities are (and just for the record, I do both).
The US government has a penchant for declaring war on abstractions - like drugs, or terror. A government that would declare all-out war on global warming - and then follow through - would get my vote. And maybe a lot of other peoples'.

I never thought I'd be grateful to Rupert Murdoch. But in today's Wall Street Journal, there's a column by Thomas Frank that speaks more sense about politics and the media than anything I've seen in this sorry and never-ending political season. And it's not a one-off. As of mid-May, Frank will be a regular Journal columnist.
Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas, says the media have got Clinton and Obama all wrong. Because Obama is an intellectual (and doesn't hide it), he's accused of being an elitist, while Clinton's knocking back of shots and tales of sharp-shooting seem to have persuaded the media that she (despite her years on the Wal-Mart board of directors) has got the common touch.
What's missing here is any clear idea of who the elite actually are. Guess what? They're rich people. Not just rich, but insanely, outrageously rich. But because they drawl, and leave off their g's, and generally don't fit the media's elitist stereotype, he argues, they and their supporters somehow persuaded the media - and the voters - that they represent the common folk. They "perfume themselves," he says, "with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers."
Personally, I've been trying to avoid getting exercised about the Democratic race. I figure I exerted the only power I've got by voting in the New York primary; the next chance I've got to actually do anything is seven months away. And since I find it hard to imagine circumstances in which I'd vote for McCain (or Ralph Nader), I'm not going to have a whole lot of choice even then.
But on the subject of campaign coverage I am very exercised. Yes, George Bush has degraded and trivialized the presidency. But I'm beginning to think it's not entirely his fault. The process of running for president trivializes and degrades the presidency. The nonsensical and irrelevant questions that exercise the media for days on end, the fixation on how much cash the candidates have raised (and not on who's giving it to them, and why), and the breathless reporting of the tiniest details of campaign strategy, degrade and trivialize the presidency. And they trivialize and degrade the candidates as well.
So please, the next time you hear someone accuse Obama - or Clinton, or anyone else - of trying to create class warfare, call them on it. There's a myth in America that we're all middle class. But that's all it is, a myth. It's becoming increasingly clear that ever since the Reagan years, the rich have been getting richer and the rest of us have been struggling mightily, and often unsuccessfully, to keep from getting poorer. But somehow, the rich, and those who have helped to make them so, have managed to pull the wool over a lot of eyes, including a lot of eyes in the media. It's time to let some light in.
And when I think that it's The Wall Street Journal where that light's going to shine, all I can say is I'm hornswoggled.

I was thinking, sitting at the Investor Summit on Climate Risk at the UN yesterday, that there is just too much bad news here. It's unmanageable. In fact, I was downright relieved that they didn't let the press into the luncheon to hear keynote speaker Al Gore (who apparently didn't want the press present, though I can't figure out why not). To hear that the world as we know it will end - and that the only way of preventing that is to immediately take steps that experience would indicate are politically impossible - is paralyzing. Then I came upon this note by David Roberts. I think he's got it right. Fear will only get you so far. What really moves the world is desire. We need to paint a picture of what life could be.
Aspirational green | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist: "I'm starting to think that the thing to do is pivot completely from global warming to one-earth living. Global warming creates the condition of necessity. It is background. Foreground the positive opportunities: reducing energy bills through efficiency and green building; generating clean energy on-site or purchasing it via offsets or RECs; living in vibrant, walkable communities to boost health and wellbeing; enjoying food more, knowing where it comes from, how to grow and cook it; knowing that the material things in your life are not contributing to degrading the planet; having a good idea and making a fortune doing the right thing. These are things to aspire to."

I spent yesterday at a conference at the UN on sustainable investing and climate risk. At the end of the day - all good conferences need a tag for a press release, after all - a bunch of state treasurers announced a climate risk action plan. Some 40 investors. managing $1.75 trillion, promised to insist that asset managers consider climate risks (and opportunities), invest in clean technologies, push for government policy changes, evangelize for sustainable investing, and so on. (Though the policy change most frequently demanded at the conference - a good, stiff carbon tax - isn't specifically mentioned in the action plan.)
Still, it's all well, good and hopeful. But when I looked at the list of signers, it turned out to be entirely made up of what I have begun to think of as the usual suspects: state pension funds, socially responsible investment companies, and foundations. These guys have been fighting the good fight for years, but they have never been able to persuade what I regrettably think of as real investors - the commercial asset managers, hedge funds, banks and investment banks that are in this business simply to make as much money as they can - to join them.
At the end of the conference, though, the moderator announced that famed venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had signed onto the action plan.
Now, this is a very, very tiny tip of the iceberg. Kleiner Perkins has been investing in green technology for years. Last year the firm joined forces with Al Gore's Generation Investment Management (an action plan signer), with Gore becoming a Kleiner Perkins partner and Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr joining Generation's board. Indeed, we were told it was Gore (yesterday's lunchtime speaker) who'd persuaded the firm to sign on.
So Kleiner Perkins' pledge may have been more a courtesy to a board member than the product of a deep commitment. But the firm is a star in the commercial investing firmament. If it does become an evangelist for sustainable investing, it might get a whole new audience to listen. And that could jump-start some big changes.

Two interesting - and alarming - New York Times articles cited here. How long is it going to take us to realize that there IS no fuel that's going to solve global warming? The only way to even approach energy independence or to have a hope of halting global warming, is not to use so much. US corporations are beginning to figure this out. Amory Lovins figured it out a long time ago. But as long as governments see a continuing and increasing supply of fuel as essential for economic growth, we're not going to get anywhere.

No Impact Man: Biofuels far from a silver bullet: "biofuels produced from plant matter such as corn and soybeans have been touted as the great hope for replacing petroleum to fuel cars and heat buildings. But though policy makers have rushed to the technology, it's turning out that the costs may far outweigh the benefits"

Watching "Hugh's Chicken Run," a three-part series on the moral and culinary offense that is cage-raised chicken that ran on the UK's Channel 4 last month, I kept wondering - will I ever see anything like this on American TV? But actually, why not? Sure, it was advocacy journalism. But it was also marvelous reality TV. (Here's a link to some clips. )
Here's the concept: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, whose River Cottage Meat Book was just released in the US, decided to try to get his local market town to give up eating, or selling, caged birds. He held town meetings, pushed take-away chicken restaurants to offer free-range kebabs, and lobbied (and got thrown out of) supermarkets.
And in an elaborate show-and-tell, he filled a big shed with chickens - caged at one end, commercial-style free-range at the other and invited townspeople in to take a look. In one clip - which Channel 4 milked for all it was worth - Hugh, who nurses his own sick chickens back to health, stood weeping at the sight of the half dead chickens which, in his role as a commercial chicken grower, he would have to kill. (In the world of commercial chicken production, it costs more to treat a sick chicken than the chicken is worth.) "I don't want to kill any more chickens," he wailed.
Interesting, how many different things the word 'kill' can mean; is killing a healthy chicken for food a different moral act from killing a sick chicken because it's too much trouble to take care of it?
Hugh also persuaded a group of lower-income local folk to try growing their own pastured chickens on a nearby patch of vacant land, a project that, while largely successful, was also rife with conflict and contradiction. However much they liked Hugh, these new chicken farmers couldn't resist making cracks about his wealth (and his double-barreled name). The project nearly came to grief because the residents came to love their chickens so much they could hardly bear to kill them. And while celebrating the town's turn to free-range chicken, Hugh runs into the woman who became the leader of the project. She's at the supermarket, resolutely and resentfully buying a cheap commercial chicken because, she argues, that's all she (and many others) can afford.